Months later, Bahrain evacuees still don’t know what’s next 

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — Three months into the war with Iran, thousands of evacuees from one of the biggest U.S. bases in the Middle East are still living in limbo.

Bahrain, home to U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is one of the only postings in the region where U.S. troops can live with their families. Over 8,000 service members, contractors, spouses, children and civilian employees call the island home.

Many fled at the start of the conflict, taking only what they could carry as Iranian drones and missiles targeted sites across the Persian Gulf. 

Months later, it remains unclear when and whether many will be able to return home, retrieve their belongings or resume the lives they left behind. 

Stars and Stripes spoke to four evacuees, including a spouse, an educator, a civilian employee and a contractor. They described uncertainty, financial strain and lingering trauma. All were granted anonymity because they feared repercussions for speaking publicly about their experiences.

For some evacuees, the deepest scars have been psychological. 

A civilian educator working for Defense Department schools said she’s still having nightmares months after leaving Bahrain. 

At the start of the conflict, she spent days sheltering in place in her bathroom while explosions from the nearby base shook her high-rise apartment building. 

She and at least two dozen other educators spent the last several months working in military schools in the Kaiserslautern area after evacuating. 

She still dreams she’s trying to save students from missile fire and says her heart races when she hears aircraft flying over Ramstein Air Base. For the first time in her life, she’s talking to a therapist. 

Many of the teachers had little time to process the evacuation after being assigned unfamiliar duties in Germany, the educator said, and some suffered mental breakdowns as they tried to adjust.

She estimates she has spent more than $14,000 on temporary lodging and other evacuation-related expenses and is being gradually reimbursed. 

Now, she will have to relocate to the U.S. by the end of June after the Pentagon ordered families and civilians who fled Bahrain to leave Germany.

Defense education officials have yet to confirm whether the schools will reopen in the fall — leaving educators with an unusual level of uncertainty just months before the start of a new school year.

A spokesperson for the Department of Defense Education Activity said the agency continues to provide counseling and support to displaced educators and praised their professionalism and resilience during the crisis. 

The spokesperson also encouraged educators to lean on peer support and speak openly with their supervisors when they feel overwhelmed by the scale of their current assignment.

Many evacuees say they are still trying to rebuild a sense of normalcy. 

That includes one Navy spouse who said her young children largely treated the evacuation as an adventure. 

After fleeing Bahrain, the family endured long bus rides and stays in multiple hotels before reaching Germany.

The adventure cost the family between $2,000 and $3,000 on transportation, meals and lodging, she said. They’re still waiting for reimbursement. 

Though her children appear to have adjusted well, the experience has left its mark.

“It’s crazy to hear [the children say] on the playground that there’s missiles incoming, or they’re, like, building their own little bunker,” she said. 

They were able to finish the school year in Germany, but just as they’ve started to settle in Kaiserslautern, they’ve been told to relocate to the United States. 

She hopes to return to Bahrain but has no idea when that might happen.

“There’s no end in sight right now, and it’s discouraging,” she said. “Things are just constantly changing.”

One Defense Department civilian said the uncertainty has become as difficult as the evacuation itself. 

“We are all in this … purgatory,” said the civilian, who served 20 years in the Navy before retiring and taking a civilian job. 

He, his wife and son fled Bahrain in the middle of the night through Saudi Arabia during the early days of the conflict before eventually reaching Germany. 

The more than $8,000 the family spent on airfare, hotels and a rental car has not been reimbursed, and he worries that with another pending move, the financial hardship will only get worse.

Another source of frustration, he said, is that Pentagon civilians are subject to State Department rules, which can provide lower reimbursement rates. Unlike military families, civilians do not appear likely receive an extension of the approximately six-month cap on coverage of expenses, he said.  

The Navy did not immediately answer questions about evacuation entitlements for its civilian workers. 

As his relocation approaches without information about his job status, the civilian is unsure if he should seek temporary or permanent housing in the United States.

With no idea when they may be able to retrieve their belongings from Bahrain, including many of his teenage son’s clothes and personal items, the family is also struggling to prepare him for college, the civilian said.

That lack of clarity and disparate treatment has “really worn on my willingness to continue to serve,” he said. 

Contractors face many of the same questions but with fewer support systems.

A defense contractor who’s worried whether he’ll be reimbursed for the evacuation he had to arrange and fund himself faces a more pressing question: How will he continue to make a living after his departure?

After days of sheltering in place and waiting for information about evacuation options, he pieced together his own route out of the country, hiring a private driver who took him to Saudi Arabia, where he caught a commercial flight out of the region.

He’s now looking for work — technically still employed by his company through the end of the month, but not getting paid.

While his employer offered him a new position at Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, a U.S. military hub on the Greek island of Crete, he turned it down. As a single father, he couldn’t take a post with no school or child care on base.

Now in Florida, he’s applied for jobs in the Philippines, Germany and elsewhere.

“I just want my life back,” he said, but considers a return to Bahrain too dangerous right now.