‘I was terrified’: Military families describe their harrowing evacuation from a Navy base in Bahrain

When Iran started launching retaliatory attacks against American troops on bases across the Middle East earlier this year, the U.S. military evacuated more than 1,250 people from a major U.S. naval base in Bahrain, according to U.S. Navy officials. MS NOW spoke to four active-duty spouses and one civilian employee who were part of the Navy’s evacuation of military families from Bahrain in March and said the process was disorganized and chaotic. The spouses and the civilian employee were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. They described living with their children through traumatic days under fire in Bahrain, jolting during constant alerts on their phones warning of incoming missiles, seeing smoke clouds from bombs that hit buildings of the base and hearing the booms of interceptor missiles blowing up incoming Iranian drones and rockets. “I was terrified. I laid really close to my kids because I was like at least if we die, we’ll die and one person won’t be left,” one spouse said. For two families, their service member spouses were relocated out of Bahrain before the U.S. bombing of Iran began on Feb. 28, leaving them alone in the country. They felt the military had transferred their spouses away and left their families behind and in harm’s way. “Our spouses who weren’t there. They’re sitting there like ‘my family’s in a war zone and I can’t help them because I’m not there.’ Why weren’t we out? They knew something was going on and they literally left us there as sitting ducks,” said one spouse, whose husband evacuated before the war. In the opening days of the war, Iranian missiles hit Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the headquarters for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which serves as an important logistics, supply and maintenance hub for American warships in the region. The military reduced staff on the base to “mission critical status,” and the Navy had to rely more heavily on a small logistics base on the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 2,200 miles away from the Gulf of Oman, for resupplying the carrier strike groups they had deployed to fight the war. The move slowed down supplies to the ships and the thousands of service members who were living and working on them, causing food and supplies to be rationed for periods of time. According to a September report to Congress, Bahrain has been the fourth most targeted country by Iranian missile and drone attacks in the region since the war began. In the opening days of the conflict, Iranian attacks damaged the command headquarters, two satellite communications terminals, warehouses and a dozen other buildings, with estimates of the damage nearing $400 million. Prior to the war, the Navy base in Bahrain served 8,300 military personnel, civilian contractors and dependents, according to the Navy. After the evacuations, that number reportedly dwindled to a fraction of that. In a recent interview, acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain” and that he has assigned a task force to look into whether or not the base should be repaired. ‘Living in a nightmare’ The families interviewed by MS NOW said they have been living in limbo ever since their hasty departure from Bahrain. Many left with only one suitcase per person, leaving behind household furniture and personal items with no clear idea when they may see those things again. They described moving between multiple continents, draining their financial savings and soothing children who were traumatized by the nearby explosions they heard during the Iranian attacks. Some said they temporarily moved to Germany so their children could be in U.S. military-run schools with some of the same children they had known on the base in Bahrain. The Navy told the families they had to relocate to the United States by June, according to the families, which many scrambled to do, even though they didn’t have the things left behind in Bahrain. Most of them moved into either short-term furnished rentals or hotels. They said the financial costs of the past year have been devastating. “My savings is gone, my savings is zero,” one spouse said. She said she has spent tens of thousands of dollars on basic necessities, including an inexpensive car to get her kids around. Additional funds from the military to cover evacuation costs are scheduled to run out at the end of November. But the families MS NOW spoke to still don’t feel settled, and many said they feel traumatized by the experience and let down by the Navy. “I feel like I’m living in a nightmare, it’s awful,” another spouse said. MS NOW reached out to U.S. Central Command for more information and clarification about the evacuation process and what the next steps are for the evacuees. CENTCOM officials did not return requests for comment. ‘Constant alarms’ The families of service members are still grappling with fresh memories of those frightening days in March in Bahrain The spouse of another service member said she didn’t leave her house in Bahrain for days, shutting all the blinds and curtains and hunkering down with her kids and pets. She said she made a bathroom area inside her house for her pets because she was terrified of leaving. “My priority was making sure my kids are alive,” she said. Another spouse said a family friend who also serves in the Navy came to check on her and her sons because they had heard it was going to be a night of heavy attack. She said she hid in a parking garage with the sailor and her sons for seven hours. “It was surreal thinking about how scared my children were. It is something I will never forget for the rest of my life,” she said. Even the civilian employee, who spent more than 20 years in the Navy, said the days following Feb. 28 were shocking. “To just sit there in your house and listen to the war over top of you in the sirens and the constant alarms,” the civilian employee said. “It’s rough to put yourself in that situation, it’s even rougher when the whole time you’re thinking well I put my family in the situation. They’re sitting on the couch next to me.” Some of the spouses ended up not being able to leave Bahrain for almost two weeks after Feb. 28. The ones whose husbands left before them said they are infuriated that the Navy decided to leave their families in a war zone. “He can’t talk about it still to this day even to his friends that come over without literally crying every time he says it out loud,” one wife said. ‘I was very ashamed’ Almost all of the evacuees MS NOW spoke to had lived in Bahrain for years and said they loved living in the country that felt like home to them. They described their kids thriving in the schools there in a community of close-knit international families. Some said they had grown close to many expats who had come to Bahrain for a better life from other countries to work in the hospitality and service industry. They said since they have left Bahrain, many of those people, whom they have stayed in touch with on social media, have lost their jobs because of the mass exodus of Americans from the region. “We should have done more to protect our regional allies. There’s so many people who don’t have the resources to just leave like we did,” one spouse said. “I have a weird mix of stress, guilt and invalidation about my experience.” She said she felt enormous guilt about leaving Bahrain. “I was very ashamed to be American and panicking and like ‘we have to get out of here’ because of this huge mess that we [the United States] made,” she said when she had to grapple with the fact that she was leaving behind a local community in Bahrain that would still be subjected to the danger she was able to escape from. ‘It was utter chaos’ Each member of the group of evacuees MS NOW spoke to are married to someone who spent more than 15 years in the military or had served themselves. They all said they had never experienced something like the evacuation this spring, and most of them had previously been evacuated during the 12-day war in the summer of 2025. During that evacuation, they said they were taken back to the U.S. for 90 days prior to the military operations beginning. The spouses interviewed by MS NOW said there was very little communication from official channels or their husbands’ commands, leaving them to rely primarily on the U.S. Embassy’s social media pages for information and WhatsApp group chats with other family members trying to figure out how to evacuate. “It was utter chaos. I had no one to talk to, no access to information, nothing,” one spouse said. With the airport shut down in Bahrain after Iranian threats, many of the families had to be evacuated overland through Saudi Arabia. One spouse said that when she finally made it to the bus meeting point to go to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia from Bahrain, she learned that there were some families where both parents were in the military and had to stay behind in Bahrain because they were considered “essential personnel.” Those families were trying to find adults who would evacuate their minor children out of the region. “I was on a bus with a lady who had two other kids from two different families on top of her own kids and her pet and someone else’s pet and I was like ‘God bless you’,” one spouse said. “Some of these weren’t even teenagers, these were like 10 year old kids.” ‘Not telling the truth’ Most of the military spouses said their husbands are already eligible for retirement, which means they have served at least 20 years on active duty. All of the spouses said that because of this experience, their husbands are considering getting out of the military, with one already having submitted his retirement paperwork. “It has been a challenge, let me tell you, for somebody who has over two decades of government service in active duty and now almost five as a civilian ... this last year has made me realize that the call of service is starting to wane,” the civilian employee said. “No one’s ever spoken a word to us besides, like ‘we’re proud of your resilience’. That’s not enough,” one spouse said. “I’m angry because no one will acknowledge any of it, and they just keep tiptoeing around it ... I’m pissed at the Navy.” “They’re not telling the truth. They’re not telling the full story. They’re not telling how much damage there really was,” another said. One spouse said she thinks this entire experience has weighed heavily on her husband and other service members who were put in a position of having to fight in a war while being concerned about their families’ safety. “I don’t know how they can be performing their best when their families are under so much stress,” she said. That spouse has written letters to members of her congressional delegation and the newly formed Military Spouse Commission run by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth. The spouse said she received responses of acknowledgement of her letter from her lawmakers but nothing from the commission yet. “The government has an obligation to keep me safe and that includes having a plan for my protection and my safety for myself and my children,” she said. Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee said to MS NOW in a statement: “The rushed evacuation of the military base in Bahrain is emblematic of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s war in Iran: chaos, confusion, and completely avoidable. The servicemembers and their families should receive transparency on this process and the military needs to