The Foreign Service Journal, February 2003

F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 Editor’s Note: This past November, we sent an e-mail via AFSANet asking members and their families to share brief vignettes relating to evacuations and life at posts located in danger zones. Some of their responses recount ways Foreign Service personnel have coped with being evacuated (and either returning to post after a long absence or being reassigned), while others offer lessons State and other for- eign affairs agencies have learned — or should have — over the years in terms of planning for, executing, and minimizing the disruptions caused by massive drawdowns of person- nel and post closings. Our thanks to all Foreign Service personnel and family members who shared their experiences. In fact, we received so many thoughtful, moving responses that we will run more next month. —Steven Alan Honley, Editor Evacuation from Cairo In the spring of 1967, Egyptian-Israeli relations deteriorated rapidly. Because of our government’s friendship with Israel, anti-American propaganda became ominous, prompting the evacuation of embassy dependents. Three TWA planes were char- tered to fly 250 women and children to Athens, giving us just 24 hours to wind up the last four years of our life. I shall never forget the bewildered expression in my 8-year-old son’s face when I told him that he would not return to school the next day nor for the rest of the school year; there would be no final exams, no report card and no time to say goodbye to his friends and teachers. When we arrived at the Athens airport, American army wives welcomed us warmly before buses took us to hotels in a suburb named Kiffissia, where rooms were already ready for all of us. We were well taken care of: Kiffissia was lovely, the people were friendly, there were organized activities for our chil- dren, and we promptly received our per diem checks. But we were in limbo, as though suspend- ed in mid-air, without responsibil- ities or control over anything. Cut off from our husbands, without any news out of Cairo, what had been our home was beyond reach — so were all our belongings, our documents, our children’s school records — and our future again was a blank. On June 5, 1967, the third Arab-Israeli war broke out. On June 11, our exhausted husbands arrived on a chartered Greek boat after their evacuation under har- rowing circumstances. It was a long, hot summer in Athens while we wait- ed for Washington to decide where we were to go from there. How, I wondered, would any of us ever be able to work up confidence and enthusiasm in another post? How could we ever recall, without a sense of frustration and pain, how seriously we had taken our work, believing in its importance when, it seemed that all our efforts, the good will so carefully nurtured, had been ruined overnight? Later, I often wondered why, no matter how often we had gone through a similar experience, our imagi- nation always failed us so that we could not see that the course of history might reverse itself. Within seven years American-Egyptian relations would be re- established and all our programs rebuilt. Maria Bauer Washington, D.C. F O C U S O N D A N G E R Z O N E S R ECALLING P AST C RISES AND E VACUATIONS AFSA MEMBERS AND THEIR FAMILIES SHARE STORIES OF EVACUATIONS AND LIFE AT POSTS LOCATED IN DANGER ZONES .