Streeter: Being stuck in the Middle East is a nightmare. I know — it happened to me.

In the two weeks since the United States started its offensive against Iran, I’ve been having flashbacks to a time, four decades ago, when my family was trapped in the Middle East, unable to get home.

It was awful. But at least, unlike the Americans currently trying to make their way out of the same region, there weren’t any bombs.

And we didn’t have the added terror and frustration of knowing that our government got involved in a war before properly factoring our safety into the equation. That’s unfathomable.

“Americans in the Middle East continue to bear the burden of the Administration’s lack of clarity and planning for their safe evacuation, and our office has been flooded with requests for assistance from Marylanders who are trying to get home,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen wrote in an emailed statement. Officials don’t know how many from the state are stranded.

Since the attack began on Feb. 28, panicked people have been trying to evacuate the area. There was the group of Potomac high school students on a trip who fled a planned layover in the United Arab Emirates when bombing started, or Anjali Sharma, an Owings Mills native who was trapped in Qatar because her passport is set to expire about two weeks before a cut-off that would make it possible to gain entry to some countries in the region.

Those people and many like them were met with canceled flights, escalating hotel costs and, worst of all, confusing guidance about whether the U.S. government could help them evacuate. Callers to a number listed on the State Department website initially heard a message that they “should not rely on the U.S. government for assisted departure or evacuation at this time.” Can you imagine looking for help from the people doing the bombing and getting told, “Don’t count on us”?

Ironically, it’s believed that the answer to making it easier to facilitate getting people out would have been not to fire a lot of folks whose jobs it was to help in such a dire situation.

“Crises like this underscore why a strong, fully resourced Foreign Service workforce is critical to America’s interests and safety,” John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, said in a statement. Dinkelman, a 37-year member of the Foreign Service, was one of more than 200 people unceremoniously dismissed in July 2025.

AFSA released an earlier statement saying that it had, for months, “warned that the State Department’s capacity has been weakened by the loss of experienced personnel with critical regional, crisis management, consular, and language expertise, including specialists in Farsi and Arabic — skills that are indispensable in moments like this."

As Van Hollen put it, “the Administration’s sustained efforts to hamstring our Foreign Service and cut staff at our embassies are only further hampering our ability to protect Americans. This chaos was avoidable, and it’s unacceptable.”

My personal crisis happened in May of 1983, when we were scheduled to come home for the summer from Saudi Arabia in 1982, where my father worked as a contractor for the kingdom’s public transportation services. But the government refused to let us leave because someone there had messed up our visas. Even when they figured out what went wrong, they still held us a couple more months while they investigated.

We were not in immediate danger. But it felt utterly helpless to not be able to leave when we wanted, to be stuck because of a government’s stalling and lack of action. My mother told me this week that she believes my father tried to get help from the U.S. Embassy in Saudi to speed things up, but it didn’t help. Sadly, he’s not here to elaborate. But I know he would have called anybody, done anything.

The call of our independence finally came, fittingly enough, on July 4, 1983, and we held a breath that we didn’t let out until we were safe in my sobbing grandmother’s arms on her Capitol Heights driveway.

Grandma, who had been nervous about us living overseas in the first place, was understandably unhappy that we returned to Riyadh later that summer, and even more distraught later that year, when 241 American troops were killed in the bombing of a Marine compound in Beirut, Lebanon.

It was a stark reminder for those Americans who live in a bubble, believing that here and overseas they are exempt from the woes of war, violence and strife. (Those Americans probably do not live in Baltimore, but it happens.) But expecting that your government is going to help you, particularly when it’s conducting a planned military exercise, is not too much to ask.

It’s not even just Americans in the Middle East feeling the ripple effects of this crisis. I chatted with Harford County’s Tam Dunn, whose expected long weekend in Barbados got extended when the country’s air traffic controllers called a sick-out, “which started the ball rolling to canceled flights due to closed air space.”

While she didn’t think her situation, stranding her a few more days on the beach, was directly related to what’s happening in Iran, she believes “those disenfranchised airport employees are using the current travel insecurities to their advantage.”

I called the number on the State Department website this week and that message has been replaced with options to contact personnel. And that’s a good thing. Americans are continuing to leave the area, including the Potomac students and Sharma. She was able to get to Saudi Arabia and then to family in India, ironically, with the help of a Trump associate who she’d criticized for being part of a group who’d escaped the area on a private jet.

What’s happening in Iran is confusing and dangerous, and the natives who have died so far are no less important than the Americans trying to get home. Having been one of those people, so long ago, it breaks my heart to imagine that I would not be a priority for my country.