Iran's early attacks on Bahrain caught Navy families and sailors by surprise

The scale and duration of Iran’s response appeared to take the U.S. goverenment by surprise, three sources who were in Bahrain at the time told CBS News, in part because families hadn’t yet been required to evacuate.

On the very first day of the war, Iran targeted the Navy's Middle East headquarters in Bahrain — before the U.S. government had evacuated all the military families based there. Some had to wait about a week or more to reach safety, according to multiple families who spoke to CBS News."You're definitely scared," one military spouse said. "As the week goes on, you wake up to ballistic missiles being fired. We went to sleep with the sound of ballistic missiles again." Iranian missiles and drones targeted Bahrain consistently for several days after the war began, according to another spouse. The scale and duration of those attacks appeared to take the U.S.

government by surprise, three sources who were in Bahrain at the time told CBS News, in part because families hadn't been required to evacuate until the war had already begun. The military had anticipated some retaliation and had even evacuated the headquarters' buildings on the base, but "we weren't expecting that [scale]," one U.S. official said. And there were still several military families living off the base nearby. One spouse said she could see the contrails of missiles and drones, and another heard explosions from attacks. CBS News granted anonymity to the spouses who feared retaliation for speaking. No military personnel were killed in the attacks, but images that