Uncertain future awaits Afghan evacuees passing through Ramstein Air Base: Reporter's Notebook

Thousands of evacuees are making a stop in Germany before traveling to the U.S.

RAMSTEIN, GERMANY -- The part that got me was the silence. A low, damp sky hung over Ramstein Air Base as Afghan evacuees -- the lucky ones who made it through the chaos and carnage of Kabul and those last final yards, as the incomparable Ian Pannell has put it, between life and death at Hamid Karzai International Airport -- shuffled wordlessly out of the hangar. They awaited final processing before climbing onto buses to drive them across the tarmac to the Delta and United jets that would take them to the United States. It was so quiet, so efficient, so anathema to the scenes they had escaped. I got emotional wondering what they had seen, what they had fled and what they thought about the place -- and future -- ahead of them. I asked those questions and more of one of the evacuees. Rafi, being identified by only his first name for his family's safety, came to Ramstein alone, a single refugee among the 20,500 that the 86th Airlift Wing Public Affairs Office had processed in Germany since Aug. 20 as of 7:30 a.m. local time Saturday. An Air Force spokesman told me that inbound flights are in a strategic pause; in English, that means, for now, more flights aren't coming in until the troops can ease the bottleneck of inflow versus outflow.