COMBAT IN PANAMA : Loved Ones at Home: ‘Proud but Apprehensive’ : Families: Bravely resigned to a lonely Christmas, relatives of troops find lack of information is nerve-racking.

Pat Arata, 26, was planning to spend her first Christmas with her husband of one month, 1st Lt. Joe Arata, 27, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne division. “I thought if he would ever go into combat, I would go to pieces,” she said.

He did. She didn’t. Like most relatives of service personnel from the bases that supplied the bulk of forces that invaded Panama, Arata is stoically contemplating a Christmas without her loved one. “They (the Army) are breaking men in right away,” she said while keeping up with her files at a local accounting firm.

Here, next to the sprawling Ft. Bragg army base, “the feeling is being proud but apprehensive at the same time,” said Sara Vanderklute, a former Army wife. “The reality is, there’s lots of real danger for the men.”

At Ft. Ord in Northern California, the mood was identical.

“We all knew what the service was about,” said one serviceman’s wife, who declined to be identified during an interview at a laundry in Marina, a tiny community just north of the base. “There is not much you can do to change it. You can only stand by them.”

“Half of Ft. Ord is gone; all my friends are going to be spending Christmas alone,” said Shelley Lofland, interviewed as she left the Lucky supermarket in Marina. “All the wives are staying close, supporting each other.”

What is nerve-racking in such Army towns is the lack of information. “A lot of wives don’t know where their husbands are,” said Lt. Cheryl Mattsen, a psychiatric nurse at Ft. Ord’s infirmary.

Anxieties are increased because the 7th Infantry Division (Light), the unit based at Ft. Ord, has been assigned to some of the most difficult fighting, in the streets of Panama City itself, according to the Pentagon.

Lofland said there is “a lot of unease . . . crying and weeping in private” among soldiers’ wives.

Indeed, there is no doubt in these base communities that this is war.

Ft. Bragg’s troops take pride in being on the front lines of America’s recent military efforts, said Fayetteville Mayor J. L. Dawkins. “We’ve had the Grenada invasion and Honduras (military exercises), but since Vietnam, this is the most traumatic situation Bragg has been in,” Dawkins said. “You could literally call this a war.”

As of late Thursday, only one Ft. Bragg serviceman had been reported killed. Army Spec. Jerry S. Daves, 20, of Hope Mills, N.C., who joined the 82nd Airborne a year ago, was killed Wednesday, but base officials gave no details of his death. About 2,000 of the 3,000-man division is reported to be in Panama.

The remaining members of the division at Ft. Bragg filled out life insurance papers and next-of-kin notification forms Thursday as they prepared for possible assignment to Panama. Christmas leaves of the 850-member 505th Airborne Infantry regiment were canceled and the soldiers were told to prepare for possible action.

That is more notice than many troops received before the invasion late Tuesday. Arata said her husband called her at the office Monday and said goodby. At Ft. Ord, the wife at the laundry said her husband called and said: “ ‘I love you and I’ll miss you,’ and that was it.”

As word came that U.S. troops may be needed for some time in Panama, Christmas plans rapidly changed.

“I think people should stop all of this ‘My-husband-won’t-be-home-for-Christmas’ stuff,” said one young Army wife who declined to give her name as she walked out of the Marina branch of the Ft. Ord Credit Union. “It’s their job (to go when called). If they were doctors, they might not be home for Christmas either, but they have an important job to do and sometimes it can’t wait.”

Treadwell reported from Fayetteville, N.C., and Stein from Marina, Calif.