‘All Hell Broke Loose,’ Newport Family Says : Invasion: A couple and their daughter had front-row seats in Panama. Now home, they tell what happened when the bombardments began.

Gina Marie Lichacz was the first in her family to hear the gunfire, and she ran to her parents’ bedroom at Albrook Air Base on the outskirts of Panama City.

“I thought I was imagining it, but I knew I wasn’t,” Lichacz, 20, said Thursday. “Then at 12:50 a.m. that Wednesday, all hell broke loose. Suddenly all you could hear was boom! boom! boom!”

Without warning, the Newport Beach family of John, Sheila and Gina Marie Lichacz found themselves huddled inside a two-story home listening to the U.S. invasion of Panama. Military airplanes roared overhead, they recalled, and mortar shells exploded as close as one-quarter of a mile away amid the din of automatic weapons fire.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared us for this,” John Lichacz said Thursday, the family’s first day back in Orange County. Lichacz is a retired air force major, and Sheila Lichacz is an accomplished U.S. artist known in her native Panama as “La Pintura de La Patria” (the painter of the motherland).

Heavy artillery opened up on strategic Panamanian targets, including a nearby Panamanian Defense Force headquarters, he said. As they spent the night watching from their windows, family members witnessed the bombardment of Panama City, including tracer shells that lighted the night sky, mortar fire and a constant barrage from cannon and automatic weapons.

For the next seven days, the three never left the base residence of an Air Force acquaintance.

They had gone to Howard Air Base in Panama to visit Sheila Lichacz’s relatives and to allow their daughter, a UC Irvine student, to interview Panama Canal Co. officials for a political science thesis.

When the family realized that night that the United States had invaded Panama, Sheila Lichacz said, they felt relieved and hopeful that Manuel A. Noriega’s bitter rule of her homeland was over.

“When my mother called from Panama City, she told me she had been praying for many years--in fact, we all had been praying--that the United States would finally get Noriega,” she said.

Fiercely proud of her Panamanian roots, she said she and her family watched televised reports of Panamanians applauding and shouting “Viva Los Americanos!” as U.S. tanks rumbled down city streets.

Sheila Lichacz once, in fact, had been in trouble with Noriega herself.

Lichacz, whose oil paintings have hung in Panama’s National Institute of Culture and in museums and the homes of Panama City’s prominent families, was a rising artist in 1983 when she had a personal visit with the Pope. News of that visit appeared on the front pages of Panamanian newspapers and angered Noriega.

At a party in 1984, she said, “he actually called out to me, and said, ‘So there’s the daring one.’ He meant it as an insult. This was right after the Pope visited Panama but refused to see him. It was an insult for a woman to be so daring.

“I turned toward him and he said, ‘You broke all the rules of protocol and you went to see the Holy Father!’ ”

Fearing for her family’s safety and her own, Lichacz, who is now a U.S. citizen, decided not to visit Panama again. They made their recent trip only because they were able to obtain a flight on a U.S. military transport, her husband said.

But en route, they said, a military officer warned them of the city’s rising tension.

“One person told us to watch out,” Gina Marie Lichacz said. “It was only going to take one American officer being killed and the U.S. was going to go in.”

Once, after a three-day lull in the battle, her father said, they thought they were safe.

“But it was a false sense of security. We had heard about Noriega’s ‘Dignity Battalions’ (armed civilian bands) but we didn’t know where they would show up.”

“We went downstairs and sat behind a concrete pillar and observed the city from there. Then we started hearing zing, zing, zing, as bullets were being fired from small-arms weapons.”

They ran upstairs into the residence and took the advice of passing soldiers: “Stay flat and stay low.”

After that incident, Sheila Lichacz said, “I never crawled so much in my life.” The family stayed well below window height, while military personnel at the air base opened up with mortars and neutralized two Dignity Brigade locations.

“Noriega had made claims that he would blow up Panama and leave it in ashes if he had to, if he was forced to leave,” John Lichacz said. “It was obvious that Noriega was planning something big, and we’re glad the U.S. did come in when they did. Our military did a marvelous job.”

But their daughter, for a while, thought she might never see home.

“You’ve got to understand that at one point the bombardment was constant,” she said. “Although I went down there for my thesis, there was a time that I didn’t think we were coming back.”