COLUMN ONE : An Eerie Outpost Awaits GIs : In a long stalemate, troops would be exposed to boredom, loneliness and culture shock. Fraternizing between men and women outside the family is forbidden.

The first time was 1942, the Second World War. Forty thousand American troops were deployed in a barren Middle Eastern country to protect what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the “bridge to victory”--an overland supply line for delivering war materiel to the Soviet Union, materiel vital to its resistance to Nazi Germany.

The country was Iran, and in that far-distant day, GIs were greeted as “saviors.” Children pursued them through the streets shouting “Johnny, Johnny!” and begging for chocolate and Camel cigarettes. “They were very popular. Everyone wanted to meet an American,” an Iranian recalled. “All the movie theaters started showing American films. Lana Turner and Betty Grable became big favorites.”

The second time U.S. forces went to the Middle East was 1958. Two battalions of Marines landed in Beirut to avert civil war. They were startled to be greeted by bikini-clad women lolling in the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean. After three months in what was then one of the world’s most tantalizing and exotic cities, the Marines went home in peace.

This time will be different. The decision to send troops into Saudi Arabia to block a threatened invasion by Iraq--the fifth deployment of U.S. forces to the Middle East in the last 50 years--will be no cakewalk.

President Bush has committed U.S. forces to one of the toughest and most inhospitable deployments short of all-out war that American soldiers have faced in decades--an environment of punishing climate, suffocating societal restrictions and deadly politics. In Saudi Arabia, there will be no strolling through exotic streets, no winsome figures on the beach, no crowds of children eager to have their pictures taken with smiling GIs.

The dangers posed by the massive army of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein--especially its chemical weapons capability--would be formidable under any circumstances. “If it comes to war, our casualties could be many times what we’ve lost in the Middle East in any previous encounters,” a U.S. military analyst acknowledged. “And they could be very ugly deaths.”

But even if such nightmares can be avoided--and intelligence reports Thursday suggested that the Iraqi army was not eager for direct combat--the realities of Saudi Arabia itself will make service there extremely hard for American soldiers to endure, especially if a protracted stalemate develops.

“I don’t think Americans understand what it means to send predominantly white, Christian troops into a brown, strictly Muslim country,” said a leading U.S. specialist on Saudi Arabia. “It’s not an issue of different religions or races--it’s different cultures.”

What strikes a visitor to northern and eastern Saudi Arabia, where U.S. forces are digging in, is the climate: an eerie, colorless, inhospitable moonscape where temperatures rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. The glare of the sun off the white sands makes it difficult to avoid squinting even at dusk.

The terrain is so arid that a local hotel put up stickers on bathroom mirrors warning, “Water Is Gold. Don’t Waste It.”

Strict Culture

What the thousands of GIs who make up Operation Desert Shield may find even harder to bear up under is the strict Islamic culture.

In Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to go to movie houses or drive cars. They cannot even be listed in telephone directories. In public, Saudi women are hidden behind layers of black veils that expose even less than the chadors of Iranian women, who can at least show their faces.

A former American envoy in Jidda once complained that all Saudi women applying for U.S. visas came in with pictures of themselves covered with veils. “It got so ridiculous. There was absolutely no way of telling one from another,” he lamented.

In restaurants, one of the few places both sexes are seen in public, men with their wives, mothers or daughters sit in so-called “family sections.” Men alone are seated separately.

Fraternizing between men and women outside the family or home is strictly forbidden. Compliance is monitored by morality enforcement squads. So serious are the Saudis about this subject, and so sensitive about outsiders’ views on it, that an international furor erupted over the 1980 British-made movie, “Death of a Princess,” which told the story of a young princess’ secret trysts with a boyfriend that ended with their executions in 1977.

The House of Saud denounced the drama, which was also aired in the United States despite Saudi protests, as “insulting” and “a slur on the entire Islamic community.” After it ran, Riyadh began a full-scale review of its relations with Britain, recalling its ambassador to London and banning all British Airways Concorde flights to the kingdom--a ban still in effect.

“Saudi Arabia is not a place where a young GI can get away with whistling at girls. This is not Vietnam or Panama or even Beirut. Comparatively permissive Americans are going to find this place a real shock,” one veteran of the region said.

In the early phase of the U.S. deployment, officials say, collisions between Americans and Saudi society should not be a big problem because soldiers’ movements will be limited by the demands of deploying and preparing for possible Iraqi aggression.

But if the U.S. presence is protracted, things will get stickier. The enemies then may become boredom, heat and isolation.

“If this doesn’t last more than two, three or even four months, they can probably survive. After that, they’ll want to go into town, get some relief from the boredom and tension, and find a local bar or people to meet,” said a senior U.S. military adviser who spent more than two years in Saudi Arabia.

In addition to the World War II and 1958 U.S. deployments to the Middle East, Marines were stationed in Lebanon for 18 months in 1982-84, and in 1987-88 the U.S. Navy was ordered to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers from Iran during its war with Iraq.

The 1982-84 deployment ended in tragedy after a suicide bomb killed 241 servicemen, but in the earlier stages Lebanese families used to bring their children down to the parking lot around the American encampment for Sunday picnics.

And during the 1987-88 deployment, many American sailors on the tranquil blue-green waters of the Persian Gulf spent more time worrying about sunburn than preventing Iranian assaults on American-flagged ships.

The challenges in Saudi Arabia will be far more extreme.

American-style entertainment and other traditional safety valves for soldiers during off hours will be limited. The Dallas Cowgirls, who performed for the Marines in Beirut in 1982, are unlikely to entertain the troops in Saudi Arabia.

And few Americans are likely to come home with local wives, as some did when 1,200 U.S. Marines were deployed in Lebanon.

Indeed, Saudi restrictions on socializing outside the home are so severe that the thousands of foreigners employed in the oil industry, hospitals and other local institutions rarely penetrate cloistered Saudi society.

“I doubt our troops will see any Saudis except soldiers. And I’m not sure how many Saudi troops they’ll see,” the military adviser with experience in Saudi Arabia said. Referring to U.S. military personnel who were already stationed there as advisers to the Saudi armed forces, he said: “The American trainers are at least at bases where they can work out and run. A lot of these troops will be billeted out in the desert in the middle of nowhere.”

Among the roughly 2,000 U.S. military advisers and trainers who have assisted Saudi Arabia for more than a decade, the most consistent problem has been alcoholism, the former adviser said.

“There wasn’t much else to do. We all sat around watching videos or playing pool and drinking. A lot of our men left with serious problems,” he added.

Although the monarchy has banned all forms of alcoholic beverages, many foreign families have stills for homemade brews, everything from beer and wine to hard liquor flavored with various wood chips. In Dhahran, many homes at the Aramco oil compound, where the architecture and layout are reminiscent of a Southern California city in the early 1950s, have been built with special rooms with drains for stills.

Islamic Law

Issues of Islamic law and custom are particularly urgent in Saudi Arabia because it considers itself the “Guardian of Islam” since its territory includes the two holiest sites of the Muslim religion: the Grand Mosque in Mecca, to which devoted Muslims are supposed to make at least one pilgrimage during their lifetimes, and Medina, where the prophet Mohammed founded the religion in the 7th Century.

Because of this, there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. Non-Muslim religious services can only be held in private homes. The kingdom even goes through sporadic waves of banning foreigners from decorating Christmas trees and making other public displays during the Yuletide. Americans working for Aramco satirized one such clampdown by printing a T-shirt with a camel depicted as a reindeer.

When it comes to non-Muslim religions, Saudi Arabia is more restrictive than even Iran, where seats have been allocated in the Parliament for Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian representatives proportionate to their populations. Iranian Christians are also allowed to make and drink wine for the sacrament.

Sacred Soil

The cultural differentiation in Saudi Arabia is so pervasive that non-Muslims are not allowed to be buried in Saudi soil.

Because some foreign workers--of whom there are thousands upon thousands in Saudi Arabia, and from almost every corner of the world--die without relatives or families to pay for shipping bodies home, an unofficial arrangement has been made to allow local burial of foreign non-Muslims. But in such cases, the grave is lined with concrete so that the body is, literally, not touching Saudi soil.

Oil-rich eastern Hasa province, where the majority of Americans will be stationed, is particularly sensitive because it has the largest share of Saudi Arabia’s minority Shiite Muslim community.

In 1979 and 1980, Shiite riots erupted over issues ranging from the sale of Saudi oil to the United States and the right to conduct their separate religious holidays to inequitable government spending that channeled the majority of oil revenues from Hasa to other parts of the country where the majority Sunnis lived.

The Shiites may be even more wary of American soldiers overwhelming their turf.

The longer the deployment of U.S. troops, the greater such problems will be, experts agree. And the outlook for a quick solution may not be bright.

“If there’s a down-and-dirty war with Iraq, then it could be a relatively short mission. But if we have to sit out Saddam Hussein, this could go on for a long time,” one analyst said. In fact, Operation Desert Shield could develop into the broadest and most open-ended mission since the U.S. deployment in Iran during World War II.

Whatever the larger diplomatic and political consequences of that might be, it would be very tough on the GIs.

“If nothing happens over the next couple of months,” this analyst said, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the boys actually wishing for a war with Iraq just to have something to do.”