Families of Hostages Wait and Worry : Mideast crisis: Like an increasing number of Americans, a La Canada family has become the victim of a world torn asunder by violence and terrorism.

Reflecting on it, Jan Chandler laughs a little. “What do I have to do with the Persian Gulf?” she says, sitting in her spotless, sunny La Canada living room.

What, indeed.

But the news of turmoil a world away matters deeply to this pretty, 42-year-old mother of three, a nurse married to an orthopedic surgeon.

They are an ordinary American family, well-educated and smart. They love television and sports and should have nothing to do with the crisis that erupted last week in the Middle East when Iraq invaded the tiny, oil-rich country of Kuwait.

But like many before them--the widely televised, oft-described families who wait anxiously when loved ones are held hostage or detained in war-torn nations--the Chandlers have become unwitting victims of a world too often turned upside down by violence and terrorism.

In Chandler’s case, it is her younger brother who was detained more than a week ago with his wife, their two small children and 33 other Americans in a five-star Iraqi hotel while troops multiplied and newspaper headlines grew. Chandler tells what news there has been so far this week calmly, as though reciting a “things to do” list taped to her refrigerator.

As of Thursday afternoon, her brother, Kevin Bazner, 35, was “stuck in Iraq.” He was returning from a visit in the United States, with his British wife Dawn and their daughter Elizabeth, 6, and 5-month-old son, David, to their home in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, where he works as a foreign representative for A&W;, marketing root beer in the Orient.

Regular people. Frightening circumstances.

By now, however, the images of terror and helplessness are media standards: families affected, without warning, by unrest in lands they must look up on a map. There are television crews in the living room; the anguish of an evening news audience waiting, in sympathy, with them.

Because it happens so often now, a system of sorts has evolved to help when world events hit close to home. Experts study the effects of terrorism and war on families of Americans caught in the middle. The State Department stands ready at a moment’s notice to dispatch dozens of operators to answer the frantic questions of families.

Everything hinges on precious bits of information, via the news and State Department officials; Chandler affirms that.

The Bazner’s British Airways flight stopped for fuel in Kuwait Wednesday, in the midst of Saddam Hussein’s rapid invasion of the tiny country. The airport was seized and the four were bused, with other Westerners aboard the plane, to Baghdad.

Meanwhile, other friends and relatives wait in concern for some 3,500 U.S. citizens who are unable to leave beleaguered Kuwait.

With her yellow legal pad in front of her, Chandler makes frequent calls to her parents Ed and Virginia Bazner in Palm Desert and her brothers Christopher, in La Jolla, and Edward, in Burbank.

They cope, they wait. “Not much else we can do,” she says.

On Wednesday afternoon, the news was slim, so Chandler let her kids change the TV channel to watch “Popeye.”

Back from picking up her daughter, Cara, from an art lesson (“It’s good to get out of the house, right?”), Chandler sets about with her way of coping, a life-goes-on determination.

Her husband told her, as the crisis became evident, to write it all down--the frustrations, the fears, the game plan, if any.

“Now I’m making videotapes for Kevin, of all the news reports. He’ll like that.” She also got out her video camera and taped her own children, ages 11, 9 and 6, and had them say what they felt to their uncle, aunt and cousins.

“Uncle Kevin, don’t get shot,” said Jeff Chandler, 9, to the camera, plainly.

“That was an emotional moment,” Jan Candler says, “watching how a child deals with this in his own way. It’s really hard to believe we are connected with all these events.”

Leah Dickstein, a University of Louisville psychiatrist who has researched effects of political violence, says the stress on families in such situations can be “nearly overwhelming.”

“There’s certainly a feeling of acute stress, of helplessness. Families don’t know what’s going on and they are possibly imagining the worst,” she says.

The best a family can do, Dickstein says, is gather together, and let the emotions run their course.

“I think we’ve all seen this in the media and wondered if . . . this violence could ever extend to our own families,” she says. “And with children involved, adults feel that much more alarm.”

In the effort to inform, the media can sometimes invade a family’s privacy with the how-does-this-make-you-feel? questions.

But Dickstein says that families can sometimes benefit from sharing their emotions--even on camera and in print.

Chandler says her parents, after talking about their fears and hopes with national and local media, seem to be dealing with the situation better than at first.

“It’s like it helps them, sharing Kevin and his family with the world,” she says. “To talk about it keeps us positive. Sharing (the ordeal) is like when the neighbors come over with food. You realize everyone cares . . . a lot. Now my father answers the phone. Before he wouldn’t want to be bothered.”

In a hostage crisis, the families of victims can become famous for their burden and determination.

Peggy Say, the sister of American journalist Terry Anderson, who has been a hostage in Beirut for five years, has received enormous media attention (recently mentioned in Esquire magazine as a “Woman We Love”) detailing her constant quest for new information and help in her brother’s plight.

The wait has its psychological toll, says New York psychiatrist Martin Symonds, especially when families have “survivor guilt, the classic expression of ‘Why not me? Why can’t I be there to experience this with him?’ ”

Families like Bazner’s, Symonds says, can take comfort in his knowing that his wife and children are with him, relatively safe and that the rest of his family back home is safe, too.

“That’s what matters to him, I suspect,” he says.

In Washington, the State Department has established a Kuwait Task Force “hot line” for family members to call. So far, says a spokesperson, the 80 or so staffers who answer the phones have received around 15,000 calls--ranging from “unnaturally calm” to “hysterical.”

Lack of information can compound the problem, Symonds adds. “It just grows . . . a dilemma you cannot solve. They must take comfort in what they do have.”

Which is still not enough, the concerned eyes of Jan Chandler say.