Families Held Hostage to New Reality

Patricia Hale is not yet ready to face the fact that her husband is a hostage.

Never mind that President Bush, in a speech Monday morning, declared that the previous policy of dancing around the word is over and that those trapped by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait are, indeed, “hostages.”

That word, after more than a decade of American involvement in hostage crises, is difficult for Hale to put beside the name of her husband, Edward, who was last seen at a hotel in Baghdad.

“I still don’t like the use of that word,” said Hale, who lives in the Houston suburb of Spring, Tex. “To me, a hostage is someone being held by terrorists for a long time. I don’t like to associate that word with my husband because I don’t even want to think of him being held for that length of time.”

But for Edwin Davis, a retired minister from Koran, La., the President’s shift in language was little more than semantics.

“I’ve been calling them hostages all along, so it didn’t come as any surprise,” said Davis, whose daughter, Martha, was vacationing in Kuwait with her husband and two teen-age children when the Iraqis invaded.

Hale and Davis are but two of thousands of people coping with the worst hostage crisis to beset the United States since the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

And like the Iran crisis for President Carter and the taking of American hostages in Lebanon for the Reagan Administration, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has the potential to make captive Americans a major force in decision-making for President Bush.

Only in this case, there are thousands of hostages, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein seems more than willing to use the foreigners as a protective shield for strategic military positions in both Iraq and Kuwait.

The other factor is that there are also thousands of American troops in the Saudi Arabian desert, further raising the possibility of an all-out confrontation that puts loved ones at risk.

“That’s a hard choice President Bush has to make,” said Davis, who fought his way across North Africa, Sicily, Italy and southern France during World War II. “As long as the Americans stay in Saudi Arabia, I don’t think there is much danger for the hostages. What I am worried about is a shooting war.”

Others, however, are not so cautious. One is Conrad Gicking of Arlington, Tenn., whose daughter married a Kuwaiti two years ago and was living in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded.

Bush, he said, “has done very well. There is only one thing more that he has to do, and that is push the button. This man (Saddam Hussein) is not human. He came from a jackal. He and what he stands for--tyranny--needs to be destroyed.”

As the days have turned into weeks since the Iraqis invaded, a pattern has emerged for Americans with relatives who are being held hostage. They are people who are getting very little sleep, spending long hours in front of the television, enduring a great deal of stress and living in a world in which telephones are ringing almost constantly as relatives and the media look for any change in the crisis. In some cases, a system of networking has begun--on a very limited basis--among the hostage relatives.

One, called The Coming Home Committee, was set up by Michael Saba, 49, who himself escaped from Baghdad after the invasion of Kuwait. Saba said the organization is gathering information about those who got out and that free legal and psychiatric advice is available.

At the same time, a measure of fear has overtaken some of the family members, leading them to attempt to pull themselves from the spotlight because they fear that their words could somehow hurt relatives being held in Iraq and Kuwait.

“We’re so tired, and I’m not comfortable answering questions because I do not want to make any wrong comments,” said Sarah Amos of Harmony, Tex., whose husband is an oil drilling supervisor believed to have been in a Baghdad hotel when the invasion began.

She said her husband had been a volunteer firefighter in Harmony, population 200, and that one day after he was caught in the Iraqi invasion, the local fire chief approached her because he was being besieged by the media.

“I said, ‘You can tell them what you want about whether he was a good fireman or a bad fireman, but please don’t say anything political.’ ”

The same caution is evident in Donnita Cole of Odessa, Tex., whose husband is in Kuwait, whose serviceman son is waiting to be shipped out to the Middle East and whose second son, also in the military, could be sent as well.

“I have to edit what I say,” she said.

As the days wear on, Patricia Hale said she does not plan to deal with the possibility of what might happen to her husband should President Bush order an attack until that moment actually comes.

“I just have to handle each day as it comes,” she said.

Times researchers Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Lianne Hart in Houston and Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this report.