Worried Californians Held Captive by the Wait : Detainees: Relatives of those trapped in Iraq and Kuwait spend their days and nights by the telephone.

From the sands of Palm Desert to the vineyards of Sonoma County, Californians with relatives trapped in Iraq and Kuwait are serving an intolerable sentence of their own.

Lela Uerling is afraid to leave her mobile home, worried she might miss word from the State Department on the whereabouts of her daughter and two grandsons.

Donna Munir is reluctant to speak of the Persian Gulf crisis, terrified that ill-chosen words might prompt Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to hunt down her husband and son, who were at a family reunion in Baghdad.

And Ed and Virginia Bazner--red-eyed and bone-tired from fitful sleep--find they can do little these days but pray, hoping divine intervention might bring the relief that the United States’ show of military might has so far failed to produce.

As the Middle East conflict deepens, relatives of the 3,000 Americans held hostage in Iraq and Kuwait are beginning to feel more and more like captives themselves. Frustrated and uneasy, they wait by their telephones--torn from their normal routines and mired in an oppressive helplessness surpassed only by fear.

They are a varied lot, these people drifting for three weeks now on a choppy sea of uncertainty--young and old, rich and poor, retired and employed. But all share the challenge of coping with the knowledge that their loved ones have become pawns in an international standoff that experts predict could span months.

Ed Bazner is tough. He fought in World War II. He supervised operations at a Ford Motor Co. plant in Michigan. He is 66 now, and he’s been around.

Nothing, however, prepared the silver-haired Palm Desert retiree for this.

Ed and Virginia Bazner’s son, Kevin, is under armed guard somewhere in Iraq. With him are his wife, Dawn, and their two children, 6-year-old Elizabeth and David, 6 months.

The young Bazners’ predicament was spawned by one of those unfathomable twists of fate. Kevin Bazner is a restaurant executive assigned to Malaysia, and the family was returning home from a vacation when their flight stopped to refuel in Kuwait.

The date was Aug. 2, a Thursday, the day Iraq chose to invade its tiny, oil-rich neighbor. Soldiers closed the airport shortly after the Bazners landed, and passengers were later bused to Iraq.

Initially, Ed and Virginia Bazner were able to obtain word on their relatives’ condition through U.S. Embassy personnel, who assured them all were well. There was even a fleeting moment of optimism after an Iraqi government official--during an interview with ABC correspondent Ted Koppel in Baghdad--promised to look into the Bazners’ case because of a hernia condition afflicting David.

But the queries have been met with silence since Friday, when Iraq moved 35 Americans being held at the Oberoi Rashid Hotel in Baghdad to an undisclosed location.

“We could kind of live with it as long as we were getting word,” said Ed Bazner, a slight, bespectacled man. “But now the communication is dead. We’re getting zero. It’s just too much to take.”

A yellow ribbon is wrapped around the Bazners’ mailbox. Each time the phone rings, the anxious parents, both 66, jump up: Maybe this is the call that will end the waiting. Usually, it’s another reporter or a neighbor calling to offer comfort.

There has been a gratifying abundance of that. Friends come by with plates of fruit, and prayers are being said at the Bazners’ parish church and at others in town.

“The community support has been terrific,” Ed Bazner said. “We’ve gotten calls, cards. We got a letter today from a couple we don’t know. Their son has just been sent over there, so they said they’d be waiting along with us.”

On Thursday, the Bazners decided they needed to get away. Some friends offered their home in Lake Arrowhead, and the Palm Desert couple retreated there gratefully after designating a daughter in Utah as the contact for any updates.

“It’s so hard, the not knowing, that we decided to go up on the mountain, just the wife and I, where we can pray and we won’t bother nobody, and nobody will bother us,” Bazner said. “We can’t keep sweating by the phone.”

Lela Uerling, 58, of Sonoma, last spoke with her daughter, Arleen Tayeh, on Aug. 2, the invasion day.

“I could hear the bombs going and the cracking of guns outside her apartment,” Uerling recalled. “My daughter was hysterical, and so was I. She was trying to get out, but the airport was closed. And her husband was out of the country, in Jordan.”

At the time, Tayeh and her two young sons--Toby and Zachary--had food and water. But how long would the supplies last, Uerling wonders. What is their condition now?

Tayeh, 27, moved to Kuwait eight years ago, drawn there by her Palestinian husband, Mohamed, who opened a catering business that serves airlines. The culture was strange at first, but Arleen learned to dress like Kuwaitis and speak their language, her mother said.

“She became happy, but every 2 years she would come home for a visit and I would beg her to move back,” Uerling said.

Since communications with her daughter ended, Uerling has sent a telegram to President Bush and telephoned “every number I could find” for the State Department.

“I’m not getting anywhere,” she lamented. “If I get a human voice on the phone, they tell me they’ll call me tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes.”

Uerling, who keeps a candle burning for her daughter each day, said she has launched a support group for relatives of the hostages.

“I think we need to band together,” said Uerling, who has already linked up with mothers in Oregon and Florida. “We can help each other.”

Joseph is the eldest of Edward and Beverly Lammerding’s eight children, and, by all accounts, the most adventurous. After a long stint as a seaman aboard a U.S. Navy repair ship, Joe Lammerding took an engineering job in Kuwait, where he has lived for five years.

Although the money was good, Lammerding found the heat oppressive. Each time he returned home to visit his family in Sacramento--including a February trip in honor of his parents’ 35th wedding anniversary--he talked of moving back.

“I thought this would be his last tour over there,” said his brother, Jerome, a purchasing agent for a Sacramento office equipment company. “He never seemed scared, but the danger was something that was always in the backs of our minds.”

The last news of 34-year-old Joe Lammerding reached his relatives one week ago. At the time, he was holed up in his Kuwait apartment, in good condition. Things have changed since then, however, and it is unknown whether Joe Lammerding was among those Americans rounded up.

Meanwhile, Jerome Lammerding said, the family waits, with his parents acting as an information center for the siblings.

“For me, it’s sort of like a dream, like it really can’t be happening,” Jerome Lammerding said. “I hate the helplessness. I’m just waiting for the phone call that says he has landed.”