171 Americans Flown to Safety From Kuwait : Evacuation: Women and children brought out aboard chartered Iraqi airliner. And they bring stories of brutality, fear and courage with them.

Praying for the men they left behind, 171 American women and children flew to safety from Kuwait on Friday, bringing surreal tales of brutality and courage, of fear, love and absurdity in the ruins of the Iraqi-occupied oil sheikdom.

A U.S.-chartered Iraqi Airways Boeing 707 called at Baghdad en route to Amman to inaugurate an air bridge that is expected to operate daily in repatriating the estimated 1,400 American women and children trapped in Kuwait since the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion.

The women continue their trip home today. Their men remain in Kuwait as Iraqi hostages, the majority hiding out in luxury apartments where they strain for news over shortwave radios and for relaxation watch an Iraqi television channel that shows English-language movies such as “Terms of Endearment.”

Most of the American women who flew out Friday are married to Kuwaitis and other Arabs. Their exit ended a month of anxiety, and few of them believed they would make it out until they were actually in the air. Nearly all were too nervous to eat the sweet fruitcakes offered by smiling Iraqi stewardesses, but everybody drank the Pepsi-Cola.

Roberta Hogan of San Diego is married to an American. She kissed him goodby in Kuwait city at 7 a.m. Friday. The couple had been hiding in a friend’s house: Their landlord asked them to leave their own apartment when Iraq declared that sheltering Americans is a hanging offense. Palestinian and Turkish friends kept the fugitives in supplies for a long month.

“I guess maybe I slept three hours with a big knot in my belly Thursday night,” Hogan said Friday night in Amman. “Still, it was my husband; he’s a Scorpio--you know, the macho front--he was the one with tears in his eyes when I left.”

Using a round-robin system of phone calls reminiscent of a World War II air raid warning system, the besieged American Embassy in Kuwait city alerted the women Thursday that they would be the first out.

Come to the parking lot of the Safeway supermarket at 7:30 a.m. Friday, they were told. Bring your suitcases and documents. No men.

Nervously, Hogan and a friend helped one another don concealing head coverings that devout Muslim women wear in Kuwait. Thus disguised for the benefit of Iraqi army patrols, they drove through empty streets strewn with wreckage to catch the airport bus at the burned-out supermarket. No problem.

“We just left the car; a shame,” Hogan said. “It’s a new Chevy. Some Iraqi soldier’s probably driving it tonight.”

Many of the women arrived tense and teary, but after a few peaceful hours in Jordan, a new reality asserted itself. Friday night after dinner, a handful of them sat on the patio of an Amman hotel to summon up details of a month none of them would ever forget.

“I guess the worst thing was realizing that one man can do that to a city, and to the world. Saddam Hussein raped Kuwait, and his ambitions don’t stop there,” said Judy Evans Aljazra of Pensacola, Fla.

The Americans lived with tedium:

“We played a lot of cards--solitaire mostly, because I could never find enough people to play blackjack,” one of the women said. “We sang sometimes, accompanying a guitar, but toward the end there wasn’t much singing.” The phone was everybody’s lifeline, the British Broadcasting Corp. and the Voice of America were the fugitive community’s bibles, and Iraqi TV a diversion. Everybody got a chuckle out of “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” and kids liked the after-breakfast Disney movies.

They coped with fear:

“One day when we heard that Iraqi troops were searching our neighborhood, I hid for 4 1/2 hours in the false ceiling of my kitchen,” said Oriole Hart of Denver.

“The city is a ghost town, wanton destruction everywhere. We talked on the phone, but never too long, because we didn’t know who was listening,” said Maureen Aldacheel of St. Louis.

There were moments of drama: An Iraqi patrol found arms belonging to the Kuwaiti resistance in the basement of one American’s apartment building. They dragged away two Kuwaiti men from a third-floor apartment.

And there was comedy, too: Muslim Kuwait was dry until Iraqi conquerors came. Then, door-to-door salesmen who had sold fruits and vegetables in the old days began turning up hawking cases of beer and whiskey imported from Baghdad at bargain prices. Some of the trapped Americans lost weight; they were too nervous to eat. Others drank.

There was grace in adversity:

“Something good happened to Kuwaitis after the invasion. They began suddenly acting like a community, protecting us and one another. I’ve never seen a country come together like that,” said Pat Aarta from Haley, Ida.--”population 600 when I left 12 years ago.”

“Three days after it happened, rich, spoiled, young Kuwaitis who had lived lives of great privilege had organized themselves and were working outdoors collecting the neighborhood garbage,” said Sandra Williams of Warren, Ohio.

On the hotel patio in the soft Jordanian night, one American woman sat apart from the others. She wore a richly embroidered and tightly drawn white head scarf, a signal of her Muslim beliefs. She was a Colorado girl, she said, who had gone East and gotten religion along with a husband. “I’m Joyce, just Joyce. My husband’s still there,” she said as her three Kuwaiti-born children between the ages of 5 and 9 horsed around on the patio.

“It was hard to make the children understand it was serious, that there were some rooms where they shouldn’t speak English because the windows were open and they might be overheard outside. Yesterday, it was me crying all day, and praying to Allah. The kids were just so excited about leaving; they love Colorado.

“After a while, your whole sense of reality changes,” Joyce said. “I remember one night there had been a lot of shooting, and the kids were scared. So I went in and said, ‘Hush, go to sleep, the shooting’s stopped now,’ and to myself I was asking, ‘Am I actually saying this?’ All the values change. What was important becomes nothing. Find yourself in a conversation about how to defend your family against chemical attack, and who cares if the washing machine is acting up?”

About 500 American men, along with hundreds of others from other Western countries and Japan, are stranded in Kuwait by order of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. They are all hostage to what has been called Hussein’s human shield program, although it is not clear how many have been detained and moved to potential bombing targets such as military sites.

Women who spoke with reporters at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad told of being torn between having to leave their husbands and staying in a country where shots and tank blasts ring out at night as Iraqi troops skirmish with Kuwaiti resistance fighters.

“The choice was difficult. At this point, everyone is scared,” said Magdalena Santana, 26, from Miami.

Many of the women said that in the past few weeks they had been moving from house to house to avoid detection by the Iraqi authorities, who had ordered foreigners to assemble in central collection points.

A woman named Cindy told reporters in Baghdad that she had dyed her blond hair brown so she could travel in the street to buy food or change locations. Magdalena Santana put on a traditional Arab scarf and gown to pass for a native resident. “No one wanted to look American,” she said.

Santana, whose husband is Kuwaiti, described nightmarish scenes of insecurity: looting by Palestinian youths, the commandeering of cars by Iraqis, the demands of resistance fighters to hide out in private homes.

“We are caught,” she said. “The Iraqis say they will hang people for hiding the resistance, but the resistance comes anyway.”

Santana said that her 16-year-old brother-in-law was shot in the neck when caught trying to hang a Kuwaiti flag in the street. He survived and was taken to a hospital, but a friend of the youth was slain.

“The soldiers ran into the block and shot the kids. That was it,” Santana recalled. “My brother-in-law landed on our doorstep wounded.”

Some women reported that tanks were used to demolish houses by firing almost point-blank into them. The resistance activity seemed to be centered on mobile ambushes and the burning of Iraqi jeeps. The amount of fighting varied depending on the neighborhood; in some places there was none and in others, especially central neighborhoods of the city, gunfire was heard nightly.

Because the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait city is under siege by Iraqi troops, a diplomat was sent from Baghdad to arrange Friday’s flight. The Hussein government has declared foreign embassies redundant and illegal since Iraq annexed Kuwait.

With no electricity and water, it is expected that the handful of American diplomats in Kuwait, along with American citizens who have taken refuge on embassy grounds, may be smoked out. Their surrender could raise tensions, especially if Iraq arrests the ambassador there on the grounds that he has lost his diplomatic immunity.

Friday’s start of a promised air bridge followed days of negotiations with Iraqi authorities by U.S. officials in Baghdad, as well as diplomats from other countries. Iraq had demanded that its national carrier be chartered to ferry the women and children out at least as far as Jordan. The airport in Amman is the only one in the world where Iraqi planes are permitted to land regularly.

Some Americans in Kuwait decided to stay or said they were not ready to depart yet. Diplomats in Baghdad said the United States is willing to charter two planes a day if there is enough demand. One flight is scheduled for today with capacity for about 140 passengers. If completed, the airlift will leave not only the American men in Kuwait but also several dozen in Iraq as hostages.

Tens of thousands of Asian refugees are also trying to leave both Kuwait and Iraq, although their departure is being held up by severe logistical tangles. In general, Third World refugees are not being held hostage.

In Baghdad on Friday, an Air India plane was scheduled to ferry several hundred women and children who had been stranded in Iraq for two weeks after fleeing Kuwait. But the plane was suddenly canceled, leaving the Indians marooned at the airport and largely penniless.

Williams reported from Baghdad and Montalbano from Amman.