COLUMN ONE : Hostages Wait in the Wings : With the freedom airlift finished, those Americans left behind in Iraq live with the agony of uncertainty.

Seated in his “safe haven” in Baghdad, Gene Lovas reflected Tuesday night on his latest role in life--a part, he said, much like that of an unwilling actor in a drama that rewrites itself each day.

Lovas, a 45-year-old construction superintendent from Orange County, is a hostage. He has been one for 55 days now, ever since Iraqi President Saddam Hussein banned the departure of thousands of foreigners whose governments are trying to drive him out of Kuwait.

For the past several weeks, Lovas and the thousands of other men still trapped here watched with mixed emotions as nearly 2,000 more women and children were flown to freedom on an airlift that ended Saturday.

Now, as Lovas knows all too well, he is among the many left behind. And with Iraq toughening its rhetoric and the airlift finished, anxiety among those still here has only deepened.

“It had the good-news and the bad-news effect,” Lovas said of the U.S.- and European-financed airlift. “Good news, because everyone wanted to see the women and children get out. But on the other hand, a couple of our people had to pay a big, big price for it.”

That price, according to one diplomat in Baghdad, was “trading husbands for visas.” The Iraqi authorities had ordered women applying for exit visas to bring their husbands with them. The men were then promptly detained and taken off to strategic locations as part of Hussein’s “human shield” against attack.

“It was very demoralizing,” Lovas said. “It took the house down for a while. We all felt very vulnerable. This was the first indication that these guys were really serious.”

According to a State Department count made public Monday in Washington, at least 93 Americans have become components of the human shield--”special guests,” the Iraqis call them. They reportedly are being held in workers’ quarters at key targets such as power stations, chemical plants, military depots, dams, airfields and communications centers throughout Iraq and Kuwait. Along with them are more than 220 Britons, about 100 Japanese, 50 French citizens and perhaps a dozen Germans.

Lovas and his dozens of compatriots at the diplomatic “safe haven” in Baghdad--where they have eaten well and built close friendships--are in a different category. They are among the estimated 350 Americans who are not detainees but who have been left behind in Iraq--most of them contract workers like Lovas or women married to Iraqis who are barred from leaving.

Another 600 to 700 Americans are still in Kuwait, according to State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler. In releasing the figures Monday, she angrily condemned the Iraqis for refusing to free 69 Americans “requiring medical attention and immediate evacuation.”

Among the 69, according to U.S. Embassy sources in Baghdad, are a man who has gone blind in one eye as a consequence of diabetes, another with a triple-bypass heart condition and a third with a spinal disorder.

Lovas, a powerfully built man who left his family in Westminster and sold his construction company in Anaheim last year to take the job in Iraq, said:

“I don’t think any of us read into this (the release of women and children) that it was going to be moving in phases that would ultimately include us. In fact, maybe it was meant to give (Hussein) the freedom to be a little more serious about the people he’s keeping behind.

“I think we’re all quite concerned now. This is a very trying time, and we don’t know the script. We don’t know what the final chapter is going to be. You just don’t know from one day to the next what’s going to happen. You’ve got to read between the lines, and then your imagination takes over.”

Not all those left behind are men, however. Women and children remain in what is being called the largest hostage population in modern history.

According to British women who were released from strategic sites on Hussein’s orders, some women chose to stay by their husbands’ sides. Many others are married to men from Arab nations that are taking part in the trade blockade against Iraq, and they are prohibited from leaving.

Then there are the extraordinary cases, like that of Pauline Arthur Hassan, a Boston native whose 21 years of living in and out of Kuwait have made for such a complex record that it confused Iraq’s rigid bureaucracy.

Indeed, hers is yet another dramatic facet to the human side of the continuing hostage drama.

Hassan was among the many American women who fled Kuwait on one of last week’s freedom flights. But she and a handful of other mothers, along with their children, were forced off the plane in Baghdad before it flew on to London.

It was not because Hassan is not an American, although technically she isn’t. Nor was it because her children are not American, because they are. It was because Hassan’s ex-husband, who is Kuwaiti, appealed to the Iraqis to bar the children from leaving.

Under Iraqi law, which now governs Kuwait, a father has such rights, and despite the Iraqis’ willingness to permit Hassan’s departure, her children had to stay behind.

“I’ve had this choice before,” she reflected in her Baghdad hotel room Tuesday night as three of her daughters played card games in the hallway outside. “And I can’t do that. I had to hold onto them.

“How would I have felt if I had gone to America without them? The only thing I have left now is my children. I lost everything in Kuwait. I lost my job, my car, a lifetime of mementos and the prospect of a prosperous year ahead teaching at the university. At least now I’ve got my kids, and that’s a lot.”

Hassan said she met her future husband in 1968 at a cafe in Harvard Square, married him before the year was out and moved to his home in Kuwait city, where she began teaching English as a second language. She alternated between Kuwait and the United States, where two of her four daughters were born, and earned a master’s degree from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.

In 1984, she and her husband were divorced, and one of her daughters moved back to the United States. The other three stayed with her in Kuwait. For years, she said, they endured seemingly endless court battles with her former husband.

When the Iraqi troops invaded Aug. 2, raining artillery fire over the family’s apartment in Kuwait city, Hassan recalled, “I was thankful to the Iraqis for liberating us.”

“We thought this was an opportunity to get out of Kuwait,” she added, explaining that, having given up her American citizenship at her husband’s request years ago, she was having difficulty leaving with her children.

Like other refugees from Kuwait, Hassan told of widespread looting and brutal behavior by the Iraqis there, but she praised the Iraqi army officers in command as “far more polite than Kuwaiti bureaucrats.” And she blamed most of the emirate’s continuing deterioration since the invasion on the thousands of Kuwaitis who have fled.

Now her ordeal appears to be near an end. A few days ago, her former husband profusely apologized and officially dropped his claim to the children. U.S. officials issued her American citizenship papers, and the Iraqis have agreed to let her leave. The only remaining hitch is that she must go out by an overland route through Jordan.

“I really don’t know what to expect,” she said with a laugh when asked whether she was apprehensive about living permanently in America again after being away so long.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do there. Obviously, I have no job. I think the first thing I’ll do, though, is sit down and write a book--a novel.”

But men like Gene Lovas and others in his situation wish they could have had the opportunity to make such choices.

“Hey, there’s not one person in this safe haven who didn’t want all these women and children to get out--I’d like to see every person get out--but I’d also like to see myself sitting on that airplane,” said one colleague of Lovas, a rigging superintendent from Santa Ana who asked to be identified only as Jack.

“What I mean is, you can’t negate any opportunity for people to get out of here,” he added. “But, hey, I want to watch the Rams play their next home game.”

Jack, a former U.S. Marine, said: “You can’t go to college and take a course for this, you know. It’s unimaginable the kind of roller coaster we’re on.

“We’ve always been taught that being a hostage is being tied up and blindfolded in some solitary confinement cell somewhere, and I almost think that would be better than to have the kind of access to the outside world we have. Every day we’re exposed to the latest news, the latest radio reports, the latest steps in this thing, and several days a week we’re able to talk to our families about it on the phone.

“It’s just so hard to be in a situation where you’re able to maintain all the relationships you have outside, but still not be able to go there and be with those people.”

Like others, Jack said there is one thought he chases from his mind each time it materializes--the possibility of a U.S. air strike on Baghdad.

“I don’t know if there’s a bomb with my name on it,” he said. “I can’t let that concern me, and we don’t dwell on it here. . . . I feel that if it happens, there’s nothing I can do about it.

“I had a burglar come into my house once, and the police told me I was very fortunate I did not awaken while he was in there. It’s pretty much the same way here. I hope I don’t awaken some morning and see them coming over the wall.

“And really, it’s no different than getting up at 6 in the morning in Los Angeles and driving downtown in your car. You just pray every day that you make it and you try not to think about it while you’re doing it.”

Still, Jack, Lovas and several of the others kept coming back to the haunting side of that unending uncertainty--and the anxiety that accompanies their still-unwritten role in this historic event.

“Anybody who is left behind here--and I don’t mean just me, but the thousands of others who are in the same situation--are definitely caught up in the events of the time,” Jack said. “Unlike the news media, who can move in and out of this city almost at will, all of the rest of us are part of this drama.

“I would not have signed up for this part. It’s like the definition we use in flying for the word experience. Experience is something that happened to you that you wish had happened to someone else.

“I just hope that when this history finally is written and that last chapter is over, I get a chance to read it.”