COLUMN ONE : For GIs, It’s a Diet of Boredom : Front-line troops in Saudi Arabia feel the strain of endless waiting. Not even the staged scorpion fights keep them amused these days.

In the Arabian desert, reveille comes by air. Clouds of pesky flies buzz in at first light, the beginning of a daylong torment.

Beneath an umbrella of Marine Corps camouflage, Lance Cpl. Lawry Cuthbert fends off the attackers with his shower shoe. Some miles away, Army Staff Sgt. Raymond Horne takes his aim with a piece of cardboard wrapped in tape. Horne has plenty of time to swat flies: His official job is persuading soldiers to re-enlist. So far, he says, there have been no takers.

The adrenaline rush of deployment has ebbed.

Staging scorpion fights has become a bore. Cleaning sand from rifles no longer focuses the mind. Even combat drills and mock battles staged under once-unfamiliar conditions smack of lessons long-since learned.

As the massive U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia enters its third month, the great challenge facing thousands of ordinary American soldiers dug in across this bleak moonscape has become the emptiness of their days. And, frustrated by uncertainty about what the future will bring and when, the patience of front-line American troops has begun to fray.

“It all comes down to this: We should either go fight or we should go home,” Cpl. Steve Ellis, a 25-year-old Army infantryman from Appleton, Wis., said recently.

“You might just say we’re all getting a little antsy now,” said Ellis’ 20-year-old squad mate, Pfc. Rod Terrill of Tucson, as he brushed the sand off yet another cigarette.

These untested troops also have time to wonder about the realities of war and how they will meet them if combat comes. It is at night, says a former Army Special Forces officer who fought in Vietnam and now serves as a chaplain to a Marine battalion here, when the troops most often approach to ask what war is really like.

“You see a lot of death, a lot of destruction, a lot of horror, really,” says Navy Lt. Dan Hall, who became a Roman Catholic priest in reaction to what he saw in Vietnam. He says he told one Marine the other day: “When you see me start to worry, then you worry.”

Waiting is rarely easy, but a grunt’s life in Saudi Arabia is particularly trying. Soldiers and officers at the forward-most U.S. positions say they are sustained by letters and news of public support from the folks back home. After weeks in the sand, they find comfort in little else.

To be sure, there is no sign of outright dissension. Many soldiers speak with vehemence about the importance they attach to their pledge to serve the nation. If some question why their President has ordered them to this bleak place, most quickly add that it is not for them to doubt.

But with tens of thousands of Saddam Hussein’s heavily armored troops entrenched just across the border and no clear indication whether the Americans will be asked to drive them out, the strain of waiting shows. Corporals say captains have failed to tell the whole story. In the absence of ready answers to the endless questions, tempers sometimes flare and rumors fly.

For GIs, the rare recreational break means little more than swapping one isolated compound for another. And Saudi Arabia’s cultural strictures always intrude: Not only are alcohol and women off limits, but even Sports Illustrated is banned for baring too much skin.

“I hate to say it,” says one commander, whose 82nd Airborne company was one of the first to be deployed here nearly two months ago, “but most of my guys just want to go home.”

The scorching afternoon on which infantryman Ellis spoke marked his squad’s first opportunity to stand down after more than 40 days of manning a 107-millimeter mortar pointed toward Iraq. The rare chance to relax consisted of watching “The Godfather” on videotape and drinking cold sodas--all in stifling tents just a quarter mile back from the big gun.

Not all the 170,000 American military personnel in the Persian Gulf theater have it so grim. For sailors, there is occasional shore leave with the prospect at least of a beer in Bahrain. The Air Force, when not in air-conditioned barracks, sleeps in air-conditioned tents. The Army’s entire 101st Airborne Division is housed in a vast tent city, a dusty, primitive sprawl that at least provides regular showers and other home-base amenities.

But for those infantrymen and tankers, ammunition haulers and mechanics whose small encampments compose the front lines, there is no such relief. A bed is a cot under camouflage or a mattress on a tank. Meals, while sometimes hot, are rarely recognizable. Showers arrive by truck.

The lucky ones rotate back to climate-controlled base camps for a couple days every two weeks. But grunts like Ellis in the 197th Infantry Regiment got their first break only last week--the two-day stint in so-called Panther’s Paradise, where soldiers still sleep 34 to a stifling tent.

And while commanders seek to crowd the days with classes and calisthenics, meals and make-work, soldiers say there can never be enough to fill the empty hours. They read or write letters or play cards. Some lift weights fashioned from ropes and water cans. But in the end, they say, the boredom is unrelieved.

“There’s a lot of settin’ and waitin’,” says Marine Sgt. John Kaneaster, whose job is to repair the rifles of the 1st Tank Battalion whenever they break down.

Indeed, he and Cuthbert, the shower-shoe wielding tank mechanic, spend most of their time these days sitting around the dusty compound, a ghost town in the sand, hiding from the fierce sun under netting and waging war upon the flies who try to share their shade.

“To me it’s a game,” says Cuthbert, a 20-year-old from Lakeview Terrace in Los Angeles. “I kill as many as I can.”

Others hunt half-heartedly for scorpions and camel spiders. The arachnids are set upon one another in title bouts that once seemed exciting. As the thrill of those fierce fights has faded, most soldiers say they would rather listen to music than mount another search.

Now that cooler weather has set in, there is less nocturnal training. Days begin at dawn--unless the flies arrive first. By 5:30 a.m., American soldiers across the front lines are face down in the dust, finishing up the mandatory push-ups before a few innings of softball in the sand.

Breakfast arrives by 7 a.m., hauled in from the rear. The food is heaped in lumpy piles on flimsy Styrofoam trays. Later, there may be sand-table classes on Iraqi tactics, even realistic training exercises that pit Marine against Marine.

But more often, the day in the desert means sitting in a foxhole, on guard against a so-far dormant Iraqi enemy. Or cleaning one more rifle. Or changing yet another sand-clogged filter in another Humvee jeep. And, soldiers say, officers can always find another berm in need of building or another sandbag for a private to fill.

“They try to keep us busy,” shrugs Sgt. Michael Londergan, whose days are spent shuttling supplies of ammunition and spare parts to the combat troops he serves.

After an afternoon reprise, quitting time comes early to take advantage of fading light. There may be time for one last workout or writing a letter home in the desert dusk. But darkness falls by 6 p.m, and a blackout is enforced. Even with games of spades and nighttime weightlifting, the hours stretch on.

“The thing about the desert,” says Lance Cpl. Derrick Farwell, a 21-year-old Camp Pendleton-based Marine scout, “is that there’s not a lot of external stimulation to get the old noodle going. Your mind just wanders.”

Most try to focus on anything but the obvious. It is wives and girlfriends that soldiers’ thoughts gravitate to, along with cars and motorcycles and the almost-forgotten delights of fresh food and ice-cold drinks.

Among the crew of “Bad Company,” the Marines’ name for a light armored LAV-25 vehicle that would charge across the battlefield in the early stages of a tank war, the nightly topic revolves around the relative merits of filet mignon and lobster.

“I prefer the lobster myself,” says Cpl. John Harvey, Bad Company’s New England-born gunner. The commander is an Oklahoman, though, and he argues the merits of “real beef for real Marines.”

Over at the Army mortar platoon, between late-night yawns on watch, Ellis and Terrill seek a silver lining in the monotony, planning aloud what they will do with earnings they now have little way to spend.

“It will be like, ‘Hey, Rod, are you still going to put those new seats in your truck?’ ” Ellis says. Sooner or later, though, even such daydreaming gets down to the basics. “Back home I drive a ’65 Buick Riviera with a 425,” he says. “I can’t afford to pay $1.50 a gallon.”

Thinking about simple pleasures sometimes also just makes their absence felt. “We’ve got nothing out here,” says Londergan, the Army sergeant from Corning, N.Y., surveying terrain broken only by scattered camouflage nets.

“Women and beer,” he says. “You take that away from a man and what else is there?”

The waiting also makes it harder for soldiers to remember why they are here.

“I have to tell myself again and again: ‘You signed that contract,’ ” says Horne, the fly-swatting Army sergeant. “ ‘You promised to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.’

“That’s what goes through my mind every day,” the sergeant says, a gold tooth gleaming in the sun. “Why am I here ? Why am I here ?”

As the initial bravado about “kicking ass and taking gas” dissipates, other troops across the desert said they were beginning to ask the same question. And frustration with defending against an Iraqi force that shows no interest in invading and orders that give no permission to attack has inspired a certain revisionism.

“They say we’re here to defend Saudi Arabia and drive Saddam out of Kuwait,” one Army sergeant says as a squad of infantrymen around him nods in agreement. “The thing about it is, Kuwait used to be his land. Why can’t he have his land back?”

The sergeant was referring to a claim by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that Kuwait is part of Iraq because Kuwait and southern Iraq were administered as the same province of Basra in the Ottoman Empire before World War I.

Following the war, both Kuwait and Iraq were administered by Britain under a League of Nations mandate in which Kuwait and Basra province of Iraq were separated. Kuwait received its independence from Britain on June 19, 1961, and survived as an independent nation until the Iraqi invasion.

In other units, talk has spread that the United States in the 1950s sought and failed to win permission to establish a permanent base here. Maybe, soldiers say, that explains their current predicament.

Kuwait was not an independent nation in the 1950s. Since then, the United States has, from time to time, sought basing rights in the gulf region. For instance, Bahrain serves as home port to the U.S. Navy’s Persian Gulf task force. Kuwait, which since independence sought to maintain a neutral foreign policy, has never permitted any foreign bases on its territory.

“Saddam tipped it off, I know,” says the Army’s Londergan. “But the longer we stay, the more I start to think the President was just looking for a reason to get a grip on all the oil.”

“Just to grab a piece of the rock,” echoes Spec. Michael Douglas, of Youngstown, Ohio.

And the longer the U.S. forces sit in place to defend Saudi Arabia, the more some soldiers wonder why they must stay here at all. “All they need now is a peacekeeping force,” one Marine corporal says. “If they need us, we can come back.”

There are no signs that such complaints have yet diminished combat readiness; the discontent, soldiers say, only makes them more eager to get the job done fast. And for every voice of cynicism, there are several who--at least to reporters--profess wholehearted commitment to the mission.

“America’s got to do its part to protect the free world from tyrants like Saddam Hussein,” said Lance Cpl. James Morgan of Dayton, Ohio, the squad leader in a Marine anti-tank missile platoon.

But other soldiers say weeks at close quarters with little outlet have left nerves raw and tempers worn, prompting periodic flare-ups. Short of blows, the play becomes more physical, with an entire platoon observed recently sprinting across the sandy dunes to tackle and pile on top of one hapless young private.

Army officers wearily explain that the game is known as “911”--the universal code for help. “You can 911 all you want to,” a fed-up staff sergeant shouts at his men as he seeks to disentangle the mob. “But no more of this dog-pile bull----.”

The uncertainty about what lies ahead touches off waves of late-night gossiping and grousing. Lately, the whispering has produced the slogan “Go home or go fight.”

Then there are the ubiquitous rumors. Why won’t the officers tell us what is going on? soldiers ask. In the past two weeks, commanders have been forced to stand before assembled soldiers to deny, variously, that Saddam Hussein is dead, that American servicemen were killed in a terror attack, and that a date has been set for their flight home.

“The soldiers really feel like we’re holding out on them,” one Army company commander says. “Their morale has really dropped a lot.”

Another commander said some of the frustration has been channeled at the host government, with soldiers confused by conflicting signals suggesting that “the Saudis want us here and at the same time don’t want us here.”

Frustrated soldiers recount stories of the private whose parents sent him a religious medal but the box arrived empty, or the sergeant whose buddies sent him a skin magazine, but Saudi censors inked over all the pictures.

“They wonder why, here we are supposedly protecting their freedom and everything, but we’re still stuck in this little encampment,” says Lt. Col. Matt Belford, whose battalion in the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the first dispatched to the front lines in Saudi Arabia, is now in an isolated facility in the rear.

“I tell them, no matter what we do, we are basically two cultures, and we’re not going to mix,” Belford says.

There remain some who insist they are content with things as they are now. Marine Lance Cpl. Farwell, who plans to buy a new motorcycle with all the money he saves, is assigned to a scout platoon that would likely bear the first shock of a gas attack. He points to the chemical suit above his driver’s seat to make clear he is in no hurry for fighting to break out.

KUWAIT RESISTANCE FADES: Iraqi reprisals have caused the opposition to scale back. A6