Baker Visits Bahrain Officials, Restless GIs : Gulf crisis: ‘When are we going home?’ troops ask. The secretary discusses war options with a royal family.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III had a somewhat sobering encounter Sunday with about 4,200 restless and homesick American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, then held discussions about war options with aging members of Bahrain’s royal family.

Making his second visit in a little more than a month to U.S. forces along the Persian Gulf front, Baker was bombarded with dozens of repetitions of a single question: “When are we going to go home?”

He also fielded criticism from the troops about poor food and water and boredom.

Summing up his impressions for a pool of reporters who accompanied him from Bahrain to the 1st Cavalry Division’s encampment in eastern Saudi Arabia, Baker nevertheless said: “I was pleased to see that morale is good. . . . The main question is knowing what the future holds.

“That’s the one thing that people are asking more than anything else, and of course that’s something that, right now, can’t be answered with a great deal of specificity.”

Baker made visiting the troops the first order of business at the start of a weeklong trip to seven nations in the Persian Gulf and Europe.

Clad in khaki pants, a khaki safari-style shirt and worn cowboy boots, he climbed off his Air Force jetliner after a 15-hour flight from Washington and immediately boarded a helicopter for an hourlong ride to the 1st Cavalry’s encampment west of Dhahran in the Saudi desert. Security regulations prohibit disclosure of the exact location.

“We appreciate the sacrifice that’s involved in being here,” Baker told the troops, who were assembled around a podium shaded by a camouflage net. “Let me say that we appreciate as well the sacrifice that your families are making in order for you to be here.

“This is a long, long way from home, but I think that Americans are at home wherever our principles are.”

Mingling with the troops after his speech, Baker heard tightly controlled “Can do, sir” rhetoric from the division’s officers, mixed with complaints about food, water and boredom from the ranks.

“Got everything you need out here?” Baker asked one officer.

“Sir, if we ain’t got it, we’re building it,” the officer replied.

But an enlisted woman demanded: “When are we going to get to go home?”

“How long you been here?” Baker asked.

“Too long,” the woman replied.

When another soldier said the division had been deployed for 30 days, Baker said, “Thirty days? Stay a little longer.”

After Baker had passed, Sgt. Lisa Jones, 29, Toledo, Ohio, told reporters: “Time is being wasted. Let’s do something or go.”

Second Lt. Henry Wardick, 23, said, “I’d like to go home as soon as possible, but let’s get the job done.” He added: “Most of us assume we’ll be going to war sooner or later.”

However, the troops generally seemed pleased with the attention. One offered Baker a chew of tobacco, which he gnawed and spat for a while.

“I didn’t know I’d find any of that out here,” he said.

Other soldiers shouted that Baker should try the much-too-warm drinking water or the packaged MRE (“meals ready to eat,” the military’s equally unappetizing successor to the C-ration).

A group of soldiers gave reporters a chicken ala king MRE, demanding that it be passed along to Baker.

“Tell him to eat this for 30 days,” a woman said.

“It may come as somewhat of a surprise to some of you to know that I used to live on this stuff when I was in the Marine Corps, even though it was a little bit different then--they were in cans--but it wasn’t a lot different,” Baker said after receiving the package.

Although Baker told the troops that U.S. forces were dispatched to the gulf because America is determined not to repeat the “mistakes that were made in the 1930s,” his speech was devoid of the bellicose rhetoric that has marked his recent speeches, as well as President Bush’s.

Although the reference to the 1930s was clearly intended to compare Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with Adolf Hitler, Baker did not use the Nazi dictator’s name the way that Bush has done repeatedly.

The future for the 1st Cavalry and the rest of the international force in the gulf is what Baker came to the region to discuss. He has said he wants to find out what other members of the anti-Iraq coalition will do if the confrontation escalates to open combat.

In Bahrain, the leaders of the island nation, which has served as home port for U.S. Navy warships since 1949, told Baker that they support U.S. moves so far and can be counted on for the long pull.

“As long as there is a crisis, there is no limit to the cooperation between the United States and the states in this part of the world,” said Tarik Moayyid, Bahrain’s minister of information.

Asked if Bahrain, which has committed its tiny air force to the multinational force, will be ready for war if that becomes necessary, Moayyid said, “These armies from all over the world are not here for a picnic.”

Baker met separately with Bahrain’s ailing emir, Sheik Isa ibn Salman al Khalifa, Foreign Minister Sheik Mohammed ibn Mubarak al Khalifa and Prime Minister Sheik Khalifa ibn Salman al Khalifa. The emir, recently hospitalized for exhaustion, received Baker in the hospital--the first foreign visitor to see him there.

Talking briefly to reporters, the Bahraini foreign minister said his tiny nation hopes to end the crisis peacefully but “if we don’t succeed, we have other alternatives to look at.”

From Bahrain, Baker goes today to Taif, Saudi Arabia, where the exiled government of Kuwait is holed up in luxurious exile in a Sheraton hotel. Later in the day, he goes to Jidda to confer with King Fahd and other top Saudi officials.