Bunked in a Battle Zone : As hostilities loom in the Gulf, Dhahran International suddenly finds itself hosting the world’s journalists. And like war hotels of the past, International’s reputation may soon reach storied proportions.

Every war produces a legendary hotel.

In Vietnam, it was the Caravel; in Lebanon, the Commodore; in El Salvador, the Camino Real. Their fame was born not from fine cuisine nor pampered service, but merely because this was where correspondents who covered the war lived, drank, worked, and sought companionship and truth.

Often the frayed remnants of a bygone colonial era, the favored hotels lived on a last hurrah in a moment of high drama. Yet even in the toughest times, they provided the war correspondents’ staples: communications, information, alcohol and safety--generally in that order.

When the city was blacked-out, the staff found generators to keep the lights burning. When the streets were dangerous, to step into the hotel’s foyer was to be secure. When it was seemingly impossible to find a communications link with the home office in Europe or the United States, the hotel’s telexes chattered away as reliably as Swiss watches.

Now journalists have gathered again, 350 of them at last count, to record the drumbeat of threatened war. Many are veterans of wars and revolutions in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, a few of Vietnam--but only a few because the years have slipped by more quickly than most have realized. And the hotel that is to them what the Caravel was in Saigon is a mint-on-your-pillowcase, marbled retreat, the Dhahran International.

It seems a bit out of place with the boozy, tattered character of its predecessors.

In normal times, the 200-room, $85-a-night International is a businessman’s hotel where guests such as then-Vice President George Bush, Libyan dictator Moammar Kadafi and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat have dined on fricassee de fruits de mer au saffron and lamb kabobs.

What nobody worried about in those quieter times was the International’s exceedingly dangerous location. Well within range of Iraqi missiles, it sits on the perimeter of a major air base, close to huge containers of petroleum and a collection of TV dishes and antennas.

But the hotel’s general manager, Gunther Baehr, and his staff of 300--which includes Egyptians, Tunisians, Jordanians, Thais, Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Moroccans, a handful of Saudis in executive positions and an Irish chef--have responded like battle-scarred veterans to the challenge of running what could become a war-time hotel.

“This is a rare opportunity to witness a turning point in history,” Baehr said while journalists down the hall were dismantling the ceiling to accommodate TV cables. “Everyone’s concerned for his own safety, yet there is something in a crisis that binds everyone, the staff and the guests, together. For instance, I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of the guests, and that wouldn’t happen in normal times.”

Baehr’s job has no doubt been made easier because the stiffest drink served in Dhahran is a kandana fizz--orange juice and nonalcoholic sparkling white wine in a martini glass--and by the absence of quasi-journalistic war junkies who usually find their way into foreign battle zones. The Saudis’ rigid visa controls have kept the groupies at bay, and the alcohol ban has produced what must be the most conservative and well-behaved buildup of journalists--and soldiers--in military history.

“Frankly, I welcome the chance to come up to Saudi and get off the sauce for a while,” said one European correspondent based in Cairo. “I always cope better than I think I will. “What I miss, though, is the camaraderie and exchange of information you get in a bar. You just don’t get that same interaction in a coffee shop. . . . This whole atmosphere is very sterile compared to what it was like in Vietnam or Beirut.”

The journalists, who now need computer jacks as much as they once did telexes, have converged on the Dhahran International because its Grand Banquet Hall houses the U.S. military’s Joint Information Bureau. A collection of 35 officers and sergeants, the bureau coordinates field trips and escorts small groups of correspondents to various units scattered through the desert.

Unlike Vietnam, the military has kept a tight reign on journalists, forbidding them unaccompanied access to units and soldiers. The competition is so keen to secure one of the 10 or 15 spaces available on any escape from the hotel that 40 journalists tried to sign up for a day with Chief Warrant Officer Wesley Wolf, who visits units in a catering truck, selling “Wolfburgers.” (NBC has hired the wife of an American oil worker to sit by the board where future trips are posted; her sole job is to pencil in the names of an NBC crew at the top of each list.)

And because the journalists are at the Dhahran International, the Kuwaitis are too, in a suite staffed by volunteers who try to keep Iraq’s atrocities in the world’s conscience.

They sell T-shirts that say, “See You In Kuwait,” arrange interviews with Kuwaitis who have escaped Iraqi occupation, and distribute videos of Kuwait, before and after. The posters they have taped to walls in the hotel show gallant fighters, teary-eyed children and hands raised in victory salutes. A visitor who did not speak Arabic might think he was looking at something published by the Palestinians.

“We have suffered more than the Palestinians because their suffering has been gradual and ours has been sudden,” said a Kuwaiti named Saqar whose family remains in Kuwait. “We were born to wealth and dignity, and suddenly we are jobless, homeless, moneyless.

“Think of an American going to work one morning and by the evening he has lost everything. Everything. We found ourselves in 24 hours with nothing. We didn’t even have time to go to the bank and draw out some money.”

Rumors float through the hotel these days that a deal may be in the works to give the Kuwaitis back their country. In the lobby, where fountains flow with gurgling water, guests sip Turkish coffee and discuss these reports amid the piped-in sounds of “Danny Boy.” Upstairs, in the banquet hall, the television set, tuned to the U.S. Armed Forces network, shows a pro football game, live from the United States. Johnny Carson will be on later.

It is the twilight zone between war and peace. The hotel staff scurries about, emptying ashtrays, slipping faxes from offices in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo under journalists’ doors.

All of life seems to blur into a single memory of too many wars in distant lonely lands. The Caravel. The Commodore. The Intercontinental. Camino Real. The Dhahran International--whose staff and guests now attend nightly seminars about how to survive air attacks and chemical warfare--has not yet earned its stripes as a member of that select wartime fraternity.

And, one hopes, it never will.