COLUMN ONE : How Four Hostages Survived : Teacher, banker, architect and weapons expert--theirs is a story of despair and ingenuity. Now safe at home, they recall the fear and the horror.

The uncertainty of it all, now that was the worst of it. Sitting and waiting for . . . what?

Listening to the shortwave radios and hearing about the massive American military buildup in the desert. Being held prisoner at Iraqi military installations and wondering if the bombs really would drop. Waiting in Kuwait city apartments, listening for the knock at the door that would mean an escort north to Baghdad and . . . what?

No one knew. No one could predict. The wily Saddam Hussein certainly wasn’t going to show his hand until the right moment. And so they waited, these hostages and those in hiding, and waited some more.

In the darkest of times, they were seized by the kind of despair that captivity and the feeling of abandonment can bring. What the hell was George Bush doing, anyway?

So it went, day after day, until that wonderful moment in December when they dared to hope that Hussein spoke the truth when he said they could all go home.

And then came that moment when hope becomes reality. The jet engines roared and the wheels lifted off the runway, headed first for Europe, then home. They are all back now, at least all those who wanted to leave. They are sorting out their lives and Christmas shopping and making up for lost time.

Talmadge Ledford is with his family in New Hampshire, and Paul Pawlowski is with his family in Boston. Will Van Dorp is at home in Ft. Wayne, Ind., and William Van Ry is with his family and parents in Ft. Collins, Colo. Guided missile expert. Architect. English teacher. Bank officer.

A diverse lot. They did not know each other. But their common bond was Kuwait city on Aug. 2, the day of the Iraqi tanks. They became a part of the largest hostage episode in modern times, one of the reasons President Bush said he was willing to go to war.

Each knew, at one time or another, that the wrong decision could mean danger and even death. Each took a different path. Two ended up as Iraqi prisoners. Two decided to remain in hiding.

None of the four had thought this could happen in Kuwait city, with its wide seaside boulevards and high-rises that oil had built. Here, hundreds of thousands of foreigners, including many Americans, helped Kuwait operate perhaps the richest spot on the planet. True, Hussein had been warning the Kuwaitis about producing too much oil, which drove down prices and hurt his struggling postwar economy. But an invasion, after warring so long with Iran?

So the first hours of the first day that Iraq swallowed Kuwait had a dreamlike quality to them, a kind of otherworldliness spawned by surprise and fear. Yet the people who lived through them, and the days to come, also speak with the vividness reserved for times when the adrenalin is pumping and the mind becomes a movie camera.

Van Ry and Ledford first heard of the invasion by telephone, Van Ry from a friend and Ledford from his Kuwait office. Van Dorp and Pawlowski heard noises that made them wonder what was going on outside. For Van Dorp, it was an explosion he thought had occurred on a ship passing by his seaside apartment; for Pawlowski, it was heavy trucks moving through the streets, awakening him at 5:30 a.m.

Van Dorp watched in fascination as Iraqi jets made wide swings out over the Persian Gulf before coming in low for another rocket attack two miles down the coast. From his seventh-floor balcony, he saw smoke and fire belch from the target and remembers feeling that, somehow, his life was being violated.

Ledford, the recently arrived manager for Raytheon Gulf Systems Co.--which maintained an American-made guided missile system--raced to his office and began emptying files on government projects and military operations. He stored them in boxes and hid them away. His wife, Clairanne, called from New Hampshire. It would be the last time they would talk to each other for 96 days.

Pawlowski and his wife, Ingrid, spent the day wondering what to do as they listened to nearby small-arms fire and tank exchanges. Should they make a run for the desert? A huge explosion blew out two large windows of their villa, the first event since the shooting started that had frightened their 7-year-old daughter, Tess. And in his diary of that day, Pawlowski wrote: “Is this a bad dream--will we wake up tomorrow and find out that this was a bad dream?”

Van Ry, the banker, drove to warn a friend who had no telephone. While they were returning, he stopped to buy a newspaper in which there was an account of negotiations between Kuwait and Iraq. The story assured readers that there would be no more problems between the two countries.

Over the story was this headline: “It’s Over.”

Throughout the day, people in Van Ry’s apartment building prepared for what they were sure would be an evacuation of foreigners. In the afternoon, they stood on the rooftop and watched tank battles and helicopters firing rockets. They did that until a building down the street was hit with mortar and machine-gun fire.

Van Ry was able to get through on the phone to his wife, who was visiting Colorado with their 9-year-old son and new baby girl.

“It took a long time. I finally got through and told my wife I was OK, not to worry, I’d be all right. The only thing she said was, ‘Why are you there? Why aren’t you in Saudi Arabia?’ ”

Van Ry and a friend had talked earlier in the day about making a run for the border, but the embassy had told them to stay put.

Talmadge Ledford was not a patient man, and the days of hiding in his apartment were taking their toll. He and another Raytheon engineer slept in their clothes in case they needed to make a fast getaway from the apartment, which was six miles south of Kuwait city. He was constantly pulling back the beige curtains to see what was happening. He scouted for the best places to hide--the two most likely being an attic crawl space and an enclosed fire escape.

Eight days after the invasion, the U.S. Embassy called and asked them to come there because their jobs were defense-related. So they made the perilous ride to the embassy, following a Palestinian co-worker who flashed his taillights when he spotted Iraqi troops, and joined 30 others who had taken refuge there.

He slept on the dining-room floor of the ambassador’s residence with four others on a makeshift bed of blankets and comforters. The food was plentiful and good, but in the morning he would awaken and find himself covered with ants. Ledford’s assigned chore was helping wash the dishes. The preoccupation for him and others was plotting what to do if the Iraqis stormed the embassy.

After women and children had been allowed to leave the country, Ledford became even more convinced that staying in the embassy would eventually lead to his capture.

“If we stayed there,” he reasoned, “we would become ‘human shields’ anyway, which was a fate no worse than if we got captured trying to escape. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

Three other men were of the same mind, and they set out toward the desert. They made it through one checkpoint before being turned back. Instead of returning to the embassy, they drove to Ledford’s apartment, where they plotted yet another escape attempt.

This time, lackadaisical Iraqi guards waved them through the first two checkpoints on the route to Saudi Arabia, and the bribe of a quart of gin was being handed to a guard at a third when a higher-ranking soldier approached, AK-47 submachine gun at the ready. Ledford knew from the soldier’s expression that the game was up.

“We had lost our freedom,” he said. “Even when we were hiding in Kuwait, we still had our freedom.”

William Van Ry’s first impression of an occupied Kuwait city was one of relief. He made the drive to the central business district on Aug. 4 with a Lebanese friend named Christian, who had bluffed his way past an Iraqi roadblock, telling the soldier he wanted to see if Kuwait city had become the new Beirut.

Everything in the business district, save for the looted Rolex watch shop, remained untouched. A trip to the supermarket the next day was uneventful as well. Van Ry spent $350 on meat and milk and canned food and juice. Van Ry tried to call home again but realized that his earlier call to his wife was probably his last; the international lines were gone.

The relative calm of the first few days of occupation, however, began to change. The Iraqis became more severe as they began to lose tanks and troops to the underground resistance. The sight of a fast-moving car made Iraqi soldiers scatter because they thought it was Kuwaitis with guns.

There were stories of rape and murder. Van Ry knew one to be true because it happened to friends of his, a German couple who lived down the street. On Aug. 9, an Iraqi soldier had broken down their door and “put a gun to the head of the man, tied him up and raped the woman. Made him watch. Then the guy made the woman fix tea for him. Drank the tea. She had a gold necklace with a cross on it. He pulled that off and put it on.”

Two days later, panic set in and virtually everyone in Van Ry’s building left, heading across the desert in hopes of making it to freedom. Van Ry had decided not to leave. He felt that people needed him. He was a five-year veteran of Kuwait, and trapped Americans kept coming to him for advice and information.

He began, on a diskette of his computer, compiling names, phone numbers, Social Security and passport numbers of Americans still there, including American women married to Kuwaitis. “I was getting calls all the time from people wanting to be added to the list,” he said. “They couldn’t get through to the embassy.”

The embassy, in fact, had initially destroyed its own list of residents, fearful of being overrun. At one point, Van Ry’s list contained the names of more than 200 people, which he delivered to the embassy whenever there was an update. He broke them down alphabetically, by area of town, whatever the embassy wanted. In gratitude, the embassy gave him the honorary post--no money, no perks, but the title--of consular officer.

At the same time, Kuwaiti women were gathering in a field each night between Van Ry’s building and the mosque, defying a curfew, yelling, “Free Kuwait!” At first, the Iraqis fired tracer bullets over the heads and then dummy tank rounds. In the days to come, the soldiers would march up and shoot the women. It was then that Van Ry knew how bad things were and how bad they were going to get.

Will Van Dorp, the 38-year-old English teacher, kept having the same nightmare. He was in a crowded hockey arena and someone would scream that there was a bomb. Always, Van Dorp was the last one down the fire escape.

In the two weeks since the Iraqi invasion, Van Dorp and his friend John Tom Gordon had already led a convoy of 200 cars on a nerve-jarring ride for the border that had been turned back. And he had watched as soldiers dug fortifications close to his apartment.

On Aug. 15, the BBC broadcast a news account that martial law authorities were telling Americans to go to the Kuwait International Hotel. The announcement did not sound like a demand. Instead, it had the tone of a first step toward evacuation.

Van Dorp and Gordon, both weary of hiding, decided to go to the hotel, where events took a turn for the worse. They feasted on a dinner of smoked salmon but weren’t allowed to leave the hotel the next day, or the one after that. On Aug. 18, Van Dorp and Gordon were ordered, along with other Americans, to surrender their passports. Then, in the early evening, they were loaded onto two military buses whose windows had been shot out.

It was the beginning of months as an Iraqi prisoner.

Of the four, only Paul Pawlowski had his family with him, and that made decisions all the harder. He and Ingrid had stared at each other on Aug. 21 and, try as they might, had not been able to decide about whether to join a caravan heading for the border. And what about the family dogs? What’s to become of them?

As the days turned into weeks, the mood of the family turned darker and tensions rose. In his Aug. 26 diary entry, Pawlowski wrote: “We are in jail, but without access to a lawyer--no calls out and no possibility of discussing, let alone activating, the option of bail. It’s a jail of our own making--house arrest.”

When they did make a decision to drive to the border, the opportunity had been lost because few people by then were getting across. Then came perhaps the most difficult decision, brought on by Saddam Hussein’s announcement that all women and children could leave Kuwait. To stay or go? To be together or split up, at least getting out those who could leave?

They talked for hours before deciding that staying in Kuwait just wouldn’t be any good for their daughter, Tess. Ingrid and Tess left on Sept. 9, and because they had a Cable News Network hookup in their villa, Pawlowski watched them land in Baltimore the following day.

“I felt abandoned--yet the other emotion was tremendous relief that they were getting out,” he said. Now he could go it alone. The family was gone, and the dogs had been taken in by Kuwaiti friends. The long wait had begun, with no clue about when it would be over.

Patterns developed, both for those in hiding and those being held by the Iraqis, little ways to help get through the days, then weeks, then months.

They all listened to the news broadcasts, the BBC, the Voice of America and, for the two in Kuwait city, Cable News Network and C-SPAN.

Ledford, who was eventually taken to a natural-gas plant in Iraq, sometimes let the broadcasts determine his mood for the day. If the news was of war, rather than negotiation, he was more apt to mouth off to the guards.

Each day, he walked for an hour on a one-kilometer track--a path just inside the chain-link fence surrounding the plant. The hostages would play Ping-Pong with an unhinged steel door for a table. And most ingenious of all, they would play golf after finding a club in a warehouse and devising a nine-hole course. Later, and inexplicably, they found 35 sets of golf clubs stowed in a building on the grounds.

“It was so therapeutic for me,” he said. “It helped me forget things for a while.”

Ledford’s golf apparel always included a white Virginia Tech baseball cap that his son had given him.

For Van Dorn, who was transported to a fertilizer factory after being taken briefly to four other places, the regimen was much the same--walking, reading and an afternoon swim at a pool half a mile down the road. Occasionally, there would be trips to the library of a nearby refinery. The cleaning woman helped him with his Arabic, and he spent a great deal of time talking to the guards.

“I wanted to make sure that they would have a very hard time putting a bullet through my head,” he said.

For a time, Pawlowski’s existence was a lonely one. He read a great deal and began emulating the comic Jonathan Winters, making up voices and characters that would talk to each other. He moved in with two British engineers at the end of September and his life improved dramatically, merely by having someone to talk to. And always, there was the television, with CNN and C-SPAN.

“I was able to observe the goings-on of American politics in a way I never had before in my life,” he said. “It was a little bit of a civics lesson.”

Van Ry moved to a safehouse only hours before the Iraqis searched his building. By mid-September, stories of the atrocities going on outside were circulating and, at one point, Van Ry saw the smoke as the Iraqis burned 24 houses and shot 25 men in an area where they suspected the resistance was at work. He said young boys were picked up and accused of being in the resistance, then shot to death as they were being released and racing for their parents.

One of Van Ry’s friends obtained the records of a Kuwait city cemetery. Burial after burial was for young men shot in the head. By then, Van Ry and his group had begun to help the Kuwaiti resistance in whatever small ways they could. When the phones were working, for example, they faxed maps of military positions and other data to the Defense Department.

By early October, though, Van Ry was seriously considering giving up to the Iraqis. Two months had passed and they were still there, and it seemed like no progress was being made to get them out. The economic sanctions didn’t seem to be working, given the ease with which food was obtained in Kuwait city. But in the end, Van Ry decided to stay put. And then one day, he heard his son’s voice.

The VOA had begun half an hour of messages to hostages and those in hiding from their families. One of its stars was 9-year-old Jordan, who chatted like a kid out of a Norman Rockwell tableau. He read his dad the goofy jokes on the oatmeal box.

The voice from home made him laugh and seared him at the same time.

“It really boosted your emotions and gave you strength, but at the same time it made you terribly, terribly depressed,” he said. “You’d initially feel so happy . . . but as soon as the program stopped you’d get so terribly depressed. You’d come to the realization of how far you were separated, not knowing even when you’d be able to see them again.”

The days drifted on. October became November. Ledford had by then been transferred to a new site. He had also been allowed to place a call to his wife, the first one since Clairanne had called the office on Aug. 2.

An Iraqi general had visited Van Dorp’s camp and judged the food inedible. Since then, the quality had improved and hostages from other camps had been brought over for a cookout.

Pawlowski had lost 20 pounds. And, just before Thanksgiving, Van Ry was a clandestine audio guest on ABC’s “Nightline,” which interviewed him live from a darkened apartment while Iraqi troops patrolled unknowingly nearby.

November became December. In Baghdad, various Americans were attempting to gain the release of hostages, with some success, when Hussein announced on Dec. 6 that all would be free to go from both Iraq and Kuwait. The news went out over the airways.

In Ledford’s camp, a friendly Iraqi guard raced over with the news. The soldier was crying with joy. Van Dorp heard the news when he was ordered to pack his bags. Pawlowski smoked two cigars and opened a bottle of whiskey after the radio report was confirmed with the embassy.

And Van Ry. He drove to his apartment for the first time in months, and his neighbors and friends started showing up with liquor--enough, it seemed, to fill the Persian Gulf. Case upon case: Heineken. Johnny Walker Black. Gordon’s gin.

Van Ry was not much of a drinking man, and he wasn’t then at that giddy moment when the hiding was over. That night, as the desert cool warmed to morning, he was thinking that it was not over. He would be leaving, but his Kuwaiti friends who had risked their own lives by giving him shelter and food would still be there.

Just that afternoon, he had stopped to say goodby to a Kuwaiti friend, a shopkeeper, whom he had not seen since shortly after the invasion. The man had refused to put up Saddam Hussein’s picture in his shop. So the Iraqi soldiers had slashed long gouges in his cheeks. They broke his arms and his legs. Then they cut off the first knuckle of each finger, one after the next, all 10.

Times staff writers Patt Morrison, William J. Eaton, Dave Lesher, Jennifer Toth and Sue Ellen Christian contributed to this story.