SAN DIEGO AND THE PERSIAN GULF CRISIS : With Husband a Captive in Kuwait, Time Passes Slowly for Mother of 4

As others rejoice in the safe homecoming of American hostages from Iraq and Kuwait, Claudia Ledesma celebrates the holiday season stoically in San Diego, behind a tinsel veneer of good cheer.

Her husband of eight years remains in Kuwait, a captive in his own country.

They have not talked directly since their separation Sept. 7, when Ledesma and the couple’s four young boys--including twins who were born just days before--flew to the safety of her parents’ home.

She has heard indirectly from him four times--thrice, in communiques relayed second-hand by the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, and once last week, through a friend’s phone call from Baghdad.

Now that the embassy has been vacated, Ledesma can only hope to hear of her husband’s safety through friends. She holds no hope of direct contact from her husband. No telephone calls, no cables, no letters.

So as other families that were torn asunder by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2 are now reunited for the holidays, 27-year-old Claudia Ledesma and her four boys can only hope, and pray, and wonder.

It was a Dec. 2 message, relayed by U.S. embassy officials, that let Ledesma know her husband would not be trying to escape from Kuwait.

“Dear Claudia, I love you so much and I love the children. Take care of them. God bless America. I have decided to stay until this is over.”

The last she heard of her husband was word passed on by the friend calling from Baghdad last Monday. “The message was, ‘Don’t worry. I’m fine. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!’ ” Ledesma related.

She has resigned herself to not seeing her husband until peace comes to the Persian Gulf. “How could he leave? That is his country.”

Fearing for her husband’s safety, Ledesma does not want his identity released--nor, even, the specifics of his job in Kuwait before the invasion, except to say that he was involved with social work.

“He has helped many people in his job, and he feels a commitment to the country,” she said.

“Hopefully, he’s fine. I keep thinking positively, that everything is as it was when I was there. If I get depressed, and I think negative things, it’s worthless. I have to think positive. I have four children. I have to be for them. If they see me sad, it’s not good for them.”

She assumes this much: that her husband is safe at his family home in Kuwait, which is serving as a refuge, too, for his father, three brothers, a sister and his nephews and nieces.

She doesn’t believe he’s an insurgent fighter, a member of some underground militia group fighting to retake his homeland from the invaders. That’s not his style.

“He’s a very peaceful person. I know that he won’t do something to disturb his family’s safety. And he’s thinking about me and the children.” Presumably, she said, he and his family are lying low in the family home.

Ledesma says she has taken joy in the release of American and other foreign hostages, including Jack Hogan of Lakeside. When Ledesma flew out of Baghdad on Sept. 7, she met Roberta Hogan--and learned that Roberta’s husband and his roommate, Randall Warren--who hid out together in a fourth-floor apartment in Kuwait--were among those who had talked by phone to Ledesma and her husband while they, too, were biding their time there. Small world.

“She is now a very close friend,” Ledesma said of Roberta Hogan. “I feel very happy for them, and for all the people who returned. It was a different situation for them. It was not their country. But for my husband, it is his country. He had to remain.”

The older boys--7 and 5--are coping well despite the separation from their father, she said.

“It’s hard for them, but they’re happy here,” she said. “The school has been very supportive. But they still miss him. They talk about him all the time.

“I think they don’t realize what is going on out there. They don’t understand the danger he is in. Sometimes they get angry because he hasn’t come home to them yet. I tell them he has to stay there to care for his father.”

For the time being at least, the older boys--who speak English because they attended an American school in Kuwait--are enjoying the attention of doting grandparents, of going to movies, and the less-structured lifestyle.

“But they miss their friends and family in Kuwait,” she offered.

Ledesma’s memory of leaving her husband 3 months ago remains as clear as the desert sky.

Her final order to her young servant of three years was to the point, punctutated by the tears streaming down her face:

“I told Ela, ‘Don’t let my husband see anything that will remind him of me or the children. Get rid of my cosmetics, my clothes, the baby cribs, the bottles, the diapers, everything. Because I know that if he sees those things, he will be very sad.’

“Then I hugged her, and we cried. I told her, ‘Take care of him.’ And she was quiet.”

Next, she said goodby to her father-in-law, who gingerly kissed the couple’s four boys on the forehead. “Now you will go see your other grandfather,” he said.

Minutes later, in the parking lot of a burned-out Safeway grocery store, Claudia Ledesma gathered with 200 other women and children, about to leave their adopted home on an enemy’s passenger jet.

And then she said goodby to her husband.

He was the one insisting that she leave for the United States, and she knew it was the best thing to do for herself and the boys, including the twins who were born just 12 days earlier as gunfire pinged off buildings near the Kuwaiti City hospital.

But the knowledge of safety in America didn’t make it any easier for her to leave.

“He told me to take care of the children. And he said, ‘Remember, I love you, and my heart will always be with you.’

“I didn’t say anything. I was crying. He kissed all the boys on their foreheads, starting with the oldest one. Then we held hands. I remember that he wasn’t wearing any cologne. He’s crazy for perfume, but he stopped wearing cologne in protest to what was happening. So all I smelled that day was his soap. It was sweet.

“He kissed me on both cheeks,” she said. “In this kind of situation, a kiss is nothing, though. Your feelings come through your eyes.”

She boarded the bus, hot and sticky, and watched her husband drive off in a neighbor’s Mercedes-Benz. The bus drove in the opposite direction, to the Kuwaiti airport. Her parting snapshot memory of her husband is of him in the car waving to her, in the bus.

Four days later--after stops in Baghdad, Yemen, Frankfurt, Nova Scotia and Charleston, N.C.--Claudia Ledesma arrived back home to her parents in San Diego. They were accompanied at the airport by a mariachi band that as much as anything signaled the cultural shock of a disrupted life.

It was there, in San Diego, that the couple had met in 1981, at a private school both were attending to learn English: she, an 18-year-old, dark-haired Mexican student; he, a striking Kuwaiti 11 years her senior.

The couple married a year after they met, and spent two years living in San Diego before he took his bride to his homeland, in 1984.

“I knew a very different life lay ahead for me, and I felt I was ready,” Ledesma said. “But when I got there, I knew I wasn’t.”

The people. The traditions. The food. The wealth.

“I wouldn’t say they (Kuwaitis) were rich, rich, rich, rich, rich--but they’d buy gold by the kilo instead of as jewelry,” she said. “They just looked at it all differently.”

The couple moved into a spacious four-bedroom, four-bath, two-story house that featured a formal reception room, living room, den, dining room, television room and living quarters for their two servants. The home was luxuriously appointed with contemporary Chinese furnishings, looking smart against the clean white walls.

“He treated me like a queen,” she said of her husband. “He wanted all the best things for me.”

Indeed, she didn’t feel comfortable being spoiled, especially when servants would get her tea when she felt fully capable of getting it herself. But this was her husband’s lifestyle, and she would accommodate it.

“Everything we needed, we had, and soon I thought that was the normal way of living,” she recalled.

And so life went: socializing with other couples of mixed marriages, watching over the two young boys, and baking, her favorite hobby and one for which she’d shoo the servants out of the kitchen. In mid-July, her mother arrived from San Diego, to spend time with her daughter in the last days of her pregnancy. The sonogram already had telegraphed the arrival of twins.

“My sister called from San Diego in late July. She said, ‘You know, I never watch the news, but they say something is happening in Kuwait.’ I told her not to worry, that everything was normal. Everything was fine.”

The family went out for pepperoni pizza Wednesday evening, Aug. 1, and caught the news on the radio at 10:30 that night. “The announcer said the two countries (Kuwait and Iraq) had agreed in a friendly way to be brother countries, and would fix their differences,” Ledesma said.

But by 2 the next morning, the invasion was launched “and at 5 in the morning we were hearing the booms of guns,” she said.

“We hoped it would be over soon. We thought someone would help us--the United States or Egypt or Jordan--and that it would be over soon.”

Hardly. From that morning on, Claudia Ledesma became captive in her own home, leaving only once--to give birth to her twins on Aug. 26.

“Virtually everyone stayed home from Aug. 2 on, and volunteers would make the run to the market. The markets were still open, and they were giving food away for free to everyone. We all stocked up, on things like sacks of rice, flour, wheat and sugar.” They also got disposable diapers, baby formula, canned jam and bread.

It was stored in the huge, walk-in pantry that already was well stocked with food. “Kuwaitis like to eat a lot,” she said.

Within days of the invasion, the household had grown to 20 members of the family and two servants.

“We all thought about leaving, but by then we were told that men weren’t allowed to leave,” she said. “We thought about trying to escape through the desert, but my husband didn’t want me to be at risk because I was eight months pregnant.”

Claudia Ledesma and her house guests kept busy--playing the card game Uno, talking, baking, talking, doing housework, talking, and watching videotapes that her mother had brought from San Diego--”Gone With the Wind,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “Moonstruck” and assorted cartoons.

On Aug. 26, the babies were born--about a month premature. “My water broke at 4:30 in the morning. All that previous night there was a lot of machine gun shooting and bombs going off. I was nauseous and tense. We were lying in bed, just holding hands and staring at the ceiling.”

At 6:30 a.m., she and her husband piled into a Chevrolet Caprice driven by a neighbor, and sped to the hospital about 10 minutes away. They took a route that avoided the shooting.

“I asked the doctor--a female, from India--if it was safe to be there, or if I should go elsewhere. She said, ‘Oh, no, stay here.’ The place was dirty. There were no cleaning crews.”

She spent the next seven hours in labor--made harder by the sound of gunfire a few blocks away. Three hours after the babies were born, she went home.

“I was afraid to stay there,” she said. “I wanted to be home with my husband and mother.”

For a few days, she said, she forgot about the bombs.

“On Sept. 1 at midnight, everyone went outside, onto their rooftops, to pray and praise the emir and our government, and for peace, and for the Iraqis to leave. The Iraqis responded with gunfire. We all ran back inside for safety.”

By this point, the American Embassy was calling the house daily, checking on everyone’s safety and welfare.

“We had a guardian, who gave us an emergency number to call if we ran out of water or food, or if Iraqis came into our house--which they never did.”

One morning, while Ledesma and her mother ate breakfast, the guardian called, “asking us if we were interested in leaving. He said the Americans were setting up an evacuation of women and children. “I wanted to leave, for sake of the children, but I didn’t want to leave my husband.”

Two flights were scheduled--Sept. 5 and Sept. 7. She chose the latter, so she could eke out two more days with her husband.

The eve of her departure was fitful. “I didn’t sleep at all. I was thinking about leaving, and of how my (Kuwaiti) sister-in-law, who had children, too, couldn’t leave like me.

“I didn’t eat anything for dinner that night. My stomach was too tight. Others had pizza. My husband, he was so sad, went to the neighbor’s house for a time. He didn’t want to see me or the babies. I bathed the children. My husband came back, but we didn’t really talk. It was very hard. I was pale. I cried all night. I never got out of my pajamas that day or night.”

The next morning, she dressed and numbly said her goodbys, her eyes swollen and red from tears. At 8:45 that Saturday morning, the neighbor drove up in his Mercedes. Claudia Ledesma, her mother and the four boys piled in, and the neighbor drove. Her husband and another friend followed in a different car.

“It was so sad, driving through the streets filled with Iraqi soldiers. They checked our IDs twice, and looked in the trunks. They were OK to us--not kind, but not mean.

“My only thought when I saw them was, ‘This is not your country! You have to go back! This is not your land, this is not your sky! You stole it!’ That’s what I was thinking.”

First they went to the Safeway parking lot, where she and her husband touched, and looked at each other. Then they crowded onto the buses for the final drive to the airport, where an Iraqi passenger jet was waiting. Still, they sat at the airport for another nine hours--waiting, they were told, for five more persons who never did show up.

Finally, the plane took off for the 45-minute trip to Baghdad. After a three-hour layover at the airport terminal there--during which time, she said, her baby strollers mysteriously disappeared from the plane--she, her four sons and her mother were boarded again, for the trip to Yemen.

“They gave us a piece of bread and a glass of 7-Up,” she said. “And a dried piece of beef.”

Today, Claudia Ledesma lives with her parents in Chula Vista. They are Mexican citizens with U.S. residency permits who own a furniture factory in nearby Tijuana. Claudia herself is a Mexican citizen; her passport is stamped “Refugee.”

“I never thought,” she said, “that a day would come when I would be marked as a refugee.

“I think of my husband constantly, wondering when I will get to talk to him, see him, smell his sweetness.

“I just wait.”

MONDAY: Speaking safely at the San Diego home of his wife’s parents, a Kuwaiti national tells of death and torture in his homeland at the hands of Iraqi soldiers.