Hoping, Praying, Waiting for a Husband Left Behind : Gulf crisis: Claudia Ledesma can only wonder if he is safe in his Kuwaiti homeland. She fled with their 4 sons.

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 since their separation Sept. 7, when Ledesma and the couple’s four young boys--including newborn twins--flew to the safety of her parents’ home.

She has heard indirectly from him four times--in communications relayed 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--no telephone calls, no cables, no letters.

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

A Dec. 2 message, relayed by U.S. Embassy officials, let Ledesma know that her husband would not try 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 said.

She has resigned herself to being separated from her husband until peace comes to the Persian Gulf. “How could he leave? That is his country.”

Fearing for his safety, Ledesma does not want his identity made public--nor even the specifics of his job in Kuwait before the invasion, except that he was involved in social work.

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

She assumes this much: that he 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 doubts he is an insurgent, a member of some underground militia group fighting to retake his homeland from the invaders. That is not his style, she said.

“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.

Their older sons, 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.”

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

Her final order to her young servant was to the point, punctuated by 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.’ ”

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, Ledesma gathered with 200 other women and children, about to leave their adopted home on an Iraqi 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 bullets pinged off buildings near the Kuwaiti city hospital.

But knowing that it was safer 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.’ ”

She boarded the bus, hot and sticky, and watched her husband drive off in a neighbor’s Mercedes-Benz. The bus headed for the Kuwaiti airport.

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

Ledesma and her husband had met in San Diego 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 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.”

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 on 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 a.m., 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, Ledesma became captive in her own home, leaving only once--to give birth to her twins Aug. 26.

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

She and her house guests kept busy--playing cards, 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.

Early on the morning of Aug. 26, she went into labor--a month sooner than expected.

At 6:30 a.m., she and her husband piled into a Chevrolet Caprice driven by a neighbor and sped to the hospital 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.”

Seven hours later, her twins were born, and three hours after that, 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.

One morning while Ledesma and her mother ate breakfast, they received a call from a guardian assigned to them by the American Embassy “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 the 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.

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.”

The next morning she dressed and numbly said her goodbys. At 8:45 that Saturday morning, Ledesma, her mother and the four boys piled in a neighbor’s Mercedes and headed for the airport. Her husband and another friend followed in a second car.

First they went to the Safeway parking lot, where they crowded onto the buses for the final drive to the airport. After a nine-hour delay, 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 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, 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. Ledesma 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.”