O.C. Home Front Sees Peace Hopes Ebb

They were riveted to television sets and radios in homes and in shopping malls, in businesses and on campuses from La Habra to Laguna Hills, hoping against hope for news of peace.

Many had clung to Wednesday’s U.S.-Iraq talks in Geneva as the last, best chance for a solution to the 5 1/2-month-old Persian Gulf crisis. Instead they came away anxious, frightened for loved ones now girding for war in the sands of Saudi Arabia, or fearful that they, too, might soon be drafted.

“We are grasping for straws here,” said Kathy Collier, whose 25-year-old son, Darrin, serves with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in Saudi Arabia.

For Collier, who heads an Anaheim-based support group for spouses and relatives of soldiers now deployed in the Middle East, news of the stalemate in talks between U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz has very nearly doused her last glimmer of hope that bloodshed could be averted.

“We were looking at this meeting to bring us a hint of something,” she said. “Now, we must hang in the balance” until the United Nations’ Jan. 15 deadline for withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. “I don’t know when we’ve ever been in a mess like this. . . . It’s discouraging that (Iraqi President Saddam) Hussein just doesn’t want to hear the voices of the nations gathered there.”

“I have a real angry feeling,” said group member Jeannie Baldwin, whose husband is part of a Marine unit aboard the amphibious assault ship Okinawa. “I wonder who that I know will not be coming home.”

In Orange, Bishop Norman McFarland celebrated a midday Mass and prayer vigil for peace Wednesday, only moments after hearing reports that the Geneva talks produced nothing.

“We are at a very, very critical moment in our nation’s history and the history of the world,” Bishop McFarland told 300 worshipers.

“No one knows, really, where the events of these days are ultimately leading. I don’t think President Bush knows, or Saddam Hussein, or anyone else,” said McFarland at Holy Family Cathedral, where the 24-hour vigil for peace began at 8 a.m. “That is why we are here today: to ask God to bring about the peace that only he can give--a peaceful resolution to the crisis in the Middle East.”

After watching the three back-to-back press conferences in Geneva and Washington, Karen Baker is now more fearful than ever for the safety of her husband, Marine Staff Sgt. Jessie Baker, who is deployed in the Persian Gulf.

Failure of the talks to achieve a breakthrough “was a surprise to me,” said the president of El Toro Marine Elementary School’s PTA, who hasn’t seen her husband in 17 months. “I don’t know if I’m naive or what, but I really held on to this hope. . . . She added:

“I’m just praying and that’s all that is keeping me going. My kids pray: ‘Please don’t let daddy go to war; please protect him.’ ”

Yet Baker believes that President Bush has done his best to seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

“I kept thinking through the whole (press) conference . . . that he has really gone to the mat and has done everything he can. I really, honestly think he’s given his best shot. I wonder if, like he said, Saddam Hussein really does know what’s going on?”

A grim-faced veteran of World War II said he, too, clung to the talks as a path to peace.

“I keep thinking that we’ll avoid going to war somehow, because war is so stupid. But it doesn’t look like it right now,” said the retired chemical engineer from Irvine who declined to give his name.

He expressed doubts that the lives of U.S. soldiers are worth losing “just to put a bunch of Arab sheiks back in power.”

But like many others interviewed across Orange County on Wednesday, he wanted no half-hearted measures if there is to be war. He even suggested removing Hussein from power for good.

“I hope they go all the way to Iraq, not just stop at the Kuwait border,” said the former Air Force sergeant who served in the European theater during World War II. “If we don’t, nothing will have been solved except recovering a beat-up country.”

At Leisure World in Laguna Hills, reactions ranged from “get it over with” to pleas for another round of negotiations between Baker and Aziz.

“We’re wasting time dealing with this madman,” said an exasperated June Adsit, 68, who has nephews stationed in the Middle East. “This is deja vu for us. We have to go forward with what the President wants to do and get it over with.”

But retired professor Mary Callicot, a former superintendent of schools in El Segundo, thinks Baker and Aziz should go back to the table and negotiate.

“Let them go back . . . and see if they can settle this without war,” she said. “I don’t even want to think about the destruction that a war would bring.”

Many agreed that more talks are needed.

“Six days is a lot of time,” said a disappointed Neil Carter, a 35-year-old salesman from Huntington Beach who had hoped for more from Wednesday’s meeting in Geneva. He disagreed with the U.S. decision to reject a Jan. 12 meeting with Hussein in Baghdad.

“I’d take a shot at it,” Carter said of the Iraqi proposal. “You still would have three more days before the deadline. . . . Going to war is taking a big step. You’re going to kill a lot of people. And I don’t want to see anyone get hurt.”

La Habra hairstylist Moses Juaraz also criticized the President. “I think they’re both hard-headed,” he said of Bush and Hussein.

South Coast Plaza security guard Jeff Ware, a combat communications specialist in the Army reserves who could be called up if war breaks out, wondered why the same persistence used to win 12 U.N. resolutions against Iraq could not be used on the Arab country itself.

“We showed exceptional diplomatic skills in the bargaining that allowed the United Nations to pass the resolutions they did,” said the 21-year-old Cal State Long Beach political science major. “If we put all our efforts into this, we can solve this too.”

At UC Irvine, where most students were too young to recall the Vietnam War, anxiety was coupled with fear.

“I think it’s awful that we have to settle it like this, that it has to come to this,” said freshman Heidi Chernov, 18, of Irvine. “I’m kind of worried that they will start drafting because my brother is 20 and he’s healthy.”

“We’re all scared about the draft,” said a discouraged Philip Koshy, 22, a senior in biological sciences. “I really thought they would continue to negotiate, but they left the talks without any future plans.”

Added Sanjiv Ghanshani, a 23-year-old UCI graduate: “I think the U.S. Administration is being very unyielding. They’re not willing to compromise.”

Ati Sohaie knows better than most of her fellow students what is at stake. The 18-year-old UCI freshman still has relatives in her native Iran, a country that suffered tremendous human and economic losses after an eight-year war of attrition with Iraq that ended in 1986.

“Everybody thinks that America can just go in there and beat them,” she said of the Iraqis. “That’s not true. Iraq is very strong too.”

Senior Joe Boeke, an Army veteran and now a political science and economics major, is worried about his Army and Navy pals in the Persian Gulf.

“I know that they know how to do their jobs and what they were getting into when they went over there,” said the 25-year-old senior. “But I don’t want to see any of them die.”

On one high school campus, students were fearful and opinionated about the prospect of war.

“Killing people for money is not right,” said Costa Mesa High School student Gary Rashed. “Kuwait is a dictatorship, and if we are going to do this, we should at least demand (that) a democratic system be instituted,” the 17-year-old junior said. “In the end, this is a war for the people in power, not for the common man.”

Senior Jermaine Jackson agreed. “A lot of this in the Middle East has been going on since biblical days, and who is to say which side is right? . . . I don’t think we’ve given the U.N. sanctions enough time to work.”

Of greater concern to Jackson, though, is the fact that blacks make up a disproportionate percentage of soldiers now in the Persian Gulf.

“I don’t think that’s right. Bush should send his own children instead,” said the 18-year-old senior, who is black.

But junior Melissa McKay said U.S. power and prestige is on the line.

“I think we should (go to war). We can’t look like a weakling in this thing. The (United States) has the power to stop” Saddam Hussein, she said. “If we don’t do it now, we’ll have to do it sometime in the future. And even more people are going to die.”

While 16-year-old Edison Leung advocates giving U.N. sanctions more time to work, senior Patrick Quinn said there is no time left for Kuwait.

“In a year, there would be nothing left” of Kuwait, Quinn said. “And would the support still be there from the Arab countries and others?”

Yorba Linda building contractor Charles Palmer, 40, who served aboard an aircraft carrier in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970, also saw war as inevitable, adding that it’s time to “quit talking and just go take care of business. . . .

“I just hope that the Congress doesn’t try to tie Bush’s hands like they did in Vietnam,” he said.

“Waiting is the tough part,” said a 19-year-old newly enlisted Marine based at Twentynine Palms, who wouldn’t give his name, while window-shopping in Costa Mesa on Wednesday.

The prospect of war hit home two weeks ago, when he learned he would be trained as a field operator. “The radio man--they’re the ones that usually get it first,” he said.

Had he thought the United States would actually go to war when he enlisted about five months ago, he might have reconsidered. “I would have thought about it harder. Real, real, hard.”

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Anita Cal, Henry Chu, Tammerlin Drummond and Davan Maharaj, and staff correspondents Jon Nalick, John Penner and Shannon Sands.