San Diegans Settle In for an Emotional Ride : War: A roller coaster of fear and euphoria was evident as events in the Mideast progressed.

Catching their breath after the initial shock, and then stunned again, San Diegans on Thursday braced for the roller coaster of fears and euphoria that accompany war.

San Diego’s Jewish community tensed with the news that Israel had been attacked with rockets.

Local families with ties to Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were anguished with worry for their loved ones in the Mideast.

Navy families spoke of their relief that the mission was finally--and seemingly effectively--under way.

Marine families confronted the assumption that, with the war begun, 21,000 Marines based at Camp Pendleton are poised for their role in it.

War veterans gathered at meeting halls in Escondido and Vista to watch TV, mostly applauding the war’s initial turn of events, while anti-war activists protested in front of the Federal Building in downtown San Diego late in the day.

Authorities said the traffic of illegal aliens across the border at San Ysidro dropped significantly on the first night of the war, and arrests were down as well. There was no clear explanation Thursday, but one Tijuana man said there was fear among migrants that U.S. Border Patrol officials on the alert for terrorism might shoot at them.

In many corners of the county, tensions were high.

At Camp Pendleton, guards at entry gates began wearing combat garb--including helmets--and loaded M-16 rifles, and virtually cut the base off from outsiders.

Several county courthouse offices fronting Union Street were evacuated for an hour Thursday morning after a 55-gallon drum was unexplicably deposited on the sidewalk. It was filled with water.

While Don Stillwell, 60, knelt in front of the downtown San Diego Federal Courthouse, saying he was fasting and praying for peace, Robert Kocis, 26, who was at the courthouse to deliver legal papers for attorneys, displayed his sign: “I’m Protesting Ignorant Protestors.”

At noon, a man waved a huge American flag on the Clairemont Drive overpass of Interstate 5.

On a street corner near where westbound California 94 empties into downtown, a man has been standing most weekday afternoons with this cardboard sign: “Hungry. Will Work for Food or $$.” About noon Wednesday, the sign also said, “Pray for Peace.” On Thursday, the sign had been amended to say “Pray for Victory.”

The changing attitudes were played out in homes as well.

“Wednesday morning (before the outbreak), I was sick with anxiety, because we all knew something was going to happen, but we didn’t know when and we didn’t want to feel like that, on edge, for a month,” said Kaye Hunter, an ombudsman for men and women like herself whose spouses are on the Acadia, a destroyer tender now stationed in the Persian Gulf.

“Then, Wednesday evening, we were in shock that it was really happening, and there was an adrenaline surge.

“By Wednesday night, when I finally went to bed, I was emotionally drained.

“And today (midday Thursday), I think we’re all feeling better. We’re all feeling fairly up.”

Kaye’s son John, 13, was so disturbed about the outbreak of war that she allowed him to stay home from school Thursday. John was home alone watching CNN in the living room when it was announced that Iraq had bombed Israel.

Kay said there is growing empathy for the families of Marines--21,000 of them from Camp Pendleton who are now posted in Saudi Arabia.

“Now we’re all waiting for the land assault. The ship sailors, well, we’re doing that part now. But the Marine families still have the apprehension of the land attack, when it will begin, how bad it will be.

“It’s like being on a roller coaster,” she said. “We got over a bad part, and it looks good for now, but there may still be a dark tunnel to go through after the next curve.”

Marine Corps Maj. Alyce Smith, the director of family services at Camp Pendleton, said her staff of therapists and counselors had taken 175 phone calls since Wednesday afternoon.

“Right now, the main subject of the calls is ‘Where is he, how is he,’ ” Smith said.

But, although they are worried, she said, there is also a sense of relief because of the early successes of the war.

“They realize there’s a lot of steel being put in the desert,” Smith said.

Some Marines became celebrities of sorts, talking to well-wishing passers-by while strolling along the Oceanside Pier.

“It’s like this everywhere,” said PFC Scott Shinnick, 19, a Marine who arrived in San Diego on Wednesday to begin Military Occupation School at Camp Pendleton.

Shinnick and his four friends were calm, even though they might be sent to the Persian Gulf in the next two months.

“When we heard it on the radio yesterday, we got goose bumps,” Shinnick said. “I called home to my family, and they all said, ‘Don’t say goodby, just see you later.’ ”

The debate along the bar in the J. B. Clark American Legion Post 149 in Escondido ebbed and flowed, loud and soft, dove and hawk, usually ending in one of the combatants ordering another round of drinks.

Dick Wallace, the bartender and arbiter of the military debate, has his own views, which he keeps to himself; he simply nodded emphatically at every opinion he heard Thursday--while serving up another round.

“Honestly, I’ve sold more flags than I have drinks today,” Wallace said.

While many San Diegans worried for American troops half a world away--nearly 1 in 8 of the U.S. troops in the gulf region were deployed from San Diego--others worried for their families there.

Sabah Toma, 37, a native of Baghdad who came to San Diego in 1977, said he was “worried sick” over the fate of his mother and father, four sisters and a brother, all living in Baghdad.

He tried to call throughout the night, he said, to no avail. The line was “busy, busy, busy,” and he wonders if they’re still alive.

“I’m so confused,” Toma said. “I only hope my parents are safe, that everyone I love is safe. . . . It’s really scary, the city where my parents live being bombarded.

“I hope this thing is over with soon, and every nationality is safe--American, British, everybody. I just don’t believe in war. I don’t like to see anybody die for any reason. I believe in peace.”

“Am I scared? God, yes, I am. Because I don’t know if I’ll ever see my parents again. I’m even more scared that this thing will go on and on and on and on. There’s absolutely no winner in a war. Everyone loses, just some more than others.”

Others recoiled at the attack on Israel.

“Right now, I feel a terrible fear,” said Carol Davis of San Carlos, whose son-in-law’s family lives in Tel Aviv and Haifa. “I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I want to see Israel defend itself, but I hate to see Israel dragged into the war.”

Beth Karl, 41, a paralegal who took a TV set with a 3 1/2-inch screen to her office in Vista on Thursday to monitor the day’s events, said, “He (Hussein) has taken a neutral party and put them in the middle of this.”

“It just makes me want to get him more,” she said.

For students in junior ROTC units at county high schools, the onset of war brought many a special sense of responsibility and pride.

“A lot of people have come up to me today and said how proud they would be to wear our uniform today,” said Chaquita Monk, a member of the junior Naval ROTC class at Point Loma High School. The 141 members of the Point Loma unit wear their Navy uniforms to class every Thursday.

Brandy Anderson added, “I’m proud to be walking across campus with my uniform because it means we are supporting the troops and we command a lot of respect.

The Point Loma students expressed disagreement with their peers who organized a brief campus rally Thursday morning against U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

“Everyone says they are for peace, but we’re already fighting,” Jamison Price said. “Now it’s time to give our love and support to all the fighting people over there.”

The Latino community in San Diego rallied behind U.S. forces Thursday, but some also complained about what they said is the disproportionate number of minorities, mostly Latinos and blacks, among the ground forces, who would be responsible for dislodging the entrenched Iraqi defenders.

“The President certainly did everything he could to avert this war,” said Daniel Munoz, publisher of La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper in San Diego.

In Tijuana, separated by a line in the semi-desert from San Diego, the war was a prime topic of concern Thursday, as its anticipation had been all week.

While life basically continued at its usual pace, many radios and television sets were tuned to continuous coverage of the confrontation. Many residents were preoccupied about the fate of relatives and friends serving in the U.S. armed forces.

“War Breaks Out,” read the huge headline in the daily El Sol de Tijuana, while La Voz de la Frontera declared, “Baghdad in Flames.”

At the border, many merchants complained that the expectation of hostilities and the subsequent outbreak of war have combined this week to reduce cross-border travel--the area’s economic lifeline.

“In times like these, people prefer to buy food and necessities rather than superfluous things,” Fidel Zuniga Orozco said Thursday morning as he stood, alone, amid piles of woolen blankets and curios that he hawks to tourists.

Indeed, U.S. authorities say the huge volume of northbound border traffic has been sliced in recent days by almost a third, to about 7,000 vehicles a day at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the world’s busiest international crossing. A benefit for motorists, authorities said, was a reduction in the gnawing border delays, to perhaps 15 to 30 minutes during the peak morning rush hour Thursday, authorities said.

Underlying the travel drop-off was a prevalent sense of binational uncertainty: U.S. nationals apparently felt uneasy about leaving their country during a time of open hostilities, and many Mexican citizens were seemingly dissuaded by the many war-related rumors that have swept through the border city.

There have been persistent reports that U.S. authorities would shut down border crossings--an option that officials have consistently ruled out. The possibility of terrorist infiltration via the border has resulted in enhanced security tactics, but the new measures did not seem particularly noticeable Thursday. (Authorities declined to detail their operations.)

On Wednesday evening, the clandestine traffic across the border was lighter than usual, and some expressed hesitancy about making the trip at a time when U.S. border agents were on a higher state of alert.

“The Americans shoot Mexicans anyway; imagine what it would be like during a war,” said Jose Saldivar, 25, a one-time undocumented worker in Orange County who now works in Tijuana. “I wouldn’t try to cross over now.”

Border Patrol agents based in San Diego arrested about 1,050 undocumented immigrants Thursday, a decline of about 25% contrasted with the 1,400-arrest-per day average for the first 15 days of January.

For many airline passengers at Lindbergh Field on Thursday, the war and its attendant threat of terrorism seemed to be a rather fleeting concern. As Steve Hampton, a San Diegan traveling to Paris via New York, put it: “It’s something in the back of your mind. But it doesn’t really worry me. If I were flying to the Middle East, it might be different.”

Longer check-in lines inside the terminals, the result of a ban on curbside check-ins as a security precaution, produced some grumbling from passengers and skycaps alike--the former simply because of the delays and hassles, the latter because of a severe drop in tips.

But many passengers seemed to adopt Hampton’s casual attitude about the possibility of terrorism. Of about a dozen passengers interviewed, most said they had made their plans weeks or months ago and had not really worried about trying to avoid traveling on or near the United Nations Jan. 15 deadline for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait.

One exception was San Diegan Mary Rinehart, who was flying to London. As she packed her bags Wednesday night, she recalled, she half-jokingly said to herself, “Great time to plan a trip, Mary--the day a war begins!”

Local travel agencies said that relatively few customers had canceled trips because of the war or even expressed reservations about traveling when planning their trips in recent weeks. A spokesman for Rainbow International Travel in Del Mar said there were two cancellations Thursday for a group cruise to Europe in March, and agent Donna Hollywood of Ambassador Travel said a woman planning a trip to Rome next month canceled several days ago.