The War In Review : The world holds its breath as the deadline passes; the President notifies allies that he’s going to attack; Iraqi targets are blitzed, and Scud missiles hit Israel; allied troops finally meet the enemy, and Iraq parades its POWs . . . : DEADLINE

Jangled Nerves and Oregano: In the days before the war, time passed uneasily.

By Washington’s newest measure of tension, known as the oregano scale, pizza orders after 10 p.m. more than doubled at the Pentagon.

In Jerusalem, the tension caused uncharacteristic calm. Israelis, among the world’s louder drivers, shushed one another on the streets. It was as if noise might invite doom. At one point, two motorists honked, and an elderly man admonished them: “Quiet! Not today.” At the same time, nervous humor flourished. “Something for the war?” asked the proprietor at an eatery. “Some sausage to go with the mustard gas?”

Closer to Iraq, the gallows humor took on a hollow quality. A Palestinian waiter at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, brought a room-service cheeseburger. His name was Khalid. He put his tray down on a table, proffered the bill and asked, “Are you American?”

“That’s right, from Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” Khalid said. “We’re afraid of you.” He smiled, retrieved the signed bill, walked to the door and turned. “Have a good day.”

In the Persian Gulf, the deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait came at 8 a.m. last Wednesday.

There was a long blast from a car horn in Bahrain. A vegetable dealer, it turned out, was making a delivery in his white Toyota pickup. The honk came from a car that was stuck behind him. The municipal clock ticked past the hour. A traffic cop in a vanilla uniform and a green cap looked up. He reset his watch.

Half a world away, at the White House, it was midnight Tuesday.

A bell tolled at a nearby church. A light rain began to fall. A single lamp glowed through the curtains at the office of National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

The office was empty.

So was the Oval Office. Midnight was the deadline, set by the United Nations, for Iraq to relinquish the country it had seized--the nation of Kuwait.

The moment came and went. George Bush was asleep.

THE FIRST DAY

A Flurry of Phone Calls: The next day, the American President, who had successfully sought U.N. approval to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, made his move. George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III put out a flurry of telephone calls to foreign leaders.

The calls went to a variety of countries, including Arab states that had joined the United States in opposition to Iraq. At one point, the international telephone tree grew so busy that some of the phone calls, even several from the White House, never got through.

Neither the President nor his secretary of state asked for further advice or approval. That had come in the weeks before. Now some of the telephone conversations were only a minute or two long. Baker’s message to several foreign ministers was, simply and in its entirety: “This is your notification call.”

Bush spoke longer to his counterparts, the chiefs of state.

At 3:30 p.m., he had President Turgut Ozal of Turkey on the line.

“Good luck,” Ozal said. “And pray.”

George Bush replied: “Cross your fingers.”

And then at 4:50 p.m. EST, 1:50 p.m. in Los Angeles, jets screamed north from the sands of Saudi Arabia: U.S. Air Force F-117 Stealth fighters, F-15E Strike Eagles, F-16 Falcons, F-111 fighter-bombers, F-4G Wild Weasels and U.S. Navy A-6 Intruder bombers.

War was on.

Like furies in the night, the planes loosed a terrible punishment.

The sky lit with Iraqi antiaircraft fire. Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, a reporter said, was “like the center of hell.”

For an eternity, it seemed, the bombing went on. The plan, one Pentagon official said, was to keep it up day after day--”around the clock for perhaps weeks.”

In Congress, many members backed the President--even those who had opposed immediate use of force to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait. “I’m not happy that we’re in a war,” said Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), a proponent of economic sanctions to starve the Iraqis out of the oil-rich nation they had seized. “But that debate is behind us now.

“It’s necessary for Congress and the American people to stand behind the President and the troops.”

Anti-war activists nonetheless launched a wave of militant and peaceful protests.

But the bombing went on--relentlessly.

THE SECOND DAY Hussein Fires Back: It seemed strange--there was so little Iraqi resistance. President Bush had not yet gone to bed on the second day of the war when it came.

President Saddam Hussein fired missiles into Israel.

It was a thunderous retaliation--Israel was America’s ally. But this was more than just a pay-back.

America’s Arab partners in the effort to free Kuwait were uneasy enough about lining up with the United States. Now, if Israel fired back, it would put the Jewish state and the Arab partners on the same side. And this might be too much for Arabs to endure. If Israel fired back, that might shatter the anti-Iraq alliance.

Explosion after explosion rocked Israel. Two blew apart buildings in Tel Aviv. Two others rattled the port city of Haifa. Others were reported in rural areas. Sides of structures crumbled. Walls fell on cars. The Iraqi missiles--Scuds, improved versions of Soviet-designed ground-to-ground rockets--could carry gas warheads.

Was this a chemical attack?

Israelis struggled into gas masks. They fled to sealed rooms--upstairs in their homes, if possible. It was a rule of thumb: Gas settles; so if it’s gas, go up.

But these were missiles with conventional warheads.

While they killed no one outright, the missiles injured 12 people. A 3-year-old girl and three elderly women suffocated in their gas masks. Still another person reportedly died of a heart attack.

Structural damage, Israeli officials said, was extensive, especially in Tel Aviv.

What would Israel do?

“We have said publicly and to the Americans that if we were attacked, we would react,” Defense Minister Moshe Arens said.

“We were attacked,” he declared. “We will react, certainly.”

Then came the hedge. When?

“You will, of course, not expect me to state the date.”

In Washington, President Bush was outraged. Israel Radio said the American President promised revenge on Israel’s behalf. Would this be enough to hold the Israelis in check?

Meanwhile, there was bad news from the air war.

A Navy lieutenant commander, Michael Scott Speicher, and his jet fighter disappeared in a bright burst.

Scott Speicher, as they called him, had flown off the carrier Saratoga on the first night of the war. His plane was hit by an Iraqi surface-to-air missile, the Pentagon said. And now, on the second day, word came back home to Jacksonville, Fla., that he was the first American missing in action.

Dead?

There did not appear to be much hope. But a neighbor, speaking for Scott Speicher’s wife, Joanne, told reporters: “She requests you to say MIA.”

Until, the neighbor added sadly, “it’s proven differently.”

THE THIRD DAY The Israelis Are Patient: It had been 12 hours since the Iraqi missile attack. So far, the Israelis had not retaliated.

At the White House, President Bush commended their restraint. The Iraqis had been able to attack, it turned out, because allied warplanes had failed to destroy some 30 Scud launchers. The Iraqis had moved them about, to keep them from being targeted.

To disable these mobile Scuds, Bush pledged that America and its allies would mount “the darndest search-and-destroy mission that’s ever been undertaken.”

There were more allied shortcomings. By now the air attacks against Iraq and Iraqis in occupied Kuwait had mounted to more than a sortie a minute. But for all that bombardment, it seemed that as few as 10 of Iraq’s 700 warplanes had been destroyed or disabled. Iraq had dispersed them and hidden many in hardened concrete bunkers.

Some might have been damaged in the bunkers, but it was impossible to tell.

And there was more grim news of casualties--both allied and Iraqi. By now, eight allied jet fighters had been shot down. Four were American. And seven Americans were missing. Several Marines had been injured in a dust-up on the ground near a Saudi village on the Kuwaiti border, none seriously.

In Baghdad, Information Minister Latif Jasim said allied bombs had killed numerous civilians, mostly elderly people and children. Jasim did not say how many, but the Iraqi News Agency said 23 Iraqis had been killed and 66 injured.

Sad as such tolls of dead and missing always are, if all these figures were to be believed, it seemed remarkable good fortune that no more had died on either side.

Israel still had not retaliated.

Indeed, the Israelis expected still more Iraqi missiles. After suffering through three air raid scares, their worst fears were realized. As Los Angeles finished dinner and went back to television to watch the war, another salvo of Scuds fell in Tel Aviv.

Although Israelis scrambled for gas masks, these were conventional warheads too.

At the time of launch, Baghdad Radio, monitored in Jerusalem, said: “This moment, we are launching 11 missiles at the enemy.” Three landed in the Tel Aviv area. A fourth was initially reported to have fallen in an empty area. If there were others, they seemed to have gone astray.

Again, no one was killed. Seventeen were injured.

THE FOURTH DAY Meeting the Enemy: Until now, it had been a war without human contact. That ended when U.S. and Kuwaiti forces raided gulf oil platforms, capturing 23 Iraqis who had been using the offshore installations to launch surface-to-air missiles against raiding allied bombers and fighter planes. Five Iraqis died.

Looking young and frightened, the prisoners huddled in a sandy pit ringed by barbed wire in northeast Saudi Arabia.

“The screws and racks are a thing of the past,” a Marine interrogator assured reporters. “You can get anybody to break and get them to say whatever you want to hear. But you get a better response if you treat them humanely. . . .”

On the battlefield, it was a different story.

“We’re out there to kill,” said Capt. Eric Salomson, an A-10 pilot who was bombarding Iraqi tanks. And indeed, today marked a lethal escalation in allied air tactics. Previously they had concentrated on Iraq’s air defenses, its command and communications network, and its nuclear and chemical facilities. Now it was time to target the troops.

B-52 bombers, famous for their “carpet bombing” in the Vietnam War, pounded Iraqi front lines. Other allied pilots, already averaging about 1,500 sorties a day over Iraq and occupied Kuwait, went after the Republican Guards--Hussein’s elite warriors being held in reserve.

More planes blasted Baghdad, disrupting telephone service and cutting off electricity and water.

The Pentagon boasted that it had already achieved air superiority by knocking out Iraq’s command-and-control posts and ground-to-air missiles, pinning fighter jets in their concrete shelters and pitting runways with bomb craters. No matter that few enemy jets were wrecked.

The day brought another surprise: Washington was airlifting two Patriot missile batteries to jittery Israel. The goals: Giving Israel a high-tech weapon to shoot down Iraqi missiles and discouraging it from possibly endangering the anti-Hussein coalition by retaliating against the provocative Scud attacks. The Patriots were declared operational later the same day, and in another first, the batteries were manned by Americans, breaking the longstanding Israeli tradition of relying only on its own citizens for its front-line defense.

Across the United States, peace rallies multiplied. By now, 1,800 Americans had been arrested in protests that evoked images of the 1960s. The conflict also sounded a reveille for Europe’s slumbering peace movement. Still, polls showed Americans overwhelmingly backed the war effort.

In Washington, worry grew about the fate of American airmen presumed captured. The State Department made its first wartime contact with the Iraqi Embassy, delivering a stern letter demanding decent treatment of prisoners of war.

Baghdad claimed to have shot down more than 100 aircraft, not the 10 that the allies counted. But then, Baghdad also said it “incinerated” Israel.

In truth, no one seemed to know how many allied POWs there might be.

They were about to get an answer.

THE FIFTH DAY Showtime for POWs: Somehow, it was not surprising. But that made it no less wrenching.

Hussein, who outraged the world last year by playing TV host to his foreign “guests,” was parading captured allied airmen through the streets of Baghdad and onto the airwaves.

Looking exhausted and subdued, seven alleged POWs, including three Americans, appeared on Iraqi television, answering their interviewer in stilted, halting voices.

“I think this war is crazy and should never have happened,” said one, identified as Marine Corps Chief Warrant Officer Guy L. Hunter Jr., 46, from Camp Pendleton.

“I think our leaders and our people have wrongly attacked the peaceful people of Iraq,” agreed another, Navy Lt. Jeffrey N. Zaun, 28, who also sent greetings to his anguished family.

“It doesn’t sound like Jeff,” protested Calvin Zaun, the Navy officer’s father, in Cherry Hill, N.J.

But the singsong voices had a familiar ring to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent 5 1/2 years as a POW in Vietnam: “The pattern is obvious: These men have been subjected to beatings and torture.”

Hussein himself went on radio for the first time since the war began. He tried to rally the beleaguered Iraqi people, assuring them that “the tyrant’s missiles and aircraft are being devastated.” He also called for Arabs to wage a holy war against the allies.

But where was Hussein? His Defense Ministry was destroyed. Was the tape recorded earlier?

No one knew.

Iraq sent another message devoid of ambiguity: a shower of Scud missiles aimed at Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, and an allied military base at Dhahran. It was Iraq’s biggest Scud attack to date.

More Patriot anti-missile missiles were up to the challenge. The allied command said nine of 10 Scuds were intercepted and destroyed, while the 10th fell harmlessly in the waters of the gulf. Nonetheless, the Iraqi barrage served as a nerve-jangling reminder that while Hussein’s forces may be down, they are far from out.

The allies also stepped up the air assault, sending their largest mission yet from Operation Desert Storm’s new northern base in Turkey. By the end of Week One, more than 8,000 allied sorties had been flown in the Gulf War. Other tallies: 16 allied warplanes lost, with one flier killed and 12 MIAs; 15 Iraqi planes lost.

And there was a another milestone: the first Purple Heart. It went to a Californian, Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Clerence D. Conner, 21, of Banning in Riverside County, who was wounded by shrapnel.

“Please don’t send me home,” he begged.

There seemed little chance that anyone would be going home soon.