COLUMN ONE : Dhahran Adapts to Wartime : The hub of the Eastern Province owes its existence to oil. Now comes conflict to reshape its peaceful character.

Along the corniche, when the sky is blue and the Persian Gulf is as smooth as glass, it is as though nothing has changed. Life is as it always has been, abundant and peaceful and full of uncomplicated pleasures.

The beachside carnival at the foot of 28th Street is ablaze with lights, its miniature Ferris wheel turning lazily in the evening dusk. The call to prayer echoes from the minarets that rise like spikes out of the squat city skyline.

Across town, a Saudi enters a jewelry shop, briefly examines a diamond ring and says, “Yes, I’ll take it.” He counts out $50,000 in cash.

But, like so much of what one sees in the Arab world, these scenes of normalcy in Dhahran are an illusion. Life is normal in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province only in the sense that the government says everything is fine. Beneath the facade, the character of this one-time oil boom town is being shaped by a war that no one thought would happen. Nothing again will ever be as it was.

Though the carnival rides spin gaily, the amusement park is empty, save for a solitary custodian. The wide, spotless beach that seems to stretch all the way to Kuwait is virtually empty, as it usually is even in peacetime, and the sole figure who walks it appears as a white-robed apparition, off in the distance near the Gulf Meridien Hotel.

In the lobby of the hotel, an American boy wears a T-shirt that says on the front, “Scud Bait” and on the back, “This isn’t hell but you can see it from here.”

Dhahran and the surrounding area, including the port city of Dammam and the shopping district of Al Khubar, have a population exceeding 300,000, making it the kingdom’s sixth-most-populated region, after Riyadh, Jidda, Mecca, Medina and Taif.

Like most of Saudi Arabia’s other population centers, Dhahran and its sister cities sprang out of nothing in the span of two generations, the product of boundless oil wealth and the kingdom’s desire to dash pell-mell into the 21st Century.

Al Khubar was a sleepy fishing village in 1931 when the U.S. extended diplomatic recognition to Saudi Arabia, five years after the Soviet Union and Britain had granted it. Dhahran didn’t even exist. Then in 1938, Saudi Arabia made its first oil strike here and, by the 1950s, the region was booming. American oilmen poured in by the thousands, followed by a legion of Asian laborers.

Life, though, remained primitive, and for years the only decent restaurant in Al Khubar was on an old barge pulled in from Bahrain. There were no international hotels until 1973, when the Algosaibi opened, its marbled lobby dripping with chandeliers.

“When we got here in the ‘50s, about the only cars on the roads were taxis,” said Beverly Pepperdine, whose husband, George, is an oilman. “Nothing was air-conditioned except the houses. You’d go outside to hang up the laundry and the clothes would be dry by the time you reached the end of the line. There wasn’t anything in Khubar then except one muddy dirt street and a couple of shops.”

Dhahran’s growth received another boost in 1974, when Saudi Arabia drew up a 10-year military preparedness plan with the help of its American allies. The plan called for two protective shields in the shape of triangles. At the points of one of them were Riyadh, Al Kharf and, closest to Kuwait and Iraq, Dhahran. A huge air base took form here.

“No one envisioned Saudi Arabia fighting a war,” Sandra Mackey wrote in “Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom.” “The pivot of defense strategy was to adequately arm the Saudis so they could defend themselves long enough for their allies to arrive.”

Although Dhahran has suddenly become one of the world’s most famous datelines, it isn’t really a city at all. Dhahran consists of only the international airport and air base, a university, a hotel and Aramco--the Saudi Arabian American Oil Co.--all connected by a series of cloverleafs that lead into the kingdom’s network of super-modern freeways. When foreigners say Dhahran, they are usually referring to the Dhahran-Dammam-Al Khubar region.

The oil--and now the war--that brought so many foreigners to the Eastern Province has made Dhahran the most cosmopolitan of the Saudi population centers. Yet it never became a melting pot. The Third World workers, the Americans and Europeans and the Saudis all stay pretty much to themselves, the boundaries of their cultural differences too great to breach even in this shared moment of crisis.

Pakistani, Filipino and Thai workers trudge along the roadways to their jobs, gas masks over their shoulders, participants in a war they did not sign on for.

American soldiers and Saudi civilians chat cordially in small groups at shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and the Safeway market, as though trying to psych out each other’s culture. And slowly, like children at their first day of school, they are learning about each other.

“Their customs are pretty different,” said one American sergeant, “but, you know, I like the Saudis.”

For a people who long thought they could pay off their enemies and remain isolated from the turmoil in the Middle East, the Saudis in Dhahran, the city closest to the front lines, have adapted surprisingly well to their new wartime routine, which includes frequent nighttime Scud attacks, the growing fear of terrorism, security roadblocks that turn 10-minute trips into hourlong ordeals and the unsettling realization that the nightmare could go on for a long time.

To all this the Saudis appear stoic, if slightly benumbed by their rapid change of fortunes. They seem resigned to the fact that they must now pay the price for assuming a leadership role they never really wanted.

“Everyone misread the wimp factor,” a prominent Saudi educated in the United States said to an American visitor. “People used to think of us as wimps. They used to say the same thing about your President. They were wrong.”

Throughout the night and day, the roar of allied warplanes taking off from the air base rumbles through the city. The sight of the bomb-laden planes streaking off for Kuwait and Iraq is now so common that Saudis hardly give them notice. Before each mission, Saudi pilots kneel in prayer.

“Whatever Saddam Hussein says about a holy war, we are the ones who have been given a special message from God,” said Maj. Mohammed abu Amnah.

The streets of Al Khubar are quieter than usual, though the majority of shops remain open. Saudi police officers in traditional ghutra headdress cruise slowly along the corniche and up Pepsi-Cola Road, slumped in their seats so only their heads are visible above the steering wheel.

Signs tacked to several walls warn residents to watch for falling birds as a sign of chemicals from weapons in the air.

On the porches of some apartments, residents have established their own early-warning systems--hanging cages, each with a songbird inside.

“What do you hear? What’s the news?” everyone asks, as though all Americans have access to information on how the war is going and any bit of glad tidings would be welcome. The Americans usually shrug as a gesture of ignorance, and the inquirer turns back to his television and CNN.

“The uncertainty,” said one Saudi merchant, “I do not like uncertainty.”

A few hours after darkness settles over the two- and three-story white-washed buildings of Al Khubar, the streets empty. The Kentucky Fried Chicken and Baskin-Robbins shops close.

Along the corniche, a few Saudis gather at the shop that sells Med Mac hamburgers under a big red arch and at Baba Habba’s for late snacks. But by then, most everyone has gone home, and the streets of one of the world’s most famous cities are as quiet and empty as a Bedouin encampment.