Documentary : Another Week of War: A Story Told in Many Languages : A U.S. soldier cringes at the death he helps rain down on his enemy; Kuwaiti officials look to postwar details, and a Bangladeshi entrepreneur sells sandbags in Saudi Arabia.

MONDAY, JAN. 28

The Super Bowl starts at 2:15 a.m. local time. Pretzels in one hand and non-alcoholic beers in the other, Tech. Sgt. James Lee and Staff Sgt. Doug Kline sit in their bulky chemical suits, gas masks close at hand, watching the Giants and Bills do battle via satellite TV.

With 30 comrades in arms from the 1st Tactical Fighter Wing, Lee and Kline watch the game in a munitions bunker, sitting on makeshift plywood benches, not far from several stacks of missile cases.

Lee, normally a Chicago Bears fan, is rooting for the Bills. Why? “Because I hear Saddam’s a Giants fan.”

TUESDAY, JAN. 29

Artillery duels on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. The Leathernecks of the 2nd Marine Division return Iraqi fire by loading up their 155-millimeter howitzer and blasting the enemy’s positions with white phosphorous incendiary rounds. Those rounds are followed by salvos of shells containing “bouncing Betty” anti-personnel grenades that hit the ground, hop into the air and explode at about waist level. The Marines call them “gut ripper.”

“Jesus God,” mutters Cpl. Lee Welverton, 22, of Enterprise, Ala., as the rounds impact in an explosion of orange flames. “Jesus God, have pity on their souls.”

He adds: “You want to damage the enemy, you want to kill him and destroy his might. But you can’t help but sometimes remember those are human beings under the firestorm. Damn, I hate that man Saddam for leading his country to death.”

The sticker in the back window of Sobhy Masaud Abu Haila’s green Mercedes-Benz is a little touch of Americana on the border between Iraq and Jordan. “University of Southern California,” it advertises in large white letters.

“It was there when I bought the car from an old Kuwaiti sheik,” says Haila, 56, a Palestinian carwash owner who had lived in Kuwait for 35 years until the war forced him to tear up his life.

“But my son, Ahmad, did go to school in Los Angeles,” the refugee adds as he reties the bundles containing his worldly possessions onto the car roof. “He was there six years. Don’t remember the name of the school, but he got a degree in civil engineering there. He’s still back in Kuwait. He wouldn’t leave with us. Says he’s waiting for the war to end.”

There’s no question where Haila’s sympathies lie in this conflict. For half an hour he rails against President Bush and praises the perseverance and righteousness of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. But he’s troubled, nonetheless.

“As people, the Americans are good. They are respected people, kind people. One-to-one, good friends. But the government is bad. It is against us, against the Arabs, and with the Jewish state. Your government has declared war on the Arabs, and now, well, now it is so hard for us to be friends.”

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 30

Most of the war-zone stories about mail have described it as a huge morale booster for the troops. But aboard the carrier Roosevelt, the Rev. (Capt.) Ivan Fuller knows the other side--wives and girlfriends who wait for the ship to sail and then send their “dear John” goodbys.

“It is an undue cruelty, especially at a time like this,” he says. “For a lot of these men, their families are their lives. And then they get a letter from their wife, and she says, ‘John and I have decided that we love each other more than we love you.’ Or: ‘I have had an affair. I don’t love you but perhaps we should stay together for the sake of the children.’

” . . . I was up here till midnight, talking with guys who should be clicking up their heels at mail call.”

At a large allied support base in Saudi Arabia, Buford, the command center chicken, has become the early-warning system for a possible Iraqi chemical attack. The chicken sits in his cage beside a gas monitoring machine.

The machine is meant to sound an alarm when chemicals are present in the air. Buford is the backup.

Gas will kill birds before it kills human beings--that’s why coal miners take canaries underground as a warning signal. So, says Col. Bill Van Meter, 48, of Holyoke, Mass., Buford is “very important. As long as he ‘talks,’ we’re in good shape.”

A controversy erupts in Tel Aviv over the distribution of 5,000 special gas masks to bearded Orthodox men in the religious suburb of Bnei Barak. The masks feature air pumps to make them more efficient--an important feature for the men whose facial hair prevents a tight fit with normal versions. The problem is that children, asthmatics and people with heart disease also need the special gas masks, and thousands have not received them yet. Furious parents and asthma sufferers complain loudly to the media, and embarrassed spokesmen for Israel’s religious parties agree that sick people should certainly have priority over bearded men. Asked why the men did not simply shave their beards, one says it’s not just a matter of religious custom. Beards, he says, “are a way of life.”

Outside the Afghani trinket shop across from the Hussein mosque in downtown Amman, women with gray cloaks and scarves covering their hair walk among the Jordanian soldiers in their black or red berets and olive-drab, British-style military sweaters. The soldiers give Afghani’s window display a quick glance, but the women linger.

Many finally step inside to buy a button-portrait of Saddam Hussein, or plastic key chains with the likeness of the Iraqi president on one side and a depiction of a Scud missile on the other.

“Souvenir?” one woman is asked. “For my mother,” she replies.

Around Cizre, Turkey, a strategic zone guarding the only real gap in the mountains along the border with Iraq, Turkish military camps are strung out along highland hills bereft of vegetation. Volcanic boulders help conceal tanks, artillery, trucks, anti-aircraft batteries and the small brown camouflage tents of the soldiers themselves.

Many of the hills are draped in heavy freezing fog, and snow mixes with the thick mud churned up by the heavy military traffic. Swathed in their green waterproof capes, the soldiers on this northern front seem more suited to scenes from the First World War than the high-tech videos of air and missile strikes in the Arabian desert.

THURSDAY, JAN. 31

The Kuwaiti Ministry of Information slips forms for press accreditation under every journalist’s door at the Dhahran International Hotel. The gesture might be a bit premature--Kuwait remains occupied by Saddam Hussein’s troops. But the journalists nevertheless fill the papers out, just as anxious to get this conflict over with as are the soldiers.

He has not admitted that he lied, exactly, but Rafi Joohari, the Iraqi Jew who claimed on Israeli Television the other day that he had gone to school with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, says he thinks it may have been a mistake to go public.

Joohari told viewers that Hussein was essentially a dunce when they studied together in the late 1940s at an elite school in Baghdad. “He was weak in all the subjects--he was especially weak in English, in arithmetic, in physics, in chemistry, in biology, in geography, in history--in all the subjects. I had to help him like a small boy. His IQ was very low. And so I just can’t understand how a man like this, a schlemiel and a failure, has reached his heights and is threatening a whole segment of humanity.”

Now some here are questioning Joohari’s claims, and he has become recalcitrant. “I just wanted to raise the morale,” he says in a brief phone interview, adding that his neighbors in Ramat Gan, the Tel Aviv suburb hit the other day by an Iraqi Scud missile, now say “Saddam Hussein is after you.”

In the lazy Saudi oasis of al Hassa, the war plays to an indifferent audience. There are no Scud missile attacks here, no allied bombing runs, no rush of tanks and trucks moving into position.

Instead, there is the rustle of the north wind through groves of date palms and the call of merchants promoting their wares in the 300-year-old central market.

Ibrahim al Sowayigh, a local government official, says he is becoming impatient with all this talk about war. “This is our first chance for war, and we are not used to it,” he confesses. “My wife, she wants to do things like tape up the windows. But I tell her, ‘Just go out into the desert and die if you won’t leave me in peace.’ ”

FRIDAY, FEB. 1

Shortly after 1 a.m., with Marines near the Kuwaiti border during intense aerial and artillery clashes. Eight cluster bombs dropped by a U.S. aircraft fall within a few hundred yards of the Marine base, spraying their shrapnel over a wide area.

“Someone got their longitude and latitude mixed up,” says Maj. Robert Weimann, 40, of Woodbury, N.J. “Perhaps because there were no injuries, there are no hard feelings. People have taken it in stride, as an unfortunate accident of war that could have been worse.”

A restful calm usually descends slowly over Israel on Friday afternoons, but with Iraq seeming to favor the Jewish Sabbath for launching Scud attacks against the country, the quiet is now tinged with nerves.

But there is help for the distraught--a new “tranquilizer” is circulating throughout the country. It’s called: “The War in the Gulf--a Songbook for the Tense.” (The phrases rhyme in Hebrew.)

One selection, sung to a traditional Israeli tune, consoles:

Saddam, Saddam is still alive

And still sending his missiles at me.

But soon he will be dead

And no more missiles will fall.

Rumors in Diyarbakir, Turkey, say that the march after Muslim Friday prayers in the main mosque will turn into a major anti-war demonstration. Ignoring a hastily arranged official tour elsewhere, the world press turns out to watch. But nothing happens. Asked for the reason, one Kurdish worshiper in a smart baggy trouser costume, cummerbund and headdress, points to the forces arrayed against would-be protesters: Turkish riot police with shields, tough-looking clusters of plainclothes agents and even extra traffic police. “We are against the war but what can we do,” the Kurd says. “There’s one of them to every one of us.”

Patience, says Lt. Gen. Walt Boomer, commander of Marines in the Gulf. “A time for patience. In my view the air campaign is working. I never believed that it would be as quick as some thought that it might be. . . . We’re not in a hurry.”

Maybe nobody will listen to their advice, but after weeks of chemical warfare threats, after climbing in and out of their bulky protective suits, front-line Marines are saying that a nuclear strike should be America’s response to an Iraqi chemical attack.

“My personal opinion is that we should isolate a target specific enough that it has a military orientation, and nuke it,” says Cpl. Jeffery Donders of DeWitt, Mich. “I hope it doesn’t come to that though.”

Maj. John Forr of Huntington, Pa., staff officer in the 1st Marine Division, agrees. “My feeling is if we get hit with chemicals we should respond with a tactical nuke out in the countryside without a lot of civilians around and take out (an Iraq army) corps.”

At a camp outside of Khafji, hundreds of Qatari troops sit glumly in open trucks, waiting for transport back into Khafji in case fighting in the abandoned frontier town flares up again.

Qataris is a bit of misnomer: most of them were Pakistanis, happily enlisted in the army of the tiny Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar, but very nervous at this moment about the fact that they haven’t had any news from the front since morning.

“Please, can you tell us, what is the situation in Khafji?” one inquires as dozens gather around a pair of visiting journalists, straining to hear the response. It seems mostly quiet, they are told. They exchange glances, half reassured. But only half. “It is still possible for the chemicals, don’t you think?”

SATURDAY, FEB. 2

Army doctors at the 1st Infantry Division have been told to expect as many as 1,000 casualties a day in the unit if there is a major ground war. And some of them may be wounded Iraqis.

“It’s real simple,” says Maj. Leroy Graham, an Army doctor from Denver. “A wounded man is a wounded man. We will try to give some priority to our troops if the level of injury is the same, but we gave an oath to save lives.”

Says another doctor: “If I have an American soldier with a broken arm, and an Iraqi with a life-threatening chest injury, the Iraqi is getting med-evaced first. It is based on the injury, not the uniform.”

SUNDAY, FEB. 3

Gordon Walsh is one of the best shots in northern Saudi Arabia. He can hit a target at 1,000 meters in daylight, 600 meters at night. He’s a sergeant assigned to the Army’s 82d Airborne Division. He’s a sniper.

“You need the patience of a hunter,” says Walsh, who carries a .308 Remington 700 rifle with a 10-power Leopold scope. “The thing about a sniper is we’ll always be where you think we’re not. In a combat situation, we’ll be killing machines.”

Snipers cover themselves with strips of burlap to mask their outlines as they crawl on their bellies through the sand for hundreds of yards and then sit for hours waiting for a target.

“Personally, I don’t want to kill anybody,” says Walsh, 24. “It’s just a target. I ain’t going to make no feeling for anybody. I ain’t going to think if he’s married or has kids. He’s just a person who might kill my best friend.”

Times staff writers Douglas Frantz, John Balzar, Kim Murphy and David Lamb in Saudi Arabia, Nick B. Williams Jr. and Mark Fineman in Jordan, and Carey Goldberg in Israel contributed to this report. Hugh Pope in Turkey also contributed. Material gathered by pool reporters and reviewed by allied military censors is included.