Rising Threat of a Ground War Hits Home for Sisters : Persian Gulf: Two women whose Marine reservist sweethearts are positioned near Kuwait follow a routine of worry and prayer.

The timing of the ground phase of the Persian Gulf War was uppermost in the minds of Brenda and Wanda Melendez even before they each received an ominous telephone call.

Carlos Sandino, 21, a Marine reservist from Sylmar who is Wanda’s fiancee, called Feb. 8 from his position seven miles from Kuwait and said the ground war was only days away. “All he said was that it was going to be soon and that’s why he was able to call,” she said.

Brenda Melendez’s boyfriend, who is Carlos’ best friend and is in the same unit, telephoned at 5 a.m. Tuesday. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said, recalling her joy and surprise at the call from Michael Hendrickson, 21.

But then the worry intruded. “I told him that I think he’s the only one out there and he’s going to be the first one to get killed, but he said, ‘You have to remember there’s a lot of guys in front of me.’ ”

After a month during which most of the attack on Iraq and Kuwait has come from the air and the sea, the looming ground war has been on the minds of families and friends of front-line soldiers. There is no official word of when the war might enter the new phase. But constant speculation by generals, politicians and the media has made it a top concern for the sisters.

“The ground war, that’s what’s worrying me,” said Wanda Melendez, 21, who like Brenda, 18, is a teacher’s aide at Sylvan Park School in Van Nuys and a student at Mission College in Sylmar. “I’ve stopped listening to the news; I don’t want to hear it.”

When Sandino called, his fiancee remembered, “he said he couldn’t say much about it, but I could tell by the tone of his voice it would be soon.”

In civilian life, Sandino is a dispatcher and Hendrickson is a machinist for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The two friends were also in the same Marine Reserve maintenance unit at Camp Pendleton near San Diego. And Sandino introduced Hendrickson, who is from Lakewood, to Brenda Melendez during a weekend visit while the men were in training.

Sandino and Hendrickson left for the Gulf on Dec. 27 after a month of training in North Carolina. Two weeks earlier, Sandino arranged an elaborate engagement ceremony attended by his and his fiancee’s families. He proposed to Wanda Melendez over a speaker-phone with everyone listening. His stepfather, Jesus Fonderella, slipped a diamond engagement ring over her finger. She began crying, kissed the speaker and said it was beautiful.

Before the ceremony, Fonderella said to Sandino: “Whenever you get married and have kids, I hope you teach your kids peace, not war.”

Although the start of the war came as a shock, Wanda Melendez said, she and her sister have since settled into a routine of worry.

At 6:30 every morning, they go to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Santa Clarita to pray. Then they go to their jobs at Sylvan Park, where Wanda is an aide to a kindergarten class and Brenda helps out with third-graders. At noon, the sisters pray again. After work, they check the mailbox for letters, which in recent weeks have numbered as many as four a day. Dinner is followed by letter-writing, homework or an evening Mass or prayer vigil.

Like the hundreds of thousands of others left behind by the war, they said they find themselves living lives they hardly recognize. While some have turned to support groups, Wanda and Brenda Melendez have turned to each other, their parents, Kathy and Orlando Melendez, and their church.

“When she’s feeling down, I tell her don’t be like that,” Brenda Melendez said of her sister.

“We take turns,” Wanda Melendez said. “When one’s depressed, the other tries to help.”

They said they were raised in the Catholic Church but were not ardent in their faith.

“This has brought us closer to God,” Brenda Melendez said. “We read the Bible and it says you have to have faith. There are things we get scared about and mom says, ‘Here, read this from the Bible,’ and it answers the things we’re worried about.”

The sisters are also working on arrangements for Wanda and Carlos’ wedding, which is planned for August. The dress has been bought and reservations made for a ceremony at Santa Rosa Catholic Church in San Fernando, where pictures of Sandino and Hendrickson and dozens of others involved in the conflict are displayed. Invitations will be sent out by May, the month by which Sandino originally thought that he would be back.

“He told me he would for sure be home by August and to go ahead with the wedding plans,” Wanda Melendez said.

The doubters bother her the most, she said. “A lot of people ask me, ‘Why are you doing this? How do you know he’s going to come back?’ That gets me depressed.”

The sisters worry about the start of ground fighting, but they hope that if and when it comes, it will bring the war a step closer to its end.

“He’s homesick and he hates it there,” Wanda Melendez said of Sandino. “He said it’s like a never-ending nightmare. He sleeps in the dirt and he said he hadn’t taken a shower in eight days. But he told me not to worry. He said even if he came home without an arm or a leg, he would be there” for the wedding.