AFTERMATH OF WAR : Now They’ll Rebuild--Lives, Country

The telephone call came at 3:30 in the morning, but Claudia Ledesma knew instantly who it must be.

Although he left more questions than he answered, the very sound of her husband’s voice answered the most important question of all: He was safe and sound in his homeland, a survivor of seven months of Iraqi occupation.

“He said that he was safe, that the house was safe, and all his family was safe,” Ledesma said Monday, her voice sounding decidedly relieved.

“He was very happy, and I was so relieved,” Ledesma said. “He told me that the anger is over, and that we now face very hard times” in terms of rebuilding the country.

Ledesma and her husband, Ahmad Shames Al-dain, married eight years ago in San Diego after meeting here as students at a private school to improve their English. At the time, she was 19 and he was 30.

In 1984, they moved back to his homeland of Kuwait, where he is a political and social commentator for the daily political newspaper, Al Qabas.

But, five weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he sent his wife and four young boys--including newborn twins--back to San Diego so she could live with her parents, Mexican nationals residing in Chula Vista.

The last Ledesma had heard of her husband was a cassette he made Jan. 15--the eve of the U.S. aerial bombardment of Baghdad. On the tape, which was smuggled out of Kuwait by way of Iraq, he pledged his love to Ledesma--and pledged, as well, to remain in his home country, for better or for worse.

As word of Iraqi atrocities against the Kuwaiti people spread, Ledesma worried that her husband may have been taken prisoner to Baghdad. She refused to give thought, however, to the possibility that he may have been killed or tortured.

On Saturday, Ledesma heard from a sister-in-law in Saudi Arabia that her husband had been quoted in a newspaper following Kuwait’s liberation.

Then, early Sunday morning, her own telephone rang, and she heard his voice.

“To that point, I knew he was at least alive, and in Kuwait, but I didn’t know what condition he was in. When he called me, he told me he was fine. He said that many times--that he was fine.”

Her husband escaped Iraqi soldiers, she said, by hiding in an area above a ceiling usually reserved for air conditioning and other cooling appliances every time he heard the soldiers approach. It was unclear to her, she said, whether he was hiding in his family home or at the home of a friend.

After her husband hung up, Ledesma thought of all the questions she would have liked to have asked.

“He only talked on the telephone for a few minutes,” she said. “There is an eight-hour wait for people in Kuwait to get to an international phone line, to call out, so he didn’t want to talk too long.”

But she said he took time to talk to his two older sons, ages 5 and 7. “They were jumping up and down and very happy,” she said. “I’m sure all their friends know by now that their daddy is safe.”

He expects to come to San Diego to retrieve his family, she said. But first, he has commentaries to write.

“He said he was working already at the newspaper and would be traveling, to Germany and the other Gulf countries, going to all the press conferences,” Ledesma said.

“He was very happy.”