War Is Hell--but for Troops Waiting to Go Home, Peace Is Tough Too : Troops: The battles are over, but GIs don’t know when they’re going home. This may be the hardest thing they face.

Still they are arrayed as if for combat, armored power displayed forward, trucks lined up to the rear.

But look again at this occupying army, and there is a sense that its time has passed. A book is apt to fill the hand that only days ago held a rifle, and folding chairs are set out to catch the sun. And what soldiers at war a week ago now want to know is when they go home.

“It’s as if some of the oppression has lifted,” said Maj. Roy Adams, putting words to what seemed a universal sense as this brigade of the 1st Armored Division pushed across the border here to leave Iraq behind.

“It’s going to get worse,” said Maj. Paul Whittaker, the senior medical officer in this 5,000-man brigade. “The war is over, and they’re not leaving. They’re going to feel forgotten, as if nobody cares.

“In some ways,” the doctor added, “the hardest part is yet to come.”

Indeed, across this newly liberated country this week, there was a wider sense of a changing of the gears, with Egyptian, British and American fighting forces well-settled into what appear to be fixed positions.

Instead, an overland trip spanning the length and much of the breadth of Kuwait found that it is military police and military engineers whose work has assumed a frenetic pace as they supervise an expanding network of roads across the Kuwaiti desert.

The journey by four-wheel-drive vehicle across the scores of miles of desert found a trail of destruction almost numbing in its extent: electrical wires hanging limp, paved roads scarred and cratered, what once were columns of 30 or more Iraqi tanks little more than charred skeletons across the sand.

In a full day of driving, only the remains of an American M-1A1 Abrams tank, crippled by an apparent explosion, provided any sign that the battle had not been altogether one-sided. But already the tank was being hauled southward. And although the remnants of the Iraqi army will scar the desert for years, rain has already begun to turn wreckage to rust, adding to the mounting sense of distance from the carnage.

Some elements of this 1st Armored Division remain in Iraq, and its headquarters straddles the border at the northwest corner of Kuwait in a continued occupation aimed at maintaining American pressure on Baghdad.

But the dispatch of its lead brigade, the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, into Kuwait itself is an indication of the direction in which senior commanders say they hope soon to move--southward--even if the journey’s timetable remains agonizingly imprecise.

A handful of troops within the division left for home Wednesday, part of a token force that will carry the VII Corps flag back to Germany next week on what is certain to be a triumphant return. But the rest have been told that they should expect to sit in place here for anywhere from a few hours to seven days, their exodus slowed by a return policy that will give precedence to units that arrived earlier in Saudi Arabia.

In the meantime, other troops whose war is over face what they have been told may be at least three months more in a desert whose interchanging heat and rain in recent days have brought alternating storms of dust and seas of mud.

“Real infantry stuff,” said Capt. Wes Gillman, a company commander who last week joined in an assault against Iraq’s Republican Guard and on Wednesday was back to organizing parties to erect tents against the deluge.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Lt. Col. Michael Leahy, an artillery commander, told his troops the other day.