Many Americans Eager to Return to Jobs in Kuwait : Work: Many were held hostage or forced to hide, but they miss the money and way of life in the Gulf.

In the world of oil rigs and refineries that had become his home in Iraq, Gene Lovas grew accustomed to on-the-job hazards.

Now, as Lovas prepares to leave his family to return to work in the region where he had been a hostage at the U.S. Embassy until just three months ago, he adds mine fields, environmental perils and the constant threat of renewed violence to the list.

Still, Lovas, a construction superintendent from Westminster, downplays the risk.

“The fact that there was a little bit of a problem there isn’t going to stop me. . . . That’s how I make my living.”

Lovas is among a small number of Orange County residents who were in hiding or held as “human shields” by the Iraqi government. Several of them--and many more nationwide--say they are already making plans to return to the troubled Persian Gulf region to live and work in Kuwait.

It is a region ravaged by war and fire. But many of those hopeful of returning--blue-collar workers and professionals alike--insist that the oil-rich area offers more in the way of jobs and money than the United States does.

“A lot of people have expressed an interest in going back--they liked their life there, and they want it back,” said Irene Saba of Champaign, Ill., who with her husband, Michael, helped organize a now-defunct support group for Iraqi hostage families called Coming Home.

“Why?” comes the near-daily expression of incredulity from friends and family members. Or, from the more blunt, “Are you crazy?”

The responses are, like Lovas,’ more nonchalant than defiant.

“There will always be unrest in that part of the world,” said Jack Frazier of Santa Ana, who was supervising a Persian Gulf oil field. Frazier spent three months in hiding in a Baghdad “safe house” before he returned to Orange County in October, becoming the first hostage from the county to do so.

“I think it just goes with the territory,” Frazier, 53, said in a telephone interview from Montana, where he is staying temporarily with his new bride. He has been an Orange County resident for the past 35 years and has traveled to the Gulf for work in the oil industry for the last 10.

Frazier, who was freed by the Iraqis because of his health problems, plans to go to San Francisco today to undergo medical exams and handle some administrative processing with Bechtel, his once and future employer. He expects to be in Kuwait with a new, still-unspecified assignment within two weeks.

Lovas, another Bechtel employee, also expects to leave for Kuwait within two weeks, pending orders from the company.

They are among several hundred employees from the company scheduled to do restoration work, and they will likely be among the first postwar influx of foreigners allowed to re-enter Kuwait.

Randall Trinh, a 50-year-old engineer from Fullerton who was held hostage in a Baghdad factory after being taken from his home in Kuwait, said: “I already told my employer of my intentions” to return to Kuwait, “and they said that when security conditions permit, they would call me back. . . . So I’m just waiting for them.” Trinh worked for the Santa Fe International Corp. in Kuwait.

Awni Younis, a Garden Grove resident who was forced to abandon his machinery business and part-time home in Kuwait city after nearly five months on the run, is more hesitant about returning, but says he and his wife want to go back if for no other reason than to collect their belongings.

“I really love the place,” said Younis. “I’d love to go back and see that this was all a bad dream, but it’s not that easy.”

Uniting these people is a resentment over the way they were forced to flee a region that they had come to know and love, a place that they fear has been left scarred by the actions of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Kim-Yen Trinh, 44, of Fullerton had been on her way back to Kuwait from Paris at the time of the Aug. 2 invasion. She had to return to Fullerton instead to await word on her husband, Randall. She voices the sentiment of many returning ex-hostages: “Leaving was very emotional. All of us want to see the place again, to see our friends again. And I want to leave it on my own terms--not the Iraqi terms.”

Frazier said he expects to work with Bechtel subcontractors in helping put out oil well fires, laying pipes and getting the refineries in Kuwait back in good working order. Frazier has no experience putting out fires, but that does not bother him.

“Being able to go back and be a part of another phase of history is unique in itself,” he said. “That’s a good feeling.”

Several of the former Orange County hostages said they have had trouble finding work here, and they noted that they could make more money generally in Kuwait anyway.

Before the war, at least, an oil rig supervisor in the region reportedly could earn as much as $85,000 a year, with the first $70,000 of that non-taxable if the worker spent most of the year abroad.

U.S. companies sending workers to the region have also offered generous vacation plans--such as 10 days off for every three months on, as well as free vacation air travel to Europe.

Many observers suggest that the devastation Iraqi forces wrought on the Kuwaiti countryside will probably create an even larger demand for workers to help rebuild the nation.

“There clearly are going to be lots of contracts there, across quite a broad spectrum of areas,” said Mike Kidder, a spokesman with Bechtel in San Francisco, which has reached a tentative agreement with the Kuwaiti government for restoration work in the oil industry. The company plans to initially send at least several hundred employees.

“I imagine a lot of people who had been held will want to go back--that’s where the jobs are,” said a State Department spokeswoman in Washington. But, she said, it will be weeks before U.S. officials there can get a “head count” on just how many.

When Kimberly Albrecht of Santa Ana heard that her father, Jack Frazier, wanted to be among those to meet the demand for workers there, she felt uneasy.

“Of course, at first I was real apprehensive about him going back,” Albrecht said, “but we’re told”--in state Department calls--”that there are going to be a lot of armed military over there more or less baby-sitting Kuwait and making sure Saddam Hussein honors his agreement. So that softens it some.”

Frazier, a pragmatic man, understands his daughter’s worry but refuses to bend to uncertainty.

“I don’t really know how I’ll respond when I step off the airplane,” he says. “What I do know, though, is that I have to work.”