COLUMN ONE : U.S. Counts Lessons of Gulf Crisis : A year after Iraq invaded Kuwait, a mini-industry thrives by studying the event. Americans who fought have drawn some conclusions of their own.

Nearly all the U.S. troops are home from the Persian Gulf now. They’ve settled back in with their families, resumed their familiar routines, savored the long-dreamed-of cold beers and hot baths. They’ve marched in parades and basked in the gratitude of their compatriots.

A year after the Gulf crisis erupted--Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990--this nation and its warriors have learned much about themselves. They’ve learned that America remains a formidable world power, that it can build complex weapons that work, that its armed forces can fight with valor and with discipline. They’ve learned--through the everlasting agony of the Kurds and the Iraqi people--that the sword can wound but it cannot heal.

The war has spawned a mini-industry of “lessons learned” studies from government agencies, Congress, universities and think tanks.

But many of the 540,000 Americans who took part have already reached their own conclusions about what the experience meant to them.

The men and women who fought this war came to appreciate what generations of soldiers learned before them: that life’s simplest lessons are also its most profound. Months of loneliness in the empty desert taught that the bonds that endure are those of family, faith and friendship. All else is chaff.

They learned that courage is not braving an incoming artillery shell or a rocket screaming from the heavens. Courage is facing one’s fears and pressing on.

In the terrifying quiet hours before the war began, every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine looked inside and wondered, “How will I do? How will I react to the stress of battle? Will I let my buddies down?” Few had doubts about the outcome of the uneven contest between the allied war machine and the Iraqi rabble. All had doubts about themselves.

None of dozens of veterans interviewed over the last several weeks professed a hatred for the enemy; many expressed sympathy for the ill-fed, ill-led Iraqi soldiers. The young American troops, most of whom had never before fired live rounds at live targets, killed because that is what they were trained and ordered to do. They took no glee in it, yet most expressed pride in the skill with which they and their comrades did their jobs.

One Navy aviator said he put himself through a conscious brainwashing to depersonalize the enemy on the ground. They were targets, “blips” on a radar screen, he convinced himself as he rained 500-pound bombs on them. Because this was for the most part a remote-control war, virtually no American troops heard the cries of the Iraqi wounded or saw the warm blood flowing from their bodies.

While the troops came home hailed as American heroes, few believed it. For most, it was the ultimate test of their chosen craft; a job, not a moral adventure.

The military services report that the long separations and months of uncertainty have led to a rise in divorces, drinking problems and strain among returned troops and their families. But psychologists believe that these are temporary symptoms and will pale beside the demons that still are haunting thousands of Vietnam veterans.

Every war, said Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, is going to astonish you.

Capt. Carey Brickell, a 31-year-old Marine Corps artillery officer, had led his unit in a lightning four-day sweep through southern Kuwait to the outskirts of Kuwait city when the cease-fire was declared Feb. 28.

“The adrenaline was flowing,” Brickell says. “We were like machines, hyped up and totally focused on what we were doing. When the cease-fire order came, I felt a little--I never felt anything like that in my life--a little disappointed. Everybody sat down and let out a deep breath. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

“ ‘So this is war,’ I said to myself.”

Lt. Bob Wetzel, Navy pilot

Navy A-6 pilot Lt. Bob Wetzel first saw the antiaircraft fire 30 miles from his target, the H-3 military airfield in western Iraq. It was Jan. 17, the second night of the war. Wetzel was flying his first combat mission.

“We were making a low-altitude ingress, 450 to 480 feet off the deck,” recalls Wetzel, 31, of Metuchen, N.J. “The timing was right on, everything looked fine, but at seven miles I saw a missile coming at us. I turned, and it didn’t really hit us but exploded just off to the right side. It moved the whole plane and I heard one of the engines grinding down. The back of the plane was on fire, the right engine light was on and then all the lights came on on the annunciator panel.

“I don’t really remember the decision to eject,” Wetzel says. “I think we were inside of a mile from the airport because that’s where we were when we woke up on the ground.”

Wetzel doesn’t remember coming down, but he does recall hitting the ground because of the pain. The ejection and fall had broken both his arms and his collarbone.

“I was in a lot of pain at this point and kind of delirious. I was yelling to Jeff (his bombardier, Lt. Jeffrey Zaun, whose battered face became a familiar sight on American television screens) to try to find him, and I remember him telling me to shut up.”

For the next harrowing minutes, Wetzel and Zaun tried to hide from pursuing Iraqis, who’d seen them bail out and had sent a patrol to pick them up. They lay in a rut near a road until a jeep came hurtling toward them. Zaun was afraid that the Iraqis would run them over so he jumped up and waved his arms to surrender.

“They were really excited and happy,” Wetzel said. “They were shooting off their guns to tell everybody they’d caught us.”

Wetzel and Zaun spent the night at an infirmary at the air base, then were driven to Baghdad where they spent the remainder of the war in military hospitals and prisons.

Wetzel said he was interrogated several times, twice on videotape, but that he refused to divulge details of his mission or denounce the war. He said he was “hit around” a few times but never seriously abused. Meals were thin broth and pita bread. He lost 30 pounds during his six weeks of captivity.

There were air raids every night, which terrified him. On Feb. 23, the prison where he was held--which he and his fellow captives dubbed the Biltmore--was destroyed by an allied bomb. Wetzel and the others crawled out of the rubble and were recaptured. The sound of a plane going into a dive still gives Wetzel the shakes. “That’s the one thing that still bothers me,” he says

Throughout the experience, Wetzel kept praying for the war to end, or for commandos to come rescue him. He said he became very religious and vowed to go to church every Sunday. He promised to call his parents and his eight brothers and sisters more often.

Wetzel knew the war had ended when the air raids stopped the morning of Feb. 28. On March 4, he and the other POWs were given new orange jumpsuits and driven to the Al-Rashid hotel in downtown Baghdad and released to the Red Cross. The next day, he was in American hands in Amman, Jordan, and on his way home. The returning POWs were greeted at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and an army of reporters.

Wetzel says he never regretted having joined the Navy and that he plans to stay in indefinitely. “Just from what happened to me I might get some good deals. They say I can get whatever I want. I’m just looking to enjoy myself.”

Wetzel today is anything but the haggard, drained wraith that one associates with ex-POWs. He’s healthy and bright-eyed and laughs easily. He was married June 1 (the wedding originally was planned for March 2). He’s looking forward to resuming flying off carriers when his right arm heals.

“I thought I would have been a lot different when I got back,” he says. “I thought that nothing would ever bother me again. I’m kind of disappointed. I made a lot of good promises to myself.”

One of them was to buy a “promise tree” to plant in the front yard to remind him of all the worthy resolutions he made while in prison. He’s meant to do it for a couple months now. “Maybe I’ll do that this weekend,” Wetzel says.

Sgt. Shannon Clarin, Army National Guard

Sgt. Shannon Clarin’s world turned upside down on Friday, Aug. 26, the day her Oregon Army National Guard unit, the 206th Air Terminal Movement Control company, was called for duty in Saudi Arabia.

“There was no advance notice, no indication that we’d even be involved,” she says. She was ordered to be ready to leave the following Tuesday at dawn.

Chief among a thousand worries was what she would do with her 4-year-old son, James. She and the boy’s father were never married and have not lived together since the boy was born.

“I felt this sense of panic. I’d never been in this situation. I didn’t know if I was prepared financially, mentally, psychologically. Nobody knew what we were getting into. I was scared. I didn’t know if I was going to come back.”

But she couldn’t share those worries with James. He had his own fears.

“We sat on the couch here and I told him, ‘Mommy’s got to go back in the Army.’ All the other times I went to camp (on training exercises) he said, ‘Oh, OK.’ This time he questioned it, he wanted to know why. He said, ‘No, I don’t want you to go. Don’t go away. I don’t want you to go.’ But I said, ‘This is something momma has to do. I’ll be back.’

“But I think he believed that I wasn’t coming back,” Clarin says.

Clarin hurriedly arranged for James to live with his nursery school teacher, Marian Bowen of Canby, Ore., whose own children are grown. They threw together an early birthday party for him because his mother would be away on his real birthday in September. She packed up his clothes and toys and bicycle and dropped him at Bowen’s house.

Then Sgt. Clarin went off to war.

Clarin, 26, had joined the National Guard in 1982 at age 17 while still a student at Oregon City High School in a suburb of Portland. “All my compadres joined. It was the in thing to do.”

When she was mobilized last August, she was working full time for the guard unit and attending classes at Clackamas Community College, studying criminal justice in hopes of some day becoming a police officer. “Better than Burger King,” she says.

The unit’s commander told the reservists that they would be deployed for 90 days. They returned more than eight months later, on May 3.

Clarin worked the flight line at Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia, supervising ground transport for incoming flights of troops and equipment. She lived in a variety of places, including a four-bedroom apartment in an air-conditioned high-rise built for foreign workers in nearby Al Khubar.

She was in Saudi Arabia for three months before she was able to make her first telephone call home.

“James would talk about his dreams. In one, I came to his bedroom window at Marian’s house and said, ‘Come with me,’ ” Clarin says.

The hardest part of coming home, she says, has been trying to re-establish trust with her son.

“James is very angry with me still,” she says. “We have trouble talking. He thinks I actually left him. I missed almost an entire year of his life. When I left, he was a baby. Now he’s a little man.

“I have to keep reassuring him I’m not leaving. If I leave the room or just go out to the car to get something, he’ll chase after me screaming, ‘Where are you going? Don’t leave me.’

“It’ll take a long time for him to trust me again, to know I’m not leaving,” she says.

Air Force Col. David A. Sawyer

Air Force Col. David A. Sawyer, 48, flew 109 bombing missions in Vietnam. But he never saw his victims until he attacked the Iraqi Republican Guard in February.

Sawyer is commander of the 23rd Tactical Fighter Wing--the legendary Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers. The wing is now based at England Air Force Base, La., and flies the ugly but lethal A-10 Warthog ground attack plane.

Sawyer flew 25 missions in the Gulf War, including one in which his A-10 was almost downed by a SA-13 heat-seeking missile that blew 300 holes in the plane, sheared the elevator off and jammed one rudder. But he wrestled the plane back to King Fahd Air Base and continued flying.

As a bomber pilot, he had always flown at high altitude and dropped his weapons on impersonal dots on the ground, what he described as “an air-conditioned war in an air-conditioned cockpit.” That was his experience until late in the war, when Sawyer went after identifiable human targets for the first time.

“One particular pass was a strafing pass,” he recalls. “I had just destroyed a tank and saw three guys running out of their foxholes toward an armored personnel carrier. I said to my wingman, ‘I’m going to ruin their day,’ and arced around and went after them. They kinda disappeared in the dust of the strafe smoke.”

Sawyer suffers no angst about the killing. Those who do, he says, don’t belong in his business. He sent three senior pilots home before the war started because they had expressed fears about dying and guilt about killing.

After the war, Sawyer visited 250 Iraqi prisoners at the King Fahd Air Base hospital. “That’s quite a sobering thing to see. We usually don’t see the face of war unless you’re shot down. I didn’t feel bad about what I’d done, but I felt sorry they had to feel the fury of the violence we unleashed on them.”

It’s a little unnerving to hear Sawyer express pride in his work when that work involves killing large numbers of human beings. But the nation employs such warriors for a reason, and that’s the way they talk.

“I’m just thrilled I got a chance to do this,” Sawyer says. “The most unhappy people I know are my contemporaries who didn’t get to go. I’ve been preparing to do this--be a TAC (Tactical Air Command) wing commander in a war and walk in the footsteps of Claire Chennault--for my whole career.”

Capt. Carey Brickell, Marine artillery officer

Capt. Brickell, the Marine artillery officer, says his most vivid memory of the war came on the afternoon of Feb. 24, the first day of the ground campaign. He had led his battalion across the “berm”--the fortified line separating Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and was approaching his first day’s objective, the Jabbar air base southwest of Kuwait city.

“I was in a command track vehicle and one of my men said, ‘Open the hatch, captain, you’ve got to see this,’ ” Brickell recalls. “It was daytime, the middle of the day, and what I saw was like something out of a science-fiction movie.

“It was almost dark. The oil fields were burning. And everywhere you looked, 360 degrees around you, there were Iraqis. I hadn’t seen any enemy before then, and I’ll never forget that as long as I live. As far as I could see, thousands of them were streaming through, waving white flags. It just choked me up.”

Casualties in Brickell’s unit were relatively light--three wounded--and his first taste of combat was not particularly harrowing, he says. Looking back, he feels an odd sense of anticlimax and a mild shame at having enjoyed the experience.

“We were all brought up on John Wayne movies and the desperate struggle for a desperate cause,” the Caraway, Ark., native says. “But it wasn’t like that. I was dejected when it was over, disappointed, if that makes sense. I’d just run through the Iraqi army, but I didn’t feel like I’d run through the Iraqi army. I felt a little detached.”

Like all green officers, he was apprehensive about how he would withstand battle and fearful he would let his men down. He held up, and he’s proud of that. “I got to see the elephant, as they said in Civil War days,” says Brickell, who returned with his unit to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms on March 20 after seven months in the desert.

“There was a sense of excitement, being part of something on a large scale, a grand plan, being part of history,” he says. “What did I learn about myself? I probably enjoyed it more than I should have.”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Bobby Goodman

Before the Gulf War, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Bobby Goodman was better known to the American public than was Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. He was the flier shot down on a bombing mission over Lebanon in 1983 whose release from Syrian captivity was engineered by presidential candidate Jesse Jackson.

At 34, Goodman was, comparatively speaking, an old pro with one combat mission under his belt. But every day brings new dangers, he says.

“I felt apprehensive lots of times, but that doesn’t keep you from climbing into the cockpit,” said Goodman, an assured, articulate U.S. Naval Academy graduate. “While it’s a job, there’s a certain amount of risk to it. One (Navy pilot killed in action) was my roommate and he was every bit as good as I am. It’s just a matter of luck and the position you’re in that keeps you and your aircraft coming back.”

Goodman, a navigator-bombardier, and his pilot, Lt. Mike Olson, 31, flew 47 missions in their A-6 off the deck of the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, operating in the northern Persian Gulf.

The most vivid image he brought back from the war was flying a night strike over Kuwait on Feb. 25, the second day of the ground war. The antiaircraft artillery was pouring into the sky, the air was black with the smoke of burning oil wells. “It looked like hell down there,” Goodman said in a recent interview at Oceana Naval Air Station near Norfolk, Va., where he’s currently stationed.

The crew flew most of their early missions at high altitude, 20,000 to 25,000 feet, dropping cluster bombs and 500-pound and 1,000-pound bombs on Iraqi troop encampments, surface-to-air missile sites, artillery positions and communications towers.

They never saw their victims, if any, although on one mission they locked up a building in the sights of a laser-guided bomb and watched it disappear. By an act of will, Goodman never thought of what he was doing as killing.

“We had a long conversation about it one night. For the longest time, I never associated a nationality or a personality with my target. There’s a kind of required brainwashing that’s part of it. You’re going after a blip. You don’t see a person, you see a truck. You’re going after inanimate objects,” he says.

“We did a lot of our stuff from high altitude. You see bombs going off and that’s it. A lot of guys were shocked at the amount of destruction we were doing when we saw pictures later.”

Goodman and his fellow veterans have grown older and less innocent in the past year. They saw a more unforgiving world than any they have known. The “elephant” taught them humility.

“I don’t profess to have the swagger a lot of other guys have,” says Goodman. “I know why it’s there--they’re convincing themselves. I just know my own talents are sufficient to get the job done. Which is what counts.”