Documentary : On the Road Again: Life as a Mideast Reporter : * The memories of the last three years remain as vivid as the numerous cities visited, from Kuneitra to Baghdad.

Out in the Jordanian desert, an inhospitable mix of scrub, sand and black basalt rubble from some prehistoric volcanism, a solitary Arab stood on a ridge off the road to Baghdad. A light breeze tossed the red-checked kaffiyeh covering his head. If he was herding goats, they could not be seen. No Bedouin tent stood nearby, no car or motorcycle. He was utterly alone.

“I’ve seen this a hundred times over the years,” a veteran Mideast correspondent told her colleagues as their van sped past. “There they are, hours from anywhere. What are they doing and how the hell did they get there? I’ve never figured it out.”

Every Western journalist who has worked in the Middle East has stop-frame scenes like this etched in their memories. After three years I’ve kept my share:

* On my return to Iraq after last year’s Gulf War cease-fire and the anti-government rebellion in the south, Shiite Muslim women in black chadors sat huddled outside a prison gate in the southern city of Basra, shrieking lamentations and hoping for word that their husbands and sons were alive inside the high walls. That was the best they could expect--that their men were imprisoned and not among the thousands of Shiite rebels shot down by Saddam Hussein’s helicopter gunships as he re-established his hold on the country. There is still no accounting of the dead.

* In Kuneitra, a ghost town at the foot of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, leveled in the 1967 war and again in 1973, Syrian soldiers peered from the rubble of buildings, fingering the triggers of their rifles as my car arrived from Damascus. Except for weeds pushing up through broken concrete walls and birds circling overhead, they were the only sign of life in the town--a symbol of the wars that have racked the Middle East in the second half of the 20th Century.

* No country has endured a fratricidal conflict worse than Lebanon’s, yet there’s a spark of class that will not die. In a moment of truce, I sat down for a patio lunch with a Canadian journalist in the Christian-controlled port of Jubayl. The wine was good, the crepes excellent and they were served by a waiter in black tie and dinner jacket. Windsurfers were cutting across the surface of the old Crusader port. Two weeks later another session of the civil war broke out.

* During the Iranian earthquake of June, 1990, many reporters wondered if they would join the 20,000 dead as they zigzagged through a canyon in old, badly overloaded U.S. Chinook helicopters that they shared with Iranian refugees leaving the disaster scene. In Rutbar, the worst-hit town, a militiaman stopped me on the main street, lectured me on the Great Satan, then said: “Hey, you’re a reporter, who won the (soccer) World Cup?”

* Charles Dunbar, the American ambassador in Yemen, invited me for breakfast on the patio of the fortified U.S. Embassy in Sana. Dunbar approached with a shortwave pressed to his ear. It was Aug. 2, 1990. “Have you heard?” the ambassador asked. “The Iraqis have invaded Kuwait!” And then we sat for the shortest ambassadorial breakfast I’ve ever attended, my thoughts focused not on Yemen but on how to catch the first flight out.

* Twenty Indian nurses from the steamy climes of Madras huddled in a refugee tent near the Iraqi-Jordanian border, the canvas flapping in the icy cold of a high-desert winter. They had reached safety in the first weeks of the air war, bused from Baghdad in a harrowing drive along what reporters dubbed Hellfire Alley. “We were quite fortunate,” one said in the understated lilting English of educated Indians.

But when Middle East reporters trade stories of their experiences, the recurring theme is the Arab people themselves. There’s a great deal about them that a Westerner may never understand.

Most live in hard, unforgiving desert lands and their culture, their ethics may seem complicated, even mysterious. The picture is no clearer with the prism reversed--many Arabs find other societies rootless and dangerously chaotic.

Understanding the differences is the first step toward closing them. A modest collection on my shelves includes three separate books entitled “The Arabs,” evidence of the need to try to explain. One of the authors is David Lamb, a Times predecessor in the region.

He wrote of the Arabs: “For them . . . the future is rooted in the past--in their own unique and rich heritage, in their belief that what Mohammed the Prophet taught 13 centuries ago is a precise guide for today’s life--and when their sons would rather watch ‘Dallas’ than go to the mosque, when Nike sneakers and a greed for material things replace prayer beads and the need for spiritual fulfillment, then the very foundation of their Arabness is challenged and shaken.”

In the highs and lows of the Arab world over the centuries, the brake against such sudden change has been the family. It was an anchor even before the time of the Prophet. That solitary young man in the checked headdress beside the Baghdad road, for instance, is far closer to his family than most Americans. Family is--for good or ill--the foundation of Arab society.

Family here is the old school tie of Britain--the connection. Ranking and well-placed members of the family throw out a lifeline of jobs and government appointments to those below. Nepotism is a positive phenomenon in the Middle East. Daughters are brokered in marriage to advance family fortunes. Scheming is done in good spirits, and family relationships are not mere bonds, they are obligations.

My driver on several trips to Baghdad was a courtly man named Tarik Samarrai, much easier to deal with than some of his fawning colleagues. Typically, the mention of family led him to produce photos of his sons and daughters. There were nine, and Tarik had great plans for them. “This is my oldest son, Hussein,” he said, presenting another photo. “He is not a naughty boy. He is very good in school and I will make sure he goes to university. He will go further than I have been able to do.”

To examine the Arab family, however, also reveals the downside of the system. The family-clan-tribe connection leaves little room for a Western-style meritocracy. Instead, it breeds private and public corruption as the pie is gobbled by those in power. It’s most obvious in the Gulf States where the Sauds, Sabahs and other ruling tribes have near-total political and economic control, giving up only on the fringes to needed Western-trained technocrats. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are literally owned by their ruling sheiks.

In Damascus, the brother of President Hafez Assad became such an embarrassing example of greed that he was sent into well-heeled exile in Europe. “Rifaat (the brother) was insatiable,” said a Scandinavian who was doing business in Syria in the early 1980s. “Every foreign businessman here had to have a silent partner . . . and Rifaat was high on the lists. The system has not changed.”

The tourist might not sense the corruption; he’s too small a fish. But American business people complain about the endless bidding systems of Arab commerce. “You think you’ve got it, and then the bidding opens up again,” a disgruntled arms merchant told me. “It’s not the value of the contract, it’s the value of the cut for the man who lets it.”

Democracy is something that Western ambassadors, aid officials and reporters carp about, but not the Arabs. Power is shared within family alliances. When democratic tendencies are weighed among the nations of the Middle East, it is two non-Arab states--Israel and Iran--that are accorded highest marks for open debate and representative parliaments.

But to brush off today’s Arab societies as uniformly repressive and unenlightened is misleading. The Iraqis, for instance, while sometimes stiff-necked, have a civilized culture, one with the most lively fine arts in the region. They did not vote Saddam Hussein in, and they don’t deserve him.

The economic pattern in the region discourages development of a middle-class, which has been the foundation of democracy in the West. Few Arab economies actually make things--pots and pans, hardware, ready to wear. These things are imported, increasingly from Asia. (The red-checked kaffiyehs for sale in a Kuwaiti market were marked “Made in China.”) Some countries produce oil, a few make out with tourism, but sophisticated heavy and light industries are rare. So, like the generations of millennia past--those who hustled the goods of India and China to Europe--today’s Arab businessmen are often traders, buying and selling in economies incapable of producing jobs to keep up with ballooning populations.

Jordan is the current example of disaster. During the Gulf crisis, I went to the teeming Baqa camp for Palestinian refugees outside Amman. Arrangements had been made for a talk with a family whose numbers had swollen with returnees from occupied Kuwait. We sat cross-legged on mats against the wall of a small room, and the Palestinians told of their lack both of the resources to take in their cousins from Kuwait and of any option to do otherwise.

Any traveler in strange lands finds local customs memorable. Table manners, for instance. Three years ago, in my first week in the Middle East and after four years in Southeast Asia where people picked daintily through their food with chopsticks, I was dispatched to Iraqi Kurdistan to cover one of Saddam Hussein’s rigged elections.

The visiting press and various European election monitors were hosted by Saddam Hussein’s man in Sulaymaniyah, the capital of Kurdistan. After briefly stonewalling all questions from his guests, our host waved us to tables covered with fruit, bread, beer and, every four or five seats, a nicely roasted whole lamb, the belly cavity chock-full of Allah know’s what.

We Westerners, operating with fork and spoon, did the best we could. When we were done, a signal was given to our security escort of about 20 soldiers. They tore apart what was left of the lambs like buzzards, ripping the meat off with their hands and shoving into their pockets what they couldn’t fit into their mouths.

“Good Lord,” an Irish member of the European Parliament, sent to Iraq as a poll watcher, whispered to me. “They must be ravenous!”

Not really. Just enthusiastic, which is good table manners in the Arab world.

No examination of Arab mouthfuls should overlook the country of Yemen.

An afternoon repast for a Yemeni male--for every Yemeni male, it seems--is a good sit-down with 15 or 20 branches of the qat plant. They start around one o’clock, small groups sitting in a shop or office munching away on qat leaves, pushing them in and rarely spitting them out, making their cheeks bulge with the stuff. And by mid-afternoon, heads are spinning. Qat is either a mild narcotic or a major caffeine-like high--you pick your description. But the effect leaves a large part of the population zonked from noon to nightfall.

Odd customs like qat feed foreigners’ stereotypes of Arab life, and there’s nothing these proud people resent more. At the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, my wife and I struck up a friendship with the No. 1 porter, a Christian Palestinian named George. He invited us to lunch one day at his home in a West Bank village near Bethlehem. Insisting we take a tour of the house, he led us to his bedroom.

“And this is our bed,” George pointed out. “I just wanted you to see we had one because Americans think that the Palestinians sleep on the floor.”

I hadn’t, but it was interesting that George took the time to close the distance on cultural misunderstandings. He and many other Arabs realize that ignorance is dangerous--to all sides.

Got Your Bag Packed?

* On the Road: 60% of the time

* Number of trips in 3 years: 36

* Number of countries: 12

* Favorite country: Syria, “because of the antiquity of the region and the Oriental mystique of its politics and society.”