Easy Life in Kuwait Ends for Family of Iraq Prisoner : Justice: Expatriate comfort gives way to fear for wife of an American who crossed border.

When Bill and Linda Barloon moved to this paved corner of the Arabian desert 2 1/2 years ago, they viewed it as a family adventure and a chance to give their three children a new cultural perspective.

As he settled into his job with McDonnell Douglas and she worked as training director for a construction management firm, life assumed a comfortable pattern of Little League games on a sandy diamond and strong friendships with the large American expatriate community here.

Home is a multilevel townhouse in a leafy neighborhood that would not, except for the 105-degree heat and the periodic Muslim call to prayer, seem out of place in San Diego, where the couple met and married 15 years ago.

The easy, suburban life ceased for them, however, on March 13.

On that night, William Barloon, 39, and a fellow American defense worker, David Daliberti, 41, of Jacksonville, Fla., set off on a spontaneous drive to visit a friend at a U.N. post near the Kuwait-Iraq border.

A wrong turn led them into Iraqi territory. Today, Barloon and Daliberti are in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, serving eight-year terms for illegally crossing the border.

“Life has become a nightmare that doesn’t seem to end,” Linda Barloon said in an interview at the couple’s home Thursday.

One week after returning from a 12-day visit to Baghdad, where she and Kathy Daliberti were permitted daily visits with their husbands but denied a requested meeting with Iraqi officials, Barloon’s hopes for a quick release have faded.

Increasingly, she feels trapped between two governments locked in the enmities spawned by the Persian Gulf War.

There seemed little change in the two sides’ positions Thursday after the State Department brushed aside a suggestion by Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf in an interview on Cable News Network that President Clinton write to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein asking for the men’s release on humanitarian grounds.

The men are housed in a prison wing reserved for foreigners, Linda Barloon said. They have not been abused by guards or other inmates, but living conditions are dismal. Their cell is a 6-foot by 8-foot space, most of which is taken up by two bunks. One man must sit on a bed for the other to pass. They get daily exercise in a compound shared with other foreign prisoners, but they sleep badly and the food is poor.

Linda Barloon said that while visiting their husbands, “each day we’d hear the racket of this wagon going by. It would have this big silver pot on it. I asked my husband one day, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘It’s lunch . . . rice and water and, every other day, bread.’ ”

The wives left the men with a food stockpile and some money. Prisoners occasionally are allowed to buy fresh vegetables and poultry.

What may be most wearing on the men, however, is their isolation, the sense of psychological drift. They have been permitted no contact with outsiders since their wives left. Weekly visits by a Polish diplomat who looks after U.S. interests in Baghdad were halted five weeks ago. Iraqi officials have not explained why.

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“They’re both just desperate,” Linda Barloon said. “They’re anxious and frustrated, a lot of the same feelings I have . . . because they have no source of information from the outside world.”

She is also concerned by chest pains that forced her husband’s brief hospitalization while she was in Iraq. “As time wears on and the emotions and feelings of desperation continue to mount, I think ultimately it will come back and affect their physical health,” she said. “My husband’s father died of a heart attack at 38. . . . His mother’s had a quadruple bypass, so clearly, from a hereditary point of view, there’s every indication that he’s a likely prospect for a real heart attack.”

Since returning from Iraq, Kathy Daliberti has stayed at an undisclosed location here. She had been living in the family home in Jacksonville while her husband worked in Kuwait.

Linda Barloon has tried to reassemble her life as much as possible. “I think that I have tapped an inner reservoir of strength that I never knew existed. . . . Having three children and knowing I have to maintain some semblance of normal life for them gives me a source of focus. I have to keep things on a normal keel for them.”

But, she said, there are times when she goes off by herself and quietly unravels.

“I feel like there’s this black hole, that so much of what’s going on around me that doesn’t involve Bill and his situation . . . has fallen into this black hole and is lost somewhere down in there,” she said.