Some Gulf War ‘Human Shields’ Say Experience Set Them Free

They were contractors and teachers, diplomats, housewives, entrepreneurs. They lived in hotels and apartments, homes in the city and by the sea. They had children, colleagues, close Kuwaiti friends.

Their lives had three dimensions, until they were reduced in a single day to a single status:

They became “human shields.”

More than 900 Americans were in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein’s army swarmed across Iraq’s southern border on Aug. 2, 1990, helicopters whirring over their rooftops and gunfire driving them into hiding. Some were able to flee, but for many what ensued was a nightmare that stretched over months.

Homes were abandoned, bank accounts lost, worldly and sentimental possessions stolen. Any physical sense of safety, trust, innocence was gone. Now it would be about survival, coming through this test.

Remarkably, with their captivity long over, the five years that have passed since the war ended on March 5, 1991, are notable less for what was lost than for what these former hostage families ultimately found.

‘I kept asking myself: What’s the point?’

They were in their mid-40s, newly married workaholics, aces at the management-consulting game. Charlene Coutre and Stuart Williams were a power couple as the ‘80s ended, and a new decade dawned.

Contracted to restructure a major Kuwaiti bank, the couple had just returned from a brief business trip to London when Saddam Hussein’s troops rolled in, gunfire echoing in the streets below their hotel.

It was disorienting, harrowing. But looking back, Coutre and Williams see mostly the good that has come from having been cut so suddenly adrift. Odd as it may seem, for all their misery and fear, it was a strange sort of gift.

“Losing every cent we have would mean nothing to us at this point. None of it matters as long as we’re still together and have each other,” said Coutre, who like her husband is now 51. “People say that sort of thing philosophically, but we really mean it.”

At first, the couple hid in their hotel suite, wondering what to do next. Coutre could have joined other American women in fleeing Kuwait in early September, but without Williams, she refused to go.

It was a long two weeks before Iraqi troops finally showed up in the middle of the night, collected all Western passports and transported their “human shields” to an abandoned refinery outside town.

Throughout the months in the ransacked company housing at the refinery, where a community of mostly expatriate families had once worked and lived, Coutre and Williams set daily tasks for themselves.

He collected trash and did his best to sanitize the compound’s conditions. She painstakingly sorted through heaps of picked-over possessions, salvaging papers and photos that scattered residents otherwise might never see again.

Over nearly three months, the small band of several dozen hostages scratched for food, eating weeds from gardens and scavenging whatever canned goods they could find. They read when they could, but concentration was hard, with the nose of an AK-47 never far from sight.

As Christmas approached and Saddam Hussein’s “human shield” ploy failed to undermine international resolve, Coutre and Williams were moved to Baghdad and soon given their freedom. But they were not yet free.

“We’d been focusing on our jobs, careers, making money,” said Coutre. “Neither one of us had been doing much in the volunteer sector.”

“We came back thinking, what’s important is people. I just lost interest in banking and money,” Williams said. “I kept asking myself: What’s the point when all the shouting is over and somebody says, ‘What did you do with your life?’ ”

Williams went back to school. At age 50, he became a paramedic, and now works nights in Brooklyn. Instead of a suit, he wears a bulletproof vest.

The couple returned to Kuwait soon after the war, but they could not go back to the same life.

“Our personal priorities had shifted,” Williams said. “Spending time with family and friends, helping others--that’s what we cared about.”

“That’s what we gained,” Coutre said. “These were the things that were important to us now.”

‘We came through it together.’

When at last Ruthie Schaeffer Al-Qallaf opened the door to her home in Kuwait five years ago, she smelled the fear. She remembered the long nights, scrounging for food. She felt the terror, the desperate yearning for safety.

She and Kazem, her Kuwaiti husband, had lived such a happy life there. It would be happy again, she promised herself. There had been many changes, months of panic and separation. But they’d held together. As a family.

“We’ve come so far and grown so close,” Ruthie Al-Qallaf, 39, said recently from her home in Kuwait. “So many families fell apart. . . . You really have to be a fighter to withstand such a thing.”

The Al-Qallafs were ripped from their foundation, going overnight from a prosperous, peaceful life in the “pearl of the Persian Gulf” to a life on the run. Five weeks in hiding passed before she and her three young children managed to flee, taking refuge with relatives in Memphis, Tenn.

Many more months passed before her husband, a Kuwaiti Air Force major, was able to bribe his way to freedom with $6 and a pack of cigarettes.

“I had very little hope that he’d get out alive,” Ruthie Al-Qallaf said shortly after her husband made his way to Tennessee. “But after all the waiting, waiting day by day, it’s over. We’re going to start over.”

And so they did, beginning with the wartime conception of a baby son. When Iraq surrendered, Ruthie Al-Qallaf, with an infant in her arms, did not hesitate.

It was time to go home.

“Everybody was ready to make a new start, so thankful to have the country back,” she recalled. “Everyone was really coming together, working together.”

Their house had come through the war more or less intact.

But Kuwait, she said, will never be quite the same.

A certain naivete and ease has been lost. A persistent low-grade malaise hangs in the air. The emirate is still limping out of the smoky wreckage and paying staggering wartime bills. This saddens the Al-Qallafs but does not distract them from the central lesson: Family comes first.

“Your priorities change a lot,” said Ruthie Al-Qallaf, getting ready to tuck her children into bed. “You just appreciate human things. You appreciate friendships, smiles from people. Everything else just kind of takes second place.”

‘Did you really learn anything? You hope so, but you don’t know.’

Looking around her living room at the eclectic collection of mementos and Middle Eastern antiques, Katherine Baker strains for a moment, trying to conjure that time when she had no home.

It seems so strangely distant. There was before--the good life here in Kuwait. And after--now--the rebuilding of a good life in Kuwait.

What went in between, though, is somehow difficult to recall. “It’s amazing how the brain lets go,” the gregarious, single 42-year-old said.

“The funny thing is, once it’s over and you’ve gone through it all, you look back and say, ‘That was somewhere else, someone else.’ Did you really learn anything? You hope so, but you don’t know.”

Baker couldn’t bear to look at her place until a month after she got back, in the summer of ’91.

She had been a retail manager happily settled in a pink cinder-block house near the sea, content with her two wrinkle-faced pups, artwork, souvenirs collected over a decade of living abroad.

Her brother, whose home was nearby, was on vacation in France when the Iraqis descended. Disguised in black religious robes, she joined a caravan across the desert to safety. She had a pair of sneakers and one hastily packed bag when she finally made it to her sister’s Indianapolis home.

Much like Kuwait, whose “age of innocence” Katherine says is now gone, her perspective was broadened, deepened, reshaped when Saddam Hussein’s troops crushed her tidy little existence.

“My home was pretty trashed when I got back. They’d stolen or broken most of the nice stuff. They’d urinated everywhere. That was the Iraqis. But a lot of healing began right after the war,” she said.

She never lost faith, or her bearings. That’s not Katherine Baker’s style. But it was a long period of dislocation, months of helpless downtime in which to discover what having a true sense of place really involved.

“These questions preoccupied me most of the time,” said Baker, who ultimately passed most of the Gulf War with her mom in Florida. “With the bad, there was a lot of good. That experience, at my age to spend all those months with family, reflecting, was so neat.”

The changes aren’t obvious, Baker said, pausing to consider them a minute. They are small things, such as the yoga she’s been practicing to combat stress-related allergies that flared during the war. Like photography, a passion once on hold, now back at the fore. Like her steady Arab boyfriend, a serious relationship she might not have taken so seriously a few years ago.

Katherine Baker still takes things as they come, laughing easily, open as her wide, Midwestern grin. But there is something sober in her now.

She’s not sure exactly what she learned from her Gulf War experience. Except that life is short, that no job or antique or piece of real estate sustains.

“I’m trying to get my trunk more deeply rooted in the earth,” she said. “I’m trying to live a life in which I stop and think about things.”