Exiled Kuwaiti Pilots Reluctantly Bomb Homeland to Help Free It : Military: The remnants of the tiny air force have won the respect of fliers from other allied countries.

DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia —  Night after night, the people who have the biggest stake in the defeat of Iraq watch transfixed as the television screen shows allied fighter bombers screaming into the darkness--destination Kuwait.

They fall silent, hunched forward in their chairs that are drawn into a semi-circle. Kuwait, their homeland, has been punished as no place on Earth, first by the invading Iraqis who raped and pillaged and killed, and now by one of the greatest armadas of air power ever assembled.

The Kuwaitis wince as television announcers speak of the destruction of Kuwait and video footage shows plumes of smoke rising from across the Saudi border. But almost everyone, even the Kuwaiti pilots dropping bombs on their homeland, accepts an old Vietnam contradiction to explain the future: Kuwait, they say, may have to be destroyed in order to be saved.

“It won’t be our home if we don’t bomb it,” says Lt. Talal Mudhar, who drops 500-pound bombs on his country from one of the A-4 Skyhawks that Kuwait managed to salvage from the Iraqi invasion. “We’re not too happy about it. It’s not something anybody would like to do, really--bomb their own country.

“If we’re asked to do something worse than attack the Iraqis, we would (do it) to get our land back . . . even if there’s nothing left. It hurts. But you know the end result will be good. You’ll have a place to be. You can live somewhere you’d be proud of. . . . It’s better than not having a country.”

On the fuselages of the Kuwaiti planes are stenciled the words FREE KUWAIT.

The remnants of the tiny Kuwaiti air force have earned the respect of allied pilots, who find it difficult to imagine what it must be like to bomb one’s own home.

“You gotta have sympathy,” said Capt. Mike Kennedy, an American F-15 pilot. “How would you feel, wherever you’re from, having to go in there and bomb your own country? Bomb your own buildings. Bomb what you’ve paid a lot of money for, a lot of time to build up. And now you’re going in there and taking it down. It can’t be fun.”

One Kuwaiti pilot, Maj. Ala Sayegh, who is the father of five young children, found himself bombing not just his country, but the very block on which his home was located.

“It is bad enough dropping bombs on your country,” he said, “but next to your home is agonizing. I knew my family was hiding inside, but what could I do?”

Kuwaiti military officers and civilian exiles in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province paint an increasingly grim picture of life inside Kuwait. Iraqi deserters roam Kuwait city in large numbers, food and water is running low, public phone communications have been cut.

“We worry about what will happen to Kuwait because no one wanted a war, but we don’t have any choice except bombing,” said Waleed, a 21-year-old Kuwaiti who didn’t want his last name used because two of his brothers are held prisoner in Iraq. He wears a lapel button that says, “I Support the Troops.”

“I pray Kuwait city won’t be destroyed, but if that is the price we have to pay, we will pay it,” he said.

In Kuwait’s Ministry of Information office in Dhahran, the wall is covered with bumper stickers: “To Kuwait Any Day Now” and “Kuwait--Small but Not Alone.” Near the door is a map of Kuwait city, showing its six ring roads and Arabian Gulf Street that skirts the Kuwait Hyatt Regency Hotel and the Al Beda Sea Club.

One of the men there, Wael Abdul Rahman, said that even if the bombing levels Kuwait, “we’re ready to take back just our flat desert and rebuild from the beginning.”

Sakr al Boaijan, who worked in the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information before Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion, said he had expected the bombing campaign and believes that a ground war will be necessary to dislodge the Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

“I don’t see (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein withdrawing,” he said. “But maybe something unexpected will happen and Kuwait won’t have to be destroyed. Something unexpected could happen, you know. This is the Middle East.”

This article was written in part from correspondent pool reports cleared by U.S. and Saudi military censors.