Iraqi POW Comes Home to America : Reunion: When he was 16, Shant Kenderian went back to visit his native Baghdad. Fate, and two wars, intervened. Ten years later, he and his mother are together again in Glendale.

On April 15, a tired and hungry Shant Kenderian walked up to the military information booth at the airport in Norfolk, Va. Unshaven and dressed in a black sweat suit, he appealed to the soldier behind the desk:

“I’ve got a problem. It’s very difficult. I’m going to need help. It’s a long story.”

Looking him over, the soldier asked, “Does it start, ‘Once upon a time . . . ?’ ”

“Yes,” Kenderian replied. “I’m an Iraqi POW. I just arrived from Saudi Arabia. I have no money. I haven’t got an ID. I want to go to L.A.”

He made it the next day.

“He is the first (Iraqi POW who is not an American citizen) to be allowed to return,” says Ann Stingle, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross in Washington. “It just goes to show that the world is so fluid and interdependent now, that this sort of situation does exist.”

Once upon a time. . . .

Shant Kenderian was a schoolboy in Baghdad, growing up in the Armenian Christian community there. His parents divorced, and in 1978, at age 14, he emigrated to America with his mother and brother. They joined his uncles in Chicago, and Shant started high school as a sophomore.

Just before his 17th birthday, he returned to visit his father in Baghdad, arriving on Sept. 14, 1980. One week later, Iraq invaded Iran. Kenderian was trapped; he did not see America again for more than 10 years.

It is a quiet morning on a neat, shady street in Glendale. Roses bloom in the front yard of the little cream-colored stucco house, and an abundance of ceramic penguins, duck and cats play on the lawn. A hand-lettered sign hangs above the front door: “Welcome Home Shant!”

Kenderian comes to the door in white shorts, button-down shirt and running shoes--his clothes and accent as American as the street where he lives.

He then sits in a living room filled with more ceramic animals and figurines that his mother, Janet Harris, has made and tells his strange story. It’s a story in which fate, disguised as Iraqi history, plays a special role.

Maybe not fate.

His mother, still beaming with disbelief that her son has returned, walks through the room and pauses to say, “I was praying the whole time. Only God did this. It’s a miracle.”

If not a miracle, then at least happenstance.

Kenderian notes that, ironically, he was born on Nov. 17, 1963, the night of the revolution--or, more precisely, a revolution--when the Army temporarily overthrew the ruling Baath party. Soldiers searched the hospital, and nurses hid him in a drawer--for reasons he still can’t explain.

“Bad timing,” he offers.

As was his 1980 visit to Iraq.

Technically, Kenderian says, since he had a U.S. residence permit, he could have returned to the United States. But it had expired, he says, and “I was too scared to go to the Embassy. It might have been a risk.”

After getting an engineering degree, he says, he was drafted and sent to Basra, the southern city on the Gulf delta.

“They (Iranian artillery) bombed for 2 1/2 years, every day. It was part of our life to be bombed. . . . No one in my unit died. The bombing was close, and we didn’t even have shelters,” Kenderian recalls. “The people I lost were the ones I missed when I was in the States and wanted to see when I came back. My old friends. They died in the war. But no one in my unit died.”

The war ended in 1988, and he was discharged in 1989. The borders reopened in 1990 and Kenderian went to the American Embassy to reinstate his U.S. residence permit. By then his father had died (in a 1982 car accident) and he was working with relatives in northern Iraq, developing some family property into a resort. The Embassy was crowded with people wanting green cards; appointments were hard to get and the process, Kenderian says, would take five or six appointments.

“I needed time,” he says.

Time, though, was running out.

On Aug. 2, Kenderian saw a friend at the British Consulate who asked him why he wasn’t yet in the United States.

“I’m still working on my green card,” Kenderian remembers replying. “I’ll be there in two weeks.”

“Are you kidding?” the friend answered. “The borders are closed. We invaded Kuwait this morning.”

“When he told me, I thought it was an April Fools’ (joke),” says Kenderian. “But it was August.”

Kenderian quickly wound up back in the Navy, again at Basra. But this time he was trained for landing craft, assigned to a boat that supplied a small Kuwaiti island with food and fuel and ferried passengers.

“The crew changed every month,” he says. “I chose January. I knew the war would start. I was hoping to be captured, but I was actually gambling with my life.”

At midnight on Jan. 23, his boat hit an Iraqi mine. It was burning and sinking, he says. The fire extinguishers had exploded, the pump didn’t work and the dead and injured were all around the survivors as they tried to fight the fire with buckets of water. So nervous were they, he recalls, that most of the water was spilled: “We didn’t know what to do first.”

They threw the ammunition overboard and found a water pump that worked.

Kenderian says he found his commanding officer on the bridge, wounded and dying: “He was like a piece of blood. We had to hold his ribs so he could breathe. After eight hours he died.”

An Iraqi rescue boat came for them in the morning, he says, but U.S. aircraft attacked and disabled the rescue boat. The survivors went overboard; Kenderian was on a life raft when an American frigate picked them up.

He had his bag with him, and when he asked the Americans, “Can I bring this with me?” he says, they were stunned. Once on board, they quickly enlisted him as an interpreter, removing his blindfold and handcuffs.

“The helicopter pilot who’d been shooting at us came and sat down next to me,” Kenderian says. “He wanted to know if he’d killed anyone. He didn’t want to. I told him no, but that he’d almost killed me. We started to develop a friendship. He’s about my age, from California. His name is Todd.”

He spent almost three months in several POW camps in Saudi Arabia, under varying conditions.

Things were best at a camp run by military police, where Kenderian says he became a trusty and had the run of the camp: “They were great. They were from Nebraska. I’m going to visit them as soon as they get back.”

In all the camps he told his story and made his position clear: “ ‘I can’t go back to Iraq. I have no family there. Now that they (Americans) have kept me around them, the Iraqis will think I’m a spy. And you guys think I’m a spy. I can’t go back.’ They understood and they said they’d help.”

Meanwhile, his mother, married to retired Navy man Robert Harris, had been told that her son was a prisoner. She had seen him twice since 1980, during visits to Iraq in 1987 and 1989, and had waited for his return.

Now she began storming heaven and earth. She enlisted the support of her pastor at Angelus Temple, Harold Helms; she wrote and phoned the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia; she contacted the State Department, the Defense Department, the office of her congressman (Carlos J. Moorhead, R-Calif.), and the American Red Cross. All sympathized, helped trace and verify the status of his paperwork, hunted documents and turned on the pressure.

Kenderian was asleep in his tent when the MPs woke him, telling him, “Get your things together. You’re leaving early in the morning and going to the States.”

He was armed with $20 he’d acquired by trading Iraqi money as souvenirs for Americans and with three letters from the American Embassy in Riyadh--one in lieu of a passport, one to use instead of a ticket and a third as a visa. At the airport, a U.S Immigration and Naturalization Service officer handed him a card: “Humanitarian parole” will keep him here until he secures more permanent status.

And once again, he makes plans as an American: A visit with relatives in Chicago and Connecticut, another with his buddy-jailers in Nebraska. He is looking into his prospects in engineering or art and is thinking of writing a book “about this whole thing.”

Once upon a time. . . .