"We were 6-7 when I came here Dec. 10," he was saying over the phone. "Now we're 11 and 11."

Almost a year after Saddam Hussein refused to acknowledge Kuwait's basketball victory, Iraqi tanks were rumbling through Kuwait City past Jim Calvin's apartment. From his balcony, he said, he could see Iraqi soldiers killing and torturing its citizens.

"My basketball captain," he said, "was executed before 40 people because the Iraqis knew he was an athlete. To them, an athlete represented Kuwait's future."

While on the phone with one of his two sons in Texas, he could hear gunfire and explosions in the streets below his apartment when the line suddenly went dead.

"The last thing my son heard was the gunfire," Calvin said. "He didn't know what to think. Then he got a call from the State Department that we were hostages in Baghdad, then another call that we were missing. He didn't know for seven days that we were safe."

Driving through the desert to Saudi Arabia, instead of coming to a stop at the checkpoints, Calvin told his wife, "Get down on the floorboards" and sped past the Iraqi soldiers, who in the sweltering August heat didn't bother to chase them.

"But at one checkpoint," he said, "there were five cars lined up. We were third when the soldier checking the first car went around to the driver's side. I pulled out and took off."

Once across the unguarded Saudi Arabia border, Calvin drove to Dahran, where he had to sign a promissory note for $4,800 at the American Embassy to obtain airline tickets back to the United States for him and his wife.