A Hostage to Her Memories

By Stephanie Simon

May 13, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

ROSE HILL, Kan. — Gracia Burnham picked up her daughter’s backpack and slung it across her shoulder. The memory hit with such force it knocked her back -- back a year, back to the jungle.

For a moment, she was again a hostage, marching at gunpoint up a mountain -- filthy, famished, hauling uncooked rice in an old green pack. The flashback dissolved. She was again in Kansas. She continued walking toward her minivan.

Gracia Burnham does not let her memories haunt her. But she cannot erase that year of terror.

For 376 days, she and her husband, Martin, were held hostage by Muslim militants in the wilds of the Philippines. After months of failed negotiations, the Philippine Army staged a rescue raid last June. In the chaos, the soldiers shot and killed Martin. Gracia returned alone to their three children to face the challenges of a very different world.

It’s been a year now, and the Burnhams are still struggling to accept their new life here, under the broad prairie sky. They miss the father, the husband they buried. They ache for a home left behind.

Martin Burnham was a missionary pilot, delivering mail and supplies to those who spread the Gospel in the Philippines. The kids grew up flying in their dad’s red and white Cessna to the mahogany forests or the beaches, to mountain villages brushed by clouds. They rode motorbikes to the waterfall. In the warm dusk, they played soccer with their parents.

Life here is different. It feels splintered.

“There’s always some place to run off to,” Gracia said -- a game, a practice, a lesson. “Americans stay busy all the time. There’s no end to it.”

Mindy, 13, misses helping her mom make homemade pizza from scratch. They don’t seem to have time in Kansas.

Zach, 12, misses the river. He misses his inner tube. “I don’t fit in here,” he said. “I’m different.”

During the year his parents were held captive, Jeff, 16, taped all his football games. He couldn’t wait to show them to his dad. Now, he says, sports are stupid. All he wants is to learn to fly.

The Burnhams have all they need in Kansas -- more than they ever had before. The community of Rose Hill built them an airy brick house on Primrose Lane. A local dealer donated a new Dodge Caravan. Just the other day, landscapers came by, unbidden, to lay down sod. Gracia is grateful. But she also feels disoriented.

She and Martin dedicated their lives to serving others. Now, she is the one being served. Strangers have bought them furniture, cooked them meals. Gracia says she feels “humbled.” And so alone.

“All kinds of people say, ‘If you ever need anything, call me.’ But that doesn’t take care of the loneliness in my heart.”

She folds the laundry. She buys the groceries. She goes shopping for antiques with friends. Now and then, though, she longs for the quiet she had in the Philippines, the time to reflect and to pray. She drives to the Wal-Mart parking lot and sits alone, singing hymns.

“Do I wish Martin were here? Of course I do,” she said. “But the truth is, he’s better off than we are. Why would he want to come back here? To pay the bills? To take out the trash?”

Gracia has kept the notes she and Martin wrote during their captivity on any scrap of paper they could scrounge -- once, even, on a leaf.

Martin jotted lists of chores awaiting him back home. Gracia wrote out recipes. Martin described the heavy chain his captors used to lock him to a tree each night. Gracia wrote of the sores that plagued her mouth.

She has preserved the ragged journal entries in protective plastic sleeves. They’re in a drawer with the candy wrappers Martin held to his nose when he felt dizzy from hunger.

A year ago, on May 3, she wrote: “My tongue hurts. The dried fish is very salty. Miss my family so much I hurt.”

On May 10, Martin added: “First night in three we’ve been outside. Hope it won’t rain. Hope for some more food.”

“It can be a shock,” Gracia said, “to remember.”

Nightmarish Odyssey

Martin and Gracia Burnham were celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary at a Philippine resort when three men pointing M-16s burst into their beach cabin at dawn. It was May 27, 2001.

Herded onto a speedboat with 18 other hostages, the Burnhams learned they were captives of the Abu Sayyaf, a guerrilla force fighting a “holy war” against the Philippine government.

Their captors described themselves as “the Osama bin Laden group”; that name meant nothing to the Burnhams at the time. The guerrillas said their goal was to build a pure Islamic state, like the Taliban in Afghanistan. Failing that, they explained, they’d like to go to America and find jobs.

So began a nightmarish odyssey. On the run from the Philippine Army, the Abu Sayyaf marched their captives through the jungle after dark. Martin was handcuffed most of the time. Gracia was ordered to haul ammunition for the terrorists.

“For more than a year, I couldn’t make any choices for myself at all,” Gracia, 44, recalled, sitting on her deck in Kansas in a warm spring breeze. “It was, ‘You sit here. You pee there. You sleep here.’ ” When she got back, the simple act of picking out salad dressing at the market overwhelmed her.

Within a week of the hostage-taking, the Abu Sayyaf had killed two Filipino captives and released several others for ransom. On June 11, they beheaded the only other American in the group, tourist Guillermo Sobero, a contractor from Southern California.

By late fall, the only hostages left were the Burnhams and Ediborah Yap, a Filipino nurse. (Yap, a mother of four, would be killed with Martin in the rescue.)

There were long stretches of starvation -- nine days, once, without a meal. Gracia would chew on plants. Then her captors would stumble upon a village sympathetic to their cause and commandeer supplies.

Gracia and Martin reminded themselves often that the terrorists were the “bad guys.” But the “good guys,” the Philippine Army, scared them more. The Burnhams feared if soldiers discovered them, they would be trapped in the middle of a gunfight. As the months wore on, their captors gave them yet another reason to be wary of the “good guys.” They told Gracia that the Army was supplying them with guns and ammunition.

During their year in captivity, the Burnhams received several care packages from missionary friends in Manila, who had found emissaries to carry mail to the Abu Sayyaf’s jungle camps. New eyeglasses for Martin arrived, and two boxes of sanitary napkins for Gracia.

An Abu Sayyaf commander confiscated the Cheese Whiz in one package because he liked it so much. The Snickers bars also disappeared. But the Burnhams did get toothbrushes, deodorant, peanut butter, dried soup -- and, most precious, letters from their children, who had been sent out of the Philippines to live with their grandparents in Kansas.

In July, two months after they were taken, the Burnhams heard from Zach: “We went to Wal-Mart today. It is fun here. We bought two computer games.”

Mindy described her visit to an animal clinic, where she fell in love with a cat who purred on her lap. “I just want you to know I am praying for you,” she wrote.

“Hey my cool parents,” Jeff, the oldest, wrote. “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

Martin and Gracia got another packet of letters just before Christmas. Then the Abu Sayyaf took them deeper into hiding. An anonymous benefactor, contacted by Gracia’s parents, paid a $330,000 ransom. The Abu Sayyaf celebrated with fried chicken. Still, they would not free the missionaries. They were holding out for $1 million.

Gracia thought she could hear God laughing at her. She left Martin’s side and sat in the long grass for hours, weeping.

“I’ve tried to be a good hostage and be patient and where has it gotten me? 8 1/2 months and still here,” she wrote on Feb. 11, Jeff’s 15th birthday. “God is pleased to make me suffer and I’m tired of it.... So I ask you, why keep going? My heart is tired of being smashed.”

After several days of misery, Gracia told herself she had a choice. She could let resentment rule her. Or she could embrace the faith that had been her life’s work.

“I could be mad at the Abu Sayyaf and a lot of people would back me up, would tell me I have every right to be bitter,” she said. “But I can’t live that way.”

A New Philosophy

When she got to Kansas, Gracia began carrying a tape recorder to capture the memories that threatened to overwhelm her. Sitting in the bleachers at her son’s football practice, she talked through the terror and the tedium of her captivity.

She described how she and Martin fashioned dental floss from stringy rice sacks. She talked about the intestinal disorders that left them weak from diarrhea. She recalled the day she was so hungry she caught a small fish with her bare hands -- and swallowed it whole.

Those tapes provided the outline for Gracia’s newly released book, “In the Presence of My Enemies.” Profits will benefit the Martin and Gracia Burnham Foundation, which she established to support Christian outreach around the world.

Mindy is glad the book is finished. Her mom has been working too hard. She hopes now they can put the trauma of the last two years behind them.

“I just want to forget,” Mindy said.

Before she and Martin vanished into the jungle, Gracia was the tough parent. She home-schooled the kids and always pushed them hard. In captivity, she regretted all the nagging.

“I’m definitely learning patience. Please, God, let me go home so I can practice patience with the children,” she wrote on March 17.

“If I could tell people on the outside anything today, it would be to enjoy life,” she wrote on April 29. “Don’t take it so seriously. Don’t work your tail off.”

In freedom, Gracia has taken that philosophy to heart. She no longer gets on the kids to clean their rooms. She lets them watch “X2: X-Men United” on a school night last week. “If you didn’t do your homework because you were having fun the night before, that’s OK,” she told them. “It’s no big deal.” She doesn’t even mind if they’re late to church.

On the wall of his room, Jeff has a poster of a red and white Cessna flying above the glossy green of jungle trees. He’d like to go back to the Philippines. So would Mindy and Zach.

So would Gracia. But she can’t see how to return. “I was a missionary pilot’s wife; I was good at that,” she said. “I don’t know what I would do now.” Other missionary work, she said, would take her away too much from her family: “I have to pour all my energy into the kids.”

So she folds the laundry and buys the groceries and reminds Zach to return his overdue video games.

When she rolls over in bed at night, she gives thanks that she’s no longer sleeping on a hammock in the jungle, squeezed so tightly against Martin that their hips have rubbed raw. When a helicopter rattles overhead, she takes pleasure in standing tall; no more crouching behind a bush terrified that the Philippine Army might spot her.

When she slings Mindy’s backpack over her shoulder, she pauses, swept away by the flashback. Then Gracia straightens.

“I don’t have to hike up a hill in the jungle,” she reminds herself. “I just have to walk across the parking lot.”