CHANUTE ? Gracia Burnham knew when she met her late husband, Martin, that he was likely headed for missionary work far from Calvary Bible College in Kansas City, Mo., where the two fell in love.

Martin, an adventuresome fellow whom Burnham describes as “a really nice guy who loved people” had already spent most of his life overseas with his missionary parents. As a child, Martin was often transported by plane, “and he decided he wanted to be a pilot for missionaries,” Burnham said.

Burnham, a preacher’s daughter who had moved often while growing up, was game to go along.

“As soon as we got married we started heading for the mission field,” she said. After flight training for Martin and training for the task of proselytizing in remote and dangerous lands, the young couple set off for the Philippine Islands, where Martin had spent most of his childhood.

“For Martin, he was going back home,” Burnham recalled. “He understood the culture, so it made it easy for me to adjust.”

During their first five years in the Philippines, Burnham gave birth to the couple’s three children: Jeff, now 19; Mindy, 16; and Zachary, 15. While she was busy maintaining the family home and schooling the children, Martin was busy piloting mail, supplies and sick or injured people through the jungles. Although the family would return to the United States several times over the next 17 years, “we really loved the Philippines, and that’s where we wanted to stay,” Burnham says.

The couple even decided to spend their 18th wedding anniversary at a rustic resort on Palawan Island. Martin had just returned from the United States but agreed to substitute for another pilot in need; a friend had suggested the Dos Palmas Resort as a place where he could recover from jet lag before embarking on another flight.

“The resort was really too expensive,” Burnham recalled. “But we justified the cost because it was also a time of celebration.”

Just before sunrise on their anniversary, however, the Burnhams were awakened by banging on the door. Before Martin could answer, “three guys with M-16s broke the door in,” Burnham described. “And one of them took Martin right out.”

Burnham dressed quickly in her beach attire from the night before – “just cut off shorts and a T-shirt,” she said – not knowing she would be wearing the outfit for 376 days in the jungle.

“They took about 20 of us from the resort down to waiting speedboats,” Burnham said. The frightened vacationers soon figured out they were the hostages of the Abu Sayyaf Group.

For the next year, Burnham described: “We lived in open jungle. We moved all the time because the Philippine military was looking for us. So we hiked, and we starved and slept on the ground and bathed in rivers when we could. We ate whatever we could find, mostly fruits we would find in the lowlands. But every time the Philippine military would show up, they would take us into the hills where there was little or no food.”

Finally, after more than a year, the Abu Sayyaf Group was defeated. During that final battle, Burnham was shot in the leg but was freed. Martin, though, was killed.

Soon after, Burnham, of Rose Hill, Kan., wrote a book about the capture and yearlong captivity, titled “In The Presence of My Enemies.”

“I never planned on doing that,” she said. “But people kept saying to me, ‘We would love to hear your story because we were praying for you, and we want to know what was going on at the other end, to see how God was answering our prayers.’ After hearing that so many times, I thought maybe I should.”

“Besides,” Burnham continued. “While we were out there Martin would say, ‘Do you think this would make a good book?’ I could always see him writing a book in his head. So I felt like I could do that for him.”

At the request of her publisher and encouragement from friends, Burnham also wrote a second book with ghost writer Dean Merrill, “To Fly Again.”

“I didn’t feel I have anything else to say,” she said. “But people were curious about how (the experience) had changed me and what I had taken away from it all.” “To Fly Again” is about “what’s really important in life, like your attitude, and about forgiveness,” she said.