ZAMBOANGA, Philippines ? Martin and Gracia Burnham led a frugal missionary life, spreading the Gospels among the tribes of the northern Philippines, but for their 18th wedding anniversary they splurged on a weekend at an island resort.

The idyllic getaway ended just before dawn on a Sunday morning, when kidnappers kicked in the door of their white bungalow. For the couple from Wichita, Kan., a yearlong nightmare began in which they would dodge death in at least 16 gunbattles.

Missionary Gracia Burnham is welcomed home by her son, Zach, 11, and other family members and friends. She arrived June 10 at Kansas City International Airport. Burnham and her husband, Martin, had been held hostage for more than a year in the Philippines by members of the extremist Abu Sayyaf group. Martin Burnham was killed in the rescue attempt.

As weeks turned into months, they marked their birthdays and those of their three children amid constant fear. There were forced marches through Philippine tropical jungle. Some hostages were beheaded or shot; others escaped or were ransomed. Time and again the Burnhams saw their hopes for freedom dashed.

On June 7, after firefight No. 17, Gracia was finally free, shot in the thigh and weeping over her family photos as a helicopter flew her away. Lying dead in the mud and pouring rain were three kidnappers and two hostages a Filipino nurse named Ediborah Yap, and Martin Burnham. He was 42.

Nightmare begins

It could be called a rolling kidnap. For months the Muslim rebels of Abu Sayyaf, a group with ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, had been terrorizing the island region 550 miles south of Manila, seizing hostages, killing some, losing others, grabbing more. In all, 102 people had been held for anywhere from a few days to the Burnhams’ one year and two weeks.

Criminal gangs, emboldened by Abu Sayyaf’s success, began snatching other foreigners an Italian priest, two Chinese engineers, a Briton. Some got out alive; others didn’t.

Abu Sayyaf is rooted among the Muslim separatists in the southern islands, which seek to secede from the rest of the predominantly Catholic Philippines. But Abu Sayyaf has turned increasingly to banditry for profit. In 2000, its men snatched foreign tourists from a Malaysian resort, releasing them for millions of dollars in ransoms after negotiations involving Libya and Malaysia.

The Burnhams had been in the Philippines since 1986, serving Sanford, Fla.-based New Tribes Mission. They were kidnapped May 27 last year. Then came Sept. 11, the world changed, and a few months later America took its war on terrorism to the Philippines.

‘Pray for us?’

The kidnappers, dressed as soldiers, took the guards by surprise at the Dos Palmas resort just off the southwestern Philippine island of Palawan. They swiftly gathered up 20 tourists and resort staffers and, without a shot being fired, vanished across the Sulu Sea on speedboats.

Abducted with the Burnhams was Guillermo Sobero, a Peruvian-American who lived in Corona, Calif. The rest of the captives were Filipinos. There were women and two crying children among the hostages, some of whom had to sit on boxes of rockets as the boats sped to the kidnappers’ island base of Basilan.

Days later, the hostages were seen on predominantly Muslim Basilan, a mountainous province of 330,000 people with dense jungle and mangrove swamps that the guerrillas knew well.

Shortly after landing their human cargo, the kidnappers clashed with troops in a chance encounter. With some of their men wounded, they dragged their captives into a hospital and church compound in the coastal town of Lamitan. The rebels damaged the church and ransacked the hospital for medicine.

From left, Jeff, Zach and Mindy Burnham hold up a Father's Day greeting for their father, Martin, in this June 2001 file photo. The picture was shot less than a month after he and his wife, Gracia, were kidnapped by the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. The Burnhams were held for more than a year. On June 7, Martin was killed but Gracia was rescued from the Abu Sayyaf.

Troops bombarded the compound from the ground and helicopters, and it seemed the hostage crisis might end quickly. The walls shook and rebels, hostages and patients took cover under hospital cots. A Roman Catholic priest, Rene Enriquez, had been taken at gunpoint from the nearby convent. He said Gracia Burnham asked him in a shaking voice: “Can you pray for us so that we will be saved?”

‘Never let go’

That night, the rebels fled through a back door with some new hostages. The escape would spark an inconclusive Philippines congressional investigation into allegations that troops had been bribed to let them go.

Troops later found the decapitated bodies of two of the resort workers, apparently killed in the jungle before the hospital siege. A third managed to escape with a gouge in his neck.

Soon the body count was rising to the point where reports of headless bodies turning up on Basilan were almost commonplace. On June 12, the Philippines’ independence day, the kidnappers beheaded Sobero, the Peruvian-American. Abu Sabaya, the kidnappers’ leader who is always seen wearing sunglasses, called it an “Independence Day gift” to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo after she ignored his demands to negotiate.

The abductors sought $1 million for each of the Burnhams, according to local officials.

The Philippine army mounted several unsuccessful rescue attempts. Martin’s hand was constantly cuffed to a dog chain held by a rebel guard or tied to a tree. In every hail of gunfire, “Martin would grab Gracia by the hand as they ran for cover. He would never let go, even if his other hand was being pulled and strained by a rebel guard chained to him,” said Reina Malonzo, a nurse held hostage for five months until she was freed last November.

“They were always praying,” she said.

Keeping faith

The kidnappers seized the rosaries of the Christian captives and wouldn’t let them pray. So Martin and others devised hand signals to start silent group prayers, said accounting clerk Joel Guillo, an escaped hostage.

Martin, once burly but now thinning, was forever plotting an escape with his wife and other captives but never got the chance, Guillo said.

“He would tell me, ‘I’m ready to die because I would go to heaven,”‘ Guillo said.

The Burnhams’ ordeal was a story of love and religious faith in the midst of death, their greatest sustenance the family photos they had with them when they were kidnapped.

Gracia, 43, wept often and worried about her children, said Sheila Tabunyag, another kidnapped nurse freed in November.

“Gracia always set a ‘goal’ of being freed every other two months. Before I was released, she told me her final goal was to be freed on or before Dec. 25, and she would not make a wish again after that,” Malonzo said.

The children, Jeff, 15, Mindy, 12, and Zach, 11, were living with their grandparents in Rose Hill, Kan. When Martin turned 42 last year, their birthday greeting to him was broadcast on local radio, Tabunyag recalled.

“We asked if he’d heard them,” she said. Martin mumbled that he had not, and grew tearful.

Seeing them on TV

Malonzo said that when word of the Sept. 11 attacks came over the kidnappers radios, they erupted in yells of “Allahu Akbar!” God is great. The Burnhams were stunned, she said, with Gracia softly asking other hostages, “How can they rejoice over that?”

In November, freelance journalist Arlyn de la Cruz used her close contacts with Abu Sayyaf to obtain the first interview with the Burnhams. On the videotape, the terrified couple talked of their brushes with illness and gunfire.

Wearing a white Muslim-style head covering, Gracia, her eyes swollen, looked frightened. She said she was recently roused from sleep by severe chest pains.

“It takes me days to recover every time I hear even a twig snap,” she said, trying to suppress sobs. “I think it’s a gunshot. I wake up hearing gunshots in the middle of the night.”

The couple said they were living on scarce supplies of cassava and bananas and had mouth sores from lack of nutrients. They displayed a jar of Skippy peanut butter sent by friends.

Martin, in a heavy red beard, appeared more composed as he worried about their children.

Back in Kansas, the children would occasionally see their parents on TV. Letters from captivity arrived sporadically, then stopped a few months ago.

In a letter sometime in February, Martin wrote to Jeff, his oldest son: “I wanted to watch the World Series, then the Super Bowl with you … but I don’t even know who played. Isn’t that funny?” He wished Jeff a happy 15th birthday.

‘Operation Daybreak’

Early this year, military officials said that after an offensive by thousands of soldiers on Basilan, Abu Sayyaf was down to fewer than 100 fighters.

More than 1,000 U.S. soldiers from the Special Forces, engineers and support units were deployed near Abu Sayyaf strongholds in what officials said was a counterterrorism exercise but which many believed was largely aimed at helping to free the American hostages.

Gradually, the captives were killed, escaped or were ransomed. Finally, only the Burnhams and the nurse, Ediborah Yap, were left.

With night-vision goggles, helicopters, guns and aircraft surveillance provided by the United States, Filipino soldiers were running Abu Sayyaf out of Basilan. The men holding the Burnhams escaped by boat to nearby Zamboanga del Norte province. So a secret U.S.-Philippine plan, “Operation Daybreak,” was devised to pursue them near the coastal town of Sirawai.

Military officials said the group, now numbering fewer than 20 men, had lost their advantage by leaving Basilan, where they knew the terrain and had some support in the Muslim population.

In the end, it wasn’t the high-tech equipment that made the difference. A villager, who was supposed to deliver $10 worth of bread and peanut butter to the kidnappers, was taken into custody and talked. Then a local militiaman helped the troops track the rebels by following their muddy footprints in the jungle.

As a downpour concealed their advance on June 7, three dozen Philippine army scout rangers slowly crept down a jungle ravine toward a huddle of tents containing the Burnhams, Yap and their captors.

A soldier radioed back to base, “Bull’s-eye, sir, we’ve found the group.”

Was it worth it?

From a wheelchair, Gracia broke into sobs while recalling her final moment in captivity to the family of Ediborah Yap.

The Filipino troops exchanged automatic and M-203 grenade fire with the rebels for 20 minutes. Gracia said the bullet that hit her right thigh threw her off a hammock and onto the grassy slope. She faintly heard Yap yelling the name of Martin, who was hit in the first volley.

It isn’t clear which side fired the fatal shots, and no investigation is known to have been ordered. U.S. officials have said it doesn’t matter because Martin clearly died because of the Abu Sayyaf abduction.

With two hostages dead and the other wounded, the question inevitably arose: Was it worth it?

“In any gunfight, things can happen bad,” said Brig. Gen. Donald Wurster, who heads the U.S. troops in the Philippines.

“I’ve told my people not to be disheartened by that, that Mrs. Burnham will have the opportunity to go home and raise her children, and that’s an important piece of this.”

Martin’s body was flown back to Kansas for burial Friday. As for the rebels, they are depleted by deaths, defections and arrests, and on the run with no more hostages to serve as human shields.

But in a part of the Philippines wracked by poverty and unfulfilled promises of government help, no one is writing them off.

Wednesday was Independence Day again, and President Arroyo raised the Philippine flag in Lamitan, the town where the kidnappers had skirmished with troops in the hospital a year before.

In a speech, she said guns alone wouldn’t defeat the guerrillas jobs, food and education would.

“Unless all these are comprehensively addressed,” she warned, “impoverished and disillusioned communities will continue to be the recruitment grounds for the evil of terrorism.”