In the Presence of My Enemies (34 page)

As we hiked, we came to yet another logging road. Since it had been raining, we couldn’t help but leave tracks in the mud. I appealed to Sarin again. “Is there any way you could talk to the guys and point out how dangerous it is to be on these roads?”

He ignored me. Again, we waited until dark to cross.

When I got to the other side, I misstepped and fell about three feet down into some of the slash. A couple of others did the same. As I worked my way back up, I scraped my back and wrenched my arm. Nevertheless, we kept walking, eventually crossing a river before we were allowed to stop, totally exhausted, around two or three in the morning.

There was no moon; it was an especially dark night. We couldn’t see what we were doing. We put up our hammocks as best we could and lay down to rest.

I thought we would at least get to finish the night there. But an hour or so later, we were aroused to get moving again. “Dawn is coming soon, and we have to be out of here.” We were groggy and disoriented as we fumbled around in the darkness for our belongings.

On the trail Ediborah said to me, “I felt really alone last night. Nobody helped me set up my hammock, and I couldn’t find two trees that were close enough. I just had to sleep on the ground.”

“Oh, Ediborah, I’m so sorry that happened,” I told her. “You’re really all alone, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Actually, that wasn’t the worst of it. I ended up on an anthill. I didn’t sleep at all.”

After the sun had come up, we ran into, of all things, a farm! It had nangka trees and marang and coconut. Soon we were all shoving this unripe fruit into our mouths as fast as we could and drinking the coconut milk. We gorged ourselves, then hit the road once again.

About eight that morning, we stopped to set up our hammocks. Apparently our captors intended to spend the day in this place. Up on the hill, we could see the logging road we had crossed. A truck came along. It stopped at a point I calculated to be about where we had been during the night. We could hear voices talking excitedly, and then some shouting.

“Pack up! Pack up!” came the order. Soon we were on the move once again, up, down, up, down. We came to a couple more farms, then some swamps.

I remember saying to Martin that day for about the five hundredth time, “I just don’t think I can keep doing this much longer. I can’t take this anymore.”

And he answered, like so often before, “You know, Gracia, I just think we’re going to get out of here soon. I think this is all going to work out. After we’re home, this is going to seem like such a short time to us. Let’s just hold steady.”

At about twelve or twelve-thirty we could see a rain front moving in. The Abu Sayyaf began looking for another place to stop. We crested a mountain and started down the other side toward a little stream. The slope was very steep—maybe as much as forty degrees. From top to bottom, its length was no more than a city block, with low vegetation covering it. We brought out our hammocks once again.

It was June 7. “You know, tomorrow is my brother Paul’s birthday,” I said as we worked to get the hammock set up.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Martin replied, with a long look at me.

Neither of us said any more. We both knew what the other was thinking:
Wouldn’t it be nice to be out for that, so we could give Paul a call?
But by now, there was no point in verbalizing such wishes. We let the matter drop.

We also put up our
tolda,
as it looked like the rain would start at any moment. Ediborah was having trouble again finding suitable trees.

“Can I help you?” Martin asked.

“No, I think I just found a place. I’ll be okay.” She was up the hill and a little to our right.

We sat in the hammock a minute. Martin was in a reflective mood. He said, “I really don’t know why this has happened to us. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Psalm 100—what it says about serving the Lord with gladness. This may not seem much like serving the Lord, but that’s what we’re doing, you know? We may not leave this jungle alive, but we can leave this world serving the Lord ‘with gladness’; we can ‘come before his presence with singing’ [Psalm 100:2,
KJV
].”

We prayed together then, something we did often. There was nothing else to do; we were totally dependent upon the Lord. We thanked the Lord for bringing us this far safely, and of course we begged him to get us home and back to our kids. We told him we wanted to keep serving him with gladness.

Martin had a toenail that had become ingrown. He borrowed a knife from the guys nearby and worked on his nail for a while. It gave me the creeps to watch him. But he said it started to feel better.

We returned the knife to the guys and then decided to lie down for a nap. It was starting to rain. We had just closed our eyes when a fearsome barrage of gunfire cut loose from the crest of the hill. The AFP? Surely not! It was raining, and they never fought in the rain.

“Oh, God!” I said. I wasn’t swearing; I was honestly praying. My instincts, after sixteen previous battles, told me instantly what to do:
drop immediately.
I flipped my feet around to get out of the hammock—and before I even hit the ground, I felt the
zing!
of a bullet slamming through my right leg.

I rolled down the steep hill maybe eight feet, dazed. I looked up and saw Martin on the ground, too, so I quickly crawled to his side. He was kind of twisted, with his legs underneath his body. His eyes were closed. He was wearing a white Suzuki shirt with blue sleeves. Then I saw it: the blood was beginning to soak through his shirt from his upper left chest.
Oh no!
I thought.
He’s been hit, too.

Shots continued to ring out. The Abu Sayyaf were just getting themselves positioned to start firing back. Martin’s breathing was heavy, almost a soft snore. He lay quietly on his back and partly on his side; he was so still that I refrained from yelling about my wound, which is what I normally would have done.

“Mart!” I heard Ediborah yell from where she was, just one time. Then nothing more. It was the last word she ever said.

I thought to myself,
If the Abu Sayyaf see that I’m wounded but still alive, they’ll drag me down the hill, and I’ll have to walk while wounded.
So I deliberately tried to lie still and look dead. Martin had taught me to focus my mind in a firefight, to hang on tightly to my emotions, and I knew that now, more than ever, I needed to do just that.

Once in a while, he moaned softly. I didn’t say anything to him but just focused on being still. The shooting continued. Grenades blew up. Each moment was going to be my last, I was sure.
Lord, if this is it, just make it happen quickly for me,
I prayed. The battle raged. The pain in my leg was not as severe as the terror in my heart. I forced myself to keep lying still.

Several minutes passed. Then without warning I felt Martin’s body become heavy and sort of sag against mine.

Is he dead?
I wondered. I had no experience by which to judge.
Maybe he just passed out.

The shooting gradually became more sporadic and then finally stopped. At the top of the ridge I heard shouting in Tagalog, the language of the AFP. No sounds came from the bottom, however, which told me that the Abu Sayyaf had fled down the streambed.

I didn’t want to startle anyone who might be nearby, so I slowly moved my hand to signal that I was still alive. Immediately an AFP soldier spotted me. He and his partner ran down and tried to pick me up, one by lifting my shoulders, the other my ankles. I cried out in pain. So they let me down again, and both took a shoulder to pull me back toward our hammock and
tolda.
In the wetness they couldn’t get a good grip on me, and their feet were slipping as well.

I looked back at where Martin still lay. The red spot on his shirt was larger now. His complexion was pasty white. And then I knew—the man I loved more than anyone in the world was gone.

* * *

I wanted to stop the world in that moment, to reflect on my dreadful loss, to mourn the senseless death of my wonderful husband. Unfortunately, circumstances demanded otherwise. I had to think about getting myself off this mountain alive.

I gazed upward at our
tolda.
It had been riddled with bullet holes. As we had feared for so long, the AFP had come upon us with all barrels blazing.

“Did you get Sabaya?” I asked.

“Yeah, we think so. The one with the long hair?”

“No—that’s Lukman. Sabaya was under the green
tolda
over there. Check that one.”

A search revealed that he had gotten away.

The soldiers yelled up the slope for more help in moving me. Somehow we reached the top of the hill.

There I remembered the green backpack. It was still back by our hammock and it had all the notes we had written, the letters to the children, the stories. “Go get that green bag,” I said. “I’ve got to have that.”

The soldiers looked at me like I was crazy.

“Go get that green bag!” I insisted. “It has letters from Martin to our children. It will be the only thing they have left from their dad. You have to get it!”

One of the soldiers said to me, “Oh, Martin’s okay. . . .”

I stared back at him. “Martin is
dead.
All the kids are going to have left is what he’s written to them in the green bag.
Please
go get it!”

At that, one of them disappeared over the ridge. In a minute, he came back with the precious bag. I reached out to touch it, but they wouldn’t let me. “We have to go over it for intelligence,” someone said, which I thought was ridiculous.

There was some arguing about when I would get the papers inside. I locked eyes with one soldier whose English was pretty good. “Do you swear you’ll get those letters to me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”

By this time, the medic was starting to cut off my wet
pantos.
I leaned back to close my eyes. Suddenly I was so exhausted, I just wanted to close my eyes and drift off into sleep.

“Oh, no, don’t go to sleep,” I heard someone say. “Stay awake.”

The medic looked at me with a big smile and announced in heavily accented English, “I am the medic, and you are my first patient!” His hands were shaking. He proceeded to wrap some cloth around my wounds and then pronounced cheerfully, “Okay, you’re all right! Do you need anything else?”

I stared blankly at him. “Do you have a Tylenol?” I asked him.

“Sure, okay.” He didn’t even have medicine with him, so he began asking around. Somebody came up with some mefenamic acid, an anti-inflammatory drug, which I took.

Somebody else brought dry clothes for me. Soon I was told, “A helicopter is coming for you.”

I looked up at the rain still coming down. “A helicopter can’t come right now,” I said. “The ridges aren’t clear, and it’s raining.”

They looked at me as if to say,
What do you know, lady?
They didn’t realize I was a pilot’s wife who had tracked the weather for hundreds of flights in my life. I knew it wasn’t safe for a helicopter to operate under these conditions.

“No, no, for you the helicopter will come,” someone answered.

“No! Please don’t call one,” I pleaded. “The pilot can’t see what he’s doing, and I don’t want anyone else to lose their life today. Let’s just wait.” Nevertheless, the helicopter was already on its way.

The soldiers were clearly upset, realizing that in their rescue attempt, they had shot all three hostages. Several of them were smoking to calm their nerves.
I can’t go to sleep, and I can’t fall apart here,
I told myself.
I’ve made it this far.
I tried to remember Martin’s words from so many times before: “You can do this, Gracia. You’ve got to go home whole.”

Eventually, the lieutenant in charge came over to talk with me.

“Mrs. Burnham, I know that you’re probably very angry with us,” he said. “But we were just doing our jobs.”

“I know,” I replied. “We never forgot who the bad guys were and who the good guys were. I don’t think of you as the bad guys.”

In a moment, I continued. “How did you find us?”

“We’ve been following you all day. We saw your tracks where you crossed the logging road last night.”

I knew it! We hadn’t been careful enough.

I told them how hungry we were after so many days without food.

“Yeah, we saw where you ate your breakfast this morning at the farm. We just kept tracking you.”

A little later, I heard the
chop-chop-chop
of a helicopter rotor. The ridges had cleared, and a little patch of blue was starting to peek through the clouds. “Now close your eyes, because it’s going to be very windy,” someone said. “We don’t want you to get anything in your eyes.”

Soon they were carrying me in a
malong
to the floor of the chopper. There I opened my eyes. I looked at the pilot, hoping he was an American, but I couldn’t tell. Several of the soldiers wounded in the battle were already sitting on the seats. They strapped me down and closed the door.

But wait! What about Martin’s body? Was I just going to be whisked away and leave my husband on this soggy hillside?
This can’t be. . . .
I leaned back and sadly realized that in my physical condition, I had no other choice. We pulled away into the sky, leaving my best friend lying in the rain.

20

The Embassy

(June 7–10, 2002)

In less than thirty minutes, the Black Hawk set down at an airport in Zamboanga City, and my world instantly changed from rugged jungle to paved runways, modern terminal buildings, electricity, running water, toilets with privacy, professional-looking signs—it almost made my head spin. The helicopter door slid back, and immediately I saw American troops. An ambulance was waiting with an honest-to-goodness stretcher. Within minutes I was on a bumpy road heading for Camp Navarro General Hospital, which had been set up several months before to serve the U.S. military advisers and other staff.