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The year of Christianity Today's birth also brought the death of five American missionaries in Ecuador: Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Peter Fleming. The story of what happened on that January day in 1956-first told in newsweeklies and Life magazine and then in numerous books and documentaries-became a primary narrative for the young evangelical movement, reinforcing and illustrating to the world our core ideals. Their noble sacrifice and the heroic follow-up work of family members like Rachel Saint, the sister of Nate, and Jim Elliot's widow, Elisabeth, inspired a generation of Christians-some to go to the mission field and many more to live a more mature and sacrificial Christian life.

While the story is familiar, many of the details have been unknown. Why were the missionaries attacked, especially after such promising initial contacts with their eventual killers, the Huaorani? Why didn't the missionaries use their guns to defend themselves?

Steve Saint grew up with these questions about the final moments of his father's life. Despite spending school vacations among and working with the now-Christian Huaorani, Steve only recently has gotten his answers-which have served to make the story even more amazing and inspiring still.

This article, like our August cover story, appears as a chapter in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, a collection of essays edited by Susan Bergman (Harper San Francisco).

As I made my final approach to the short jungle airstrip, I could tell I was coming in a little high. I pushed the flap lever all the way down, but it still wasn't going to be enough to get me down on the tiny mud-and-grass strip. I decided to pick up speed, staying on the approach glide path to get the feel for my next try. I had just spent three weeks building a new airstrip with the Huaorani people in Ecuador, but this was my first landing in Huaorani/Auca territory, and this little strip wasn't exactly what the engineers had in mind when they designed this Cessna 172.

Racing down the field just ten feet in the air, I could clearly see the faces of the Huaorani people lining the strip. As I pulled up and banked to the left to start another approach, I could see the river and what is left of the sandbar where my father, Nate Saint, had made his first approach, the very first approach ever in Huaorani territory, just 40 years ago. He and fellow missionaries Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian had set up camp on that little sandbar in hopes of making contact with the primitive Aucas, known for their fierce infighting and hatred of outsiders. The five missionaries had a deep burden to share the gospel message with a people known only for hunting and killing. Their initial friendly contact ended in death by spearing.

On my second try, I was right on the numbers. Crossing the final bushes, I cut the power and the wheels touched down solid, just ten feet from the mark I had chosen. I hopped out to say hello, but I was in a hurry to take off again before the afternoon thunderheads started to drop their torrential rains and trap my little plane in mud, making a takeoff impossible. Dad, I remembered, had flown the Piper Family Cruiser off the beach each afternoon for much the same reason while awaiting the first contact with the "savages," as the Quechua word Auca means.

So much was the same, and yet circumstances were so different! The past three weeks I had been carving a new airstrip out of the virgin jungle with "the people" (which is what their own Huaorani word means), some of whom had murdered my father and his friends just before my fifth birthday.

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September 16 1996, Vol. 40, No. 10