This time each year brings back memories of another Thanksgiving for 90-year-old Austell resident James

S. Fletcher.

In 1943, Fletcher was fighting during World War II in the jungles of Burma against the Japanese army behind enemy lines on a secret mission as an Army Ranger with the Office of Strategic Services. On Thanksgiving Day that year, his band of four U.S. soldiers and about 40 Burmese natives, called Kachins, survived an attack and spent the next 30 days trying to stay alive.

Before being assigned to Burma - officially known as the Union of Myanmar - in 1942, Fletcher was a code breaker for the military. Then the Army needed volunteers for a special mission. He spent nearly three years in Burma.

There, Fletcher and his fellow 200 American troops' mission was to collect information, destroy bridges, and ambush Japanese troops and convoys. Roughly 100 Katchins aided each band of about six Americans. His OSS missions were so secretive that he wasn't allowed to tell anyone about them, not even family.

Of the Katchins, "They would give us information about where the (Japanese) were," Fletcher said. "They hated the (Japanese) so they were fighting them with flat guns, knives and spears when we went in there."

On that Thanksgiving Day, Fletcher's band was outnumbered three to one when the Japanese attacked, he recalled.

"We ran from them down to the Chindwin River and then we set up an ambush," said. "We cut them down when they came up there to get us."

As it turned out, the gunfight would be only the beginning of another kind of battle for survival. Fletcher and his comrades spent the next month cutting their way through the jungle in which they found themselves lost. He recalled drenching rain, biting leeches, an attack by wild elephants, suffering dysentery, malaria and hunger that led to them eating monkeys to keep from starving.

"I don't even like to think about," Fletcher said of eating monkey meat. He also recalled eating muntjac, or barking deer, for Thanksgiving.

Eventually, the men cut their way out of the jungle into a friendly Chinese patrol. On Christmas Day, they got back to safety at Shingbwiyang in Burma.

The harrowing experience was something a boy born in Alabama and raised with three siblings in Columbus by his widowed father, a storekeeper, never imagined himself in. Fletcher said he didn't know where Burma was until being sent there.

In addition, headhunting was something Fletcher and the other men were keenly aware of. In fact, a close friend, Lt. Ronald Brown of San Francisco, was sent on a mission and later found beheaded, he said.

"I couldn't eat for two weeks, I was so sick," Fletcher said. "I was supposed to have gone with him, but at the last moment they gave me another mission I went on. They went on that mission and Brown was killed and beheaded, and the others were killed. We never did find their bodies."

After he was discharged from the Army in 1945, Fletcher returned to Atlanta where he had moved at age 17 before the war (he recalled attending the "Gone With the Wind" premiere). He married his late wife Jeanelle and had three children. For 36 years he worked as a troubleshooter for Southern Bell, retiring in 1983.

During this holiday season, Fletcher said he is thankful for life.

"I'm thankful I'm still here," he said. "So many of my friends are not here anymore."