A Captain's Duty Read online

  The command structure on a merchant marine ship is a lot like the military’s. The captain is responsible for the crew, the ship, and everything on it. Period. Below him are three divisions: the deck department, run by the chief mate (simply called the mate on a ship); the engine department, run by the chief engineer (known as the chief onboard); and the steward department, run by the chief steward. The mate is responsible for cargo, security, medical, maintenance, storing, loading, safety operations, and anything short of a meteorite landing on the forward deck. Under him is the second mate (called the paper mate), who is responsible for navigation, maintaining charts, and seeing to the bridge’s electronic equipment. He’s the voyage planner, the guy who lays the courses down, labels them, and makes sure the light list (which gives us all the lighthouses along our route) and the Notice to Mariners are up to date. The third mate is in the entry-level slot. He takes care of the safety equipment and does anything the mate tells him to do. Beneath the third is the bosun, the leader of the able-bodied seamen and the foreman who actually puts the mate’s orders into effect. The chief and his men (first, second, and third engineer) focus on what makes the ship go: the power plant and auxiliaries (compressors, pumps, and motors), as well as maintaining all the equipment on the ship.

  Mark Twain said that going to sea is like going to jail with a chance of drowning, and he was spot on. You give up any idea of a normal, comfortable life when you step onboard. Merchant mariners aren’t weekend warriors; we are there to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. On the water, every day is like a Monday—a workday with more to come stretching out into the distance.

  I have a tough reputation in the business. I’m known to be demanding, and I am. Each sailor has the lives of his crew in his hands, and I wouldn’t allow them to be thrown away because someone wasn’t prepared. Andrea’s brother, who’s also a sailor, told her once: “Onboard Rich is a different person from the fun-loving guy you know. You wouldn’t even recognize him.” I do like to have fun whenever I can, but not at the cost of neglecting what the ship needs. That’s not going to happen on my vessel.

  My first order of business was letting the crew know in no uncertain terms that we had to get the security profile right. The news out of Somalia was grim. Everyone knew that pirates there were wreaking havoc on the shipping lanes. The usual route around the Horn of Africa brings you within twenty miles of the Somali coast, but ever since 2005, when the pirates started terrorizing the merchant ships there, captains had been going out fifty miles, then one hundred, then two hundred miles to get away from these bandits. What was a five-day trip now takes ten. Ships don’t double their sailing time unless there are some very dangerous people waiting for them. But no matter how far offshore ships were going, the pirates were finding and hijacking them.

  As soon as I settled aboard the Maersk Alabama, I started getting e-mail bulletins from the Office of Naval Intelligence and various security firms about pirates: mysterious blips appearing on radar and giving chase, gun battles, the works. Ships, fishing boats, and yachts were being taken left and right. A great deal of the action was taking place around the Somali coast and in the Gulf of Aden, a deep-water basin 920 miles long and 300 miles wide that lies between Yemen and Somalia on the Horn of Africa. Something like 10 percent of all the world’s petroleum supply is shipped via the Gulf of Aden, as tankers bring oil out of the ports of Saudi Arabia, through the Red Sea, into the Gulf, then out to the Arabian Sea and on to Europe and America. A trillion dollars’ worth of goods passes by the Somali coast every year. Essentially, sailors are bringing the world’s most vital resource through the world’s most unstable region, which had turned the area around the Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast into a shooting gallery. Anyone sailing there would be under constant threat of attack from pirates, who were getting smarter and more violent by the month. The total ransoms paid were soaring into the tens of millions a year, attracting desperate young men to the gulf like bees to honey.

  And this was exactly where we were headed. Our next destination was Djibouti, which lies at the far western end of the Gulf of Aden. We had to sail in, unload, and get back out before the bad guys could get a bead on us.

  I sent Andrea a quick e-mail saying I’d made it to the ship safely and we were getting ready to embark. I’m not one for phone calls. Too damn expensive. But I let her know I was aboard and thinking of her.

  Andrea misses the days when I wrote her long letters or postcards. I’d always send her at least one long letter written over a week’s time, telling her what ocean I was crossing, what the weather was like, silly stuff the crew was up to. In the beginning, I signed the first postcards “Rich.” That’s when we’d decided we were “in deep like,” not “in love.” It took a while to get more. Andrea still remembers the time she got one letter, before we were married, and at the bottom, it said, “Love, R.” She was so struck by it. I guess that’s when she first thought, “Oh, maybe he is serious.” Andrea has kept every letter I ever wrote her.

  I did call a few times from around the globe, and I always used the same opening line. Andrea would be asleep and she’d pick up the phone and I’d say, in this low, Barry White voice, “Is your husband home?”

  And she’d say, “No, as a matter of fact, he’s not.”

  “Good. I’ll be right over.”

  I don’t know when that started, but it became our private joke.

  But it was the letters she really loved, especially the ones where I’d get all romantic. I wrote in one that “I miss the inside of your arms.” How could she resist that? And in another, I said, “I’ll be seeing you in the moon.” I explained to Andrea how the full moon was always good luck for sailors, and when I looked at one, I thought of her sleeping under it thousands of miles away. So the full moon became ours, a way to be in touch with each other. And when our children were young, they would all look up at the clear Vermont night sky and the kids would shout, “Look, it’s Daddy’s moon.” And Andrea would say, “That’s right.” And Mariah and Dan would look up at the moon and say, “Good night, Daddy, wherever you are.” Andrea did anything she could to keep me connected to the kids’ daily lives.

  I’d always loved kids. One of my jobs before joining the merchant marine was working with schizophrenic children and I’d really enjoyed it. “Dealing with kids is good preparation for dealing with crews,” I told Andrea. And it was true. I even instituted something called the Crying Room on my ships, a little mediation club for crew members who were having problems with each other. I’d write and tell Andrea about every session, how one guy would come into the Crying Room and yell, “He pulled a knife on me!” and the other sailor would say, “Only after he swung at me with a wrench!” I’d listen patiently and nod and let the guys get their frustrations out. At the end I’d say, “Let’s shake hands and get back to work.” Not every captain does that, but I felt it made for a better ship.

  When I left for the sea, Andrea always posted a picture of me on the refrigerator, along with a photo of “Daddy’s ship.” Next to it, there was always a list of questions for Daddy that I’d have to answer when I got home. But most of all, we had the full moon to share. Andrea cherished it because it always brought me close to her.

  TWO

  -8 Days

  GULF OF ADEN: Bulk carrier (TITAN) hijacked 19 Mar 09 at 1430 UTC while underway in position 12:35N—047:21E. Six men in a speed boat armed with AK-47s and pistols boarded and hijacked the vessel. The pirates are in control of the vessel and sailing her to Somali coastal waters.

  GULF OF ADEN: Cargo vessel (DIAMOND FALCON) fired upon 14 Mar 09 at 0629 UTC while underway in position 13:42N—049:19E, approximately 50NM southeast of Al Mullikan, Yemen. Two skiffs with men onboard armed with automatic weapons and RPGs fired upon the vessel. The captain conducted evasive maneuvers and counter-piracy measures while a Turkish warship nearby dispatched two helicopters to provide assistance along with a Danish warship. The men in the two skiffs fled the scene after the war
ships’ arrival.

  —East Africa bulletin, Worldwide Threats to Shipping Report, Office of Naval Intelligence, April 2009

  We were scheduled to depart Salalah on April 1. I woke up at five a.m., checked the weather, and then began my morning routine. I walk the entire length of the ship every day, to check for dents, leaks, anything out of the ordinary. The shore gantries had loaded the last container and we’d paid the departing crew, signed on the new members, brought aboard our supplies—food, new videos, and fuel—and were ready to sail. By six thirty a.m., I was on the bridge, drinking my first cup of coffee and looking out at the sun already burning the surface of the water. The boat was a beehive of cranes, men, and swinging containers in constant, frantic motion. But the seas were calm, with this great big sun hanging just over the horizon and a haze of mist just beginning to dissipate.

  When you’re a sailor, you return to an ancient rhythm. The sun tells you when to get up and when to go to bed. It bookends your day with these incredible sunrises and sunsets. I couldn’t wait to get out on the water. This is why you go to sea, I thought, as I looked out over my ship. I knew that every day on the water would be different. It always is. The sea would never look the same, its color changing from a granite black to vivid blue to an almost transparent green. Men go to sea for a lot of reasons—for the chance to work in the open air, for love of the oceans, because their father and their grandfather did it, or because they think it’s easy money (it’s not). But if you don’t like mornings like this, when the whole voyage is ahead of you, you might as well stay home and go to work in a factory making toasters. When you’re a seaman, leaving port always reminds you why, despite the danger and the boredom and the loneliness, you wanted to be one in the first place.

  As we got ready to depart, I was up on the bridge talking with the port pilot, who would guide us out of Salalah harbor. The pilot called out, “Dead slow ahead,” and the third mate answered, while I watched the RPMs on the engine, wanting to keep it well under our maximum. Within half an hour, we’d cleared the harbor, dropped off the pilot, and were gliding out of Salalah into the glassy Indian Ocean.

  Every time I left a port, I thought about how I’d gotten into this profession, how unlikely it was that I’d become a sea captain. If it hadn’t been for a sailor who wanted to meet some girls and have a good time, I might never have even heard of the merchant marine. In fact, growing up in Winchester, Massachusetts, outside Boston, there were plenty of people who doubted I’d get farther than the corner bar.

  My main problem was that I was a little wild. My nickname in high school was Jungle, and I have to say I earned it. My friends and I would occasionally end up in bars in the rougher parts of Boston or Cambridge and sometimes have to fight our way out. Once, in the early seventies, my buddies and I had a few beers and were roaming around Boston when we came across this huge group of people. “Carnival!” we thought in our stupor. We waded through the crowd until we got to the front and realized we were at a Mau Mau rally where a militant loony was preaching revolution. When the speaker saw us, he just froze. We were lucky we made it out alive, but it was just another night for the boys from Winchester.

  You had to be pretty rugged to survive in Boston in the sixties and seventies. I grew up in a neighborhood with its share of milquetoasts and bookish nerds. But it was also full of guys who were throwbacks to a different era, guys who had no problem smacking you in the face as a way of testing what you were made of. And I didn’t flinch. I was known for being someone who didn’t back down from a fight. If you were soft, you stayed in your room until it was time to go away to college.

  Some of my tough-mindedness goes back to my paternal grandparents, I’m sure. They lived in the Fidelis Way projects in Brighton, which was a tough area then and still is today. They’d come over from County Cork and arrived in America just in time for the Depression. Those dark years had affected them deeply. My grandparents probably didn’t have that much more growing up in Ireland, but what amazed me was that they made everything and wasted nothing. They made their own soap and their own bread and their own curtains and they probably took a shot at making their own clothes at one point. I was one of eight kids, four girls and four boys, and my brothers and sisters used to hate going to Grandma and Grandpa Phillips’ house. There were no second helpings at dinner, so you’d better eat what you got because there wasn’t going to be anything else. I seldom saw my grandmother smile.

  It’s funny. I never thought of it at the time, but seeing how hard my grandparents had worked just to survive must have sunk into my brain. They’d built a life from the scraps the world had given them. One thing that my family never lacked was a work ethic, and in them I saw where it had begun.

  My mother was from West Roxbury, then a pretty well-to-do part of Boston. Her parents were both teachers and she brought to the family the belief that you get an education, no matter what. I wasn’t much of a student but at least she made me into a reader, someone always interested in improving himself. Beyond sticking my nose in a book every chance she got, my mother was the proverbial glue that held the family together. She was a warm and sympathetic person, curious about everything—if I had a problem, I went to her. Andrea says my father was the wind in the sails and my mother was the keel. She kept the family balanced. Without her, we would have been thrown to the sharks for sure.

  My father was more typical of the Irish-American men of that time: he did things for you but he didn’t exactly smother you with affection. He was as tough as they come: six foot two and barrel-chested with the Phillips short legs and long torso. He was a big sports guy, having played football and basketball at Northeastern, where he met my mother. My father proved his love by going out and working like hell. You wanted that and a hug every night, too? Go talk to your mother.

  Dad wasn’t a great communicator. I loved him but he was very hard to please. “Do it right, do it once, or don’t do it at all” was his motto, quickly followed by “you horse’s ass.” It seemed that no matter what I did, his response would be, “You can always do better.” That infuriated me at times. Yeah, but what about a little credit now for what I did right? I learned how to do things right from my dad. I wanted to prove myself to him, but I wanted to do it my way.

  My dad believed that, when it came to us kids, the best defense is a good offense. In the mornings, he’d scream at us to get out of the single bathroom we all had to use. “You’re going to be late for school!” he’d yell in his deep, booming voice. We were so terrified we’d whittled our bathroom time to the absolute minimum. Then we’d grab our books, race out to the street, and meet our friends for the long walk to school. Two minutes later we’d see my father driving by. He worked at the very same school we were going to, but he’d never so much as turn his head as he passed.

  My friends would say, “Hey, isn’t that your dad? Why isn’t he picking us up?”

  “You don’t want to know” would be my answer.

  It was like growing up with Vince Lombardi in a bad mood.

  My philosophy was always a blend of my dad’s intensity and my mom’s caring. She took the edges off, but in many ways I’m just as tough-minded as he is. You can always do better. I hate to admit it, but the old man made his mark on me. With certain exceptions. My dad never once told me that he loved me or that he was proud of me (though I knew he did and that he was). I tell my kids I love them all the time. You learn what to inherit and what to leave behind.

  I was a wise-guy kid. I’d meet teachers who on the first day would shake my hand and say, “Oh you have so much potential!” You don’t even know me, I thought. And even though everyone knew my parents as teachers, I didn’t go in for education very much. My dad taught business and math and served as the assistant football coach and the head basketball coach at the high school near our house and my mom taught fourth and sixth grade in Massachusetts and New Hampshire schools, but I was lurking near the bottom of every class, just doing enough to get by. For me, school was a pl
ace to ogle girls, play sports, and see my friends. Sort of like church, with sports.

  Rebellion came naturally to me. I couldn’t fake an interest in things that didn’t interest me. Plus I knew I had other abilities: I was tough, I was a hard worker, and I knew how to learn.

  But I always felt like I was a very lucky guy and life was going to take me to some interesting places. Even my teachers sensed that. One day, my French teacher, Doc Copeland, went around the room and said, “Joey, you’re going to make an excellent bricklayer. Mary, you’re going to be a housewife. Joanie, maybe an architect.” When he came to me, he stopped and said, “You’re going to do a lot of traveling.” I was happy with that.

  Sports was the biggest thing in my life, growing up. I had three brothers, and I wanted to beat them at games just as much as they wanted to beat me. You competed against your friends at Bogues Court, the local basketball pit. Your street competed against the next street in games where the only fouls were the ones that drew blood. And your school lived or died by who won the big football game against your rival.

  It was an atmosphere that bred a certain mental toughness. I learned about life, about leaders and followers, by playing sports. Hell, I learned everything by playing sports. One of my favorite athletes was Larry Bird, who was born average and made himself into a superstar athlete by sheer mental toughness. That’s something I respected.

  I played football, basketball, and lacrosse in high school and I was just average in all of them. Sophomore year, I caught the football coach’s eye and he took an interest in me. Coach Manny Marshall would see me in the school hallways and he’d come up to me like I was on the verge of taking the team to the state championship. “Oh, how’re you feeling today? Drink plenty of milkshakes, you’ve got to put on more weight. Oh, you don’t have to go to gym, don’t worry about gym, I can take care of that. How you feeling? Feeling strong?” Junior year, I was out with mono and after years of being obsessed with sports, I realized there were other ways of having fun—namely, partying. But Coach Marshall still zeroed in on me every time he spotted me. “Don’t tell anyone else,” he’d say. “But you could be captain next year.”