I wasn’t good enough to be the captain. I hadn’t played all year. I didn’t deserve the title.
Coach Marshall expected me to fit his system, which required players to live and die by the score. He couldn’t understand the fact that I enjoyed myself whether we were winning or losing. “Why are you grinning?” he’d yell at me. “Because I’m having fun?” I’d answer. For him, football was a religion and if I was laughing with my friends when the team was losing, then I must be the Antichrist. I went from being his star prospect to riding the bench. I even quit the team before the final game of the season, against our archrival Woburn, just because the sport had stopped being fun. I watched the game as part of the band, where I played saxophone. I’d made the band leader deliriously happy: “It’s the first time someone’s told the football coach, ‘Sorry, I can’t play because I have to be in the band.’” Coach Marshall hated me after that.
I guess I did have something to learn about being part of a team.
I loved sports, but I bucked against the restrictions. It was the same with basketball. The JV coach called me and a guy named Gunk Johnson after a practice early in the season and turned to me first and said, “Phillips, I’m not going to play you because your father didn’t play me when I was a student. And Gunk, I’m not going to play you because I don’t like you.” He thought he’d run us out of there. When the coach asked us what we were going to do, Gunk and I looked at each other and then I said, “Coach, we’re gonna stick.”
That was my motto: I’m gonna stick. Especially if you try to push me.
I guess right then you’d have pegged me for the merchant marine. Every guy I met in the merchant marine had stories like that. We weren’t the kids who made class president. We were the guys who rode beat-up motorcycles to school, played the offensive line, and drank in the Fells, the nearby woods where all the kids hung out. We went our own way. We were the square pegs someone tried to smash into a round hole and said, “Nope, not gonna do it.”
In 1975, I was well on my way to fulfilling my detractor’s prediction that I wouldn’t do very much with my life. I’d had a few jobs, working as a security guard at Raytheon, shuttling checks to the Federal Reserve from the local banks, and driving a taxi. I was a hack in Arlington, a town north of Boston. It didn’t have much of a future, but it was colorful. One time a guy I’d never seen before jumped in my cab, gave me an address, and told me he had to go in and get the money. I pulled around back, expecting him to try to pull a fast one on me, but within a minute a woman came screaming out the door and jumped in a car, followed by this maniac. He jumped in my cab and screamed, “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you can catch her.” It was clear to me that the man and the woman were caught up in some wild domestic drama—which I never got to the bottom of—and I’d suddenly landed in the middle of it. I hit the gas and we went through the streets of Arlington like the chase scene from Bullitt. Finally I pulled even with the woman and saw her terrified face through the window. That’s when my fare yelled, “Run her off the road!” Apparently, he thought I was a hit man, not a cab driver. I pulled over, collected my $20 for catching her, then threw him out of the cab.
I learned a lot. It’s a tough job and you can’t go by the book; you have to use your imagination. But I had no real direction, no real plan for myself in life. I’d gone to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, mainly because my parents were both teachers and wanted me to give college a shot. I’d studied animal science, because I wanted to be a vet. But one class, in which I had to use a slide rule, told me I wasn’t cut out for college. I dropped out after my first semester, the victim of too much partying, too many girls, and not enough hitting the books. If there was anything wild going on at that campus in the fall of 1974, I was probably around it.
So I became a taxi driver. And one day I was coming out the back way of Logan Airport when I picked up a sharp-looking guy with pressed dungarees and a leather jacket that looked like it cost a thousand bucks. I was impressed. “Where you going?” I asked the guy. “I want some action,” he said. Not an unusual request in the city of Boston in the mid-seventies.
“What kind of action are you looking for?”
“I want booze and I want broads,” he said.
“Okay, I can do that,” I said. I cranked the meter and headed for the Combat Zone, which in those days was a single street packed with college girl revues and blazing neon signs even during the day. You could get anything in the Combat Zone, and I mean anything. You want a double-jointed Romanian girl who plays Beethoven concertos and excels in field hockey? Done. You want a rocket-propelled grenade and an old-fashioned? Done. I mean, the place never let you down. It was Disney World for adults.
When we got to the Zone, the guy’s eyes got big in my rearview mirror. “This’ll do?” I said. He nodded. “This is good.”
It was a $5 fare and he tipped me $5. I’d walked twenty bags up ten flights of stairs for an old lady and been handed a twenty-five-cent tip, so $5 got my attention. As he got out, I asked the guy what he did for a living. That was my personal form of career counseling. If I got someone in the back of my cab who looked like he was interesting and who threw money around like it was confetti, I asked him what his job was.
“I’m a merchant mariner,” he said.
I nodded. “What’s that?”
“Well, we carry cargo in ships.”
“Sounds exciting.”
Which it didn’t. What sounded exciting is pulling into a port at ten thirty in the morning and going to a place like the Combat Zone with a pocketful of cash and the nicest leather jacket in Boston, looking for a good time all by himself.
As he was walking into some strip joint, I yelled after him, “Hey, how do you get into that?”
The guy had probably been at sea for three months and he really didn’t want to spend any more time talking to a male college dropout. “Here,” he said, and he handed me a card with the address of a seaman’s school in Baltimore. Then he was gone.
I wrote the school but never heard back. I forgot about it until my brother Michael came back to Boston and showed up at a keg party I was hosting in my apartment. He was at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy down in Buzzards Bay, and he gave it a glowing review. “It’s not bad,” he said, over a plastic cup of frosty cold Falstaff beer. “They don’t shave your head. It’s not really a military academy, there are not really any uniforms, there’s not a lot of discipline and when you get out, you can stay home six months out of the year.” I was working two jobs, making $220 a week, and I was ready for something new. I’d always liked Jack Kerouac and the idea of traveling the world looked better after every shift hauling prostitutes and businessmen around Boston. My neighbors Mrs. Paulson and Mr. Muracco worked hard and were instrumental in getting me accepted at the Academy, and my high school varsity basketball coach wrote a letter to the coach there recommending me. A few months later, I was in. I couldn’t wait to go.
I drove to the campus in my VW bus, nearly cross-eyed with a massive hangover from a final blowout my friends had thrown the night before. I rolled in feeling like John Belushi after an all-night toga party. The MMA’s campus is tiny, a group of maybe six dorms, a training ship, a few classroom buildings, an administration center, and a library. When I first saw it, I thought, This doesn’t look too bad. And the admiral who greeted us was very polite, especially to the parents. “Today you lost your boy,” he said at one point. “When we return him to you, he’ll be a man.”
When the last parents’ car had cleared the parking lot, the instructors turned and started screaming at us. We weren’t these bright young men to be cherished anymore. We were “youngies,” and youngies were worth about as much as spit on pavement. The instructors screamed at us as they herded us into a barbershop to get our heads shaved and screamed at us while they marched at double-time all over the campus before ending the day by screaming at us for no reason at all. The MMA turned out to be a true-blue military school where they broke
you down before they built you into a merchant seaman. I had to give it to my brother. He’d gotten me good.
We went through a year of constant hazing. There was an admiral called Shakey who was supposedly in charge of the academy, but the upperclassmen ran the school. You’d be walking down the hall and a three-striper—a junior—would come around a corner and demand you list the twenty-five things found in all lifeboats, in alphabetical order. If you couldn’t do it, you had to drop and give him twenty push-ups. On the summer cruise to Bermuda, they’d dress you in four layers of clothing including a winter coat, gloves, hat, and goggles and take you into the engine room on the training ship in the middle of summer, where the temperature hits 160 degrees, and work you until you dropped from dehydration. And you had to suck a lollipop through the whole thing, don’t ask me why. If you ratted on a classmate, they’d cut a fire hose, slip the end under your door, and turn it on full blast. Say good-bye to your stereo equipment and your camera, pal. If you messed with a four-striper—a senior—the boys would have what they called a “blanket party.” You’d be sleeping in your bunk, and all of a sudden a blanket would be thrown over your head and ten upperclassmen would pummel you to within an inch of your life. Or the upperclassmen would ambush you in a place called Four Corners. People had nightmares about that place. You’d turn the corner and there would be a gang of stripers lying in wait. They’d immediately begin screaming for us to “be a steam engine.” One guy would be the vertical piston, another would be the prop and the shaft and the steam drum, which meant you were running in circles or pumping your body up and down or making a damn fool of yourself in some other way. For hours.
It’d all be illegal now. Back then, hazing was a character builder, but now it’s not politically correct. I’m sure they have sensitivity training there the first week and you can get demerits for even implying that a youngie might tie a better knot. But in my time, some of the lieutenant commanders who lived on campus were afraid to walk into the dorms.
One senior, an upperclassman, made a special project of me. We just rubbed each other the wrong way, mostly because he was a stickler for rules and respect, and I don’t give any unless I get it in return. It was like a chemical reaction. Instant dislike on both sides. He made it his mission to drive me out of the school.
Every time he saw me on campus, he would make my life miserable. “What are you, a virgin?” he’d scream at me. “What’s the matter, never been laid?” I wasn’t going to take that from a punk kid who was younger than me. “Way before you, loser,” I said. And ever since that day, he’d had it in for me.
One time, close to the Christmas holidays, I was walking with some classmates from mess hall toward our dorm. Of course, he was waiting for me at the Four Corners.
“Goddamn it, Phillips, are you still here?” he yelled. Some of his friends snickered. Everyone knew the skinny bastard had it in for me. “Why don’t you just go pack your bag, because you’ll never make it out of here. I’m guaranteeing that right now.”
If I’d ever had any doubts of making it out, they ended right there. My ancestors are from County Cork, and I’m told it’s known as the Rebel County, for its opposition to British rule. I have their genes.
“I swear to God,” I whispered under my breath, “you’ll never get me out of here.”
I smiled at him, a big, enthusiastic smile. He did not like that.
“Drop and give me twenty!” he yelled. Yeah, they actually said that.
I shook my head. “Sir, that ain’t even worth going down for,” I said.
He looked… well, I would say “shocked.”
“What did you say, youngie?”
“I said, ‘Sir, that ain’t even worth going down for.’ Give me forty.”
Two hours later, I was soaked with sweat, doing push-ups and sit-ups. I was dirty and sweaty and my arms felt like ropes of wet noodles. He was watching the sweat rolling down my face, enjoying himself. All my classmates had gone back to the dorm.
Finally, he got hungry. He announced he was heading off for dinner.
“I want to come back and find you here, or it’s two weeks’ worth of demerits,” he said. Demerits were worse than anything—you’d spend your entire weekend working them off.
When he was gone, one of his classmates came running out of the mess hall. I watched the upperclassman approach. He was one of the nicer guys in the senior class.
“That’s it, Phillips. Dismissed.”
I looked up. Then I dropped down for another twenty.
“No thank you, sir, I’m fine,” I said, my face a few inches from his highly polished shoes. I felt like I was going to pass out, but I was pissed off. I wouldn’t be the one to break.
I heard a sigh as I counted out twenty.
“Don’t be a dickhead, Phillips, I’m cutting you a break here. Dismissed.”
I stood up, out of breath, and looked him in the eye.
“Need to hear it from him, sir.”
“He’s an asshole. So that’s not going to happen.”
I thought for a minute, breathing hard. I didn’t want to let the bastard win. But the admission by an upperclassman that this jerk was in the wrong was good enough for me. Besides, I thought another twenty push-ups would damn near kill me.
“Very good, sir.” And I walked away. The thought of my tormentor coming to find an empty hall gave me a laugh. I owe the fact that I graduated partially to that numbskull.
For me, the best motivator in the world is idiocy administered by a bully.
Not everyone was so determined to gut it out. Out of 350 guys at the beginning of our freshman year, 180 graduated. Not one of them was a milquetoast, believe me.
But I liked the academy. First of all, there were no girls, and they had been one of my downfalls at college. They were a distraction I couldn’t handle; at the time, crazily enough, I thought this was a plus (but not for long). And the school was filled with guys from a million different backgrounds but with a similar outlook on life: they wanted adventure, freedom, physical work, and independence. They were, for the most part, guys who had a wild sense of humor and too much imagination to work in an office. I could appreciate that.
The academy taught me discipline, which is something I needed in my life. I learned to stop messing around so much: when something needs to get done in the merchant marine, it gets done. It wasn’t make-up work; every task had real value. It allowed you to stay safe on the ship and get to your next port of call. On a ship, there are no idle hands; everyone has a task that he has to accomplish. What you do affects every man on the ship.
But the clincher came in the summer of 1976, during my first training ship cruise. The tall ships were in Boston for the bicentennial and made it a spectacular time to be sailing in the harbor. My classmates and I got to work on the Patriot State, the training ship. We were painting, running lines, doing drills, all out in the fresh air during that summer. I loved it. It was physical and you dropped into your bunk at the end of the day knowing you’d accomplished something with a minimum of bullshit.
It was the first time since high school that I’d truly felt part of a team. But this time, something was different. I didn’t feel the need to go my own way so much. There was a lifestyle and tradition here. Even a freedom, if you could stick it out. I wanted to be part of it.
It was at the academy that I started to hear the stories of the merchant marine: how during the Revolutionary War, American merchant sailors working as privateers captured or destroyed three times more than the navy ships did, and how from just one town in Massachusetts, a thousand sailors disappeared fighting the British. How the Barbary pirates kidnapped merchant mariners and sold them into “the awful fate of Moorish slavery.” How pirates on the Spanish main would capture sailors, rob them blind, and lock the crew in the hold while they set fire to the deck and set the ship adrift. How America was really built on the backs of wooden ships sailing out of ports like Salem to the far reaches of the world, from Cádiz to the Anta
rctic, carrying everything from molasses, gunpowder, gold dust, Chinese silk, to, of course, African slaves. The merchant marine always got there first—Java, Sumatra, Fiji. We blazed the trails across the oceans. The navy followed us. That’s what you learned at the MMA.
But it wasn’t all history. Seniors would ship out on commercial vessels and come back, their pockets bulging with money, and tell us stories about the stunning women in Venezuela or a brawl in Tokyo that destroyed an entire bar. Pirates were always lurking in these stories, as newly minted captains would gossip about how bad the Strait of Malacca had gotten or the best way to fight off bandits in Colombia. These guys made every trip sound like it was straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson.
I was dying to get out there and see it all for myself.
THREE
-7 Days
The industry believes very strongly that it’s not for the companies to train crews to use firearms and then arm them…. If you open fire, there’s potential for retaliation. Crews could get injured or killed, to say nothing of damage to the ship.
—Giles Noakes, chief maritime security officer for BIMCO, an international association of ship owners Christian Science Monitor, April 8
The first day out of Salalah went smoothly. We were making good time down the east coast of the Arabian peninsula headed for the Gulf of Aden. So far, it was a normal run. I hoped it stayed that way.
I posted the standard procedures for a pirate attack in my night orders, which the mates read and put into practice. But that was just a paper reminder. I needed to see how the guys responded to a live-action threat. Salalah to Djibouti is a three-or four-day trip, but that first day, everyone is exhausted. A ship is like being in a womb: you have the water rushing by, making that gurgling sound, you have the rhythm of the engines, you have the whole ship vibrating to the turn of the screw. That’s why sailors love that first day at sea. You’ve left your troubles behind and you’ve entered this comforting world you know so well. But the bad thing is, you get lulled into a sense of safety. I didn’t want to crack down on the security lapses I’d seen until we were out on the bright blue. We were heading into the most dangerous waters in the world, and I wanted my ship to be ready.
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