A Captain's Duty

by Richard Phillips

  President Obama called. I picked up the phone and there was that familiar baritone voice congratulating me.

  “I think you did a great job out there,” he said.

  “Well, all the credit goes to the military,” I told him. “I can’t thank them enough. And I want to thank you for the part you played.” And I meant it. I knew the order for the rescue had to go all the way to the top, so in a way I was speaking to the man who’d gotten me out of that hellhole in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  “We’re just glad that you’re safe,” the president said. Then we talked a little basketball—he’s a hardcore Chicago fan and I’m a Boston diehard, so we chatted about how the Bulls matched up against my beloved Celtics. I couldn’t believe I was chatting with the president from a navy ship halfway around the world, and talking about Kevin Garnett’s jump shot.

  The next day, the corpsmen asked me what I wanted to do. “I want to look around, see the ocean full around on the horizon,” I said. I still had that feeling of confinement, of being trapped. They brought me up on deck and I just looked at the huge ocean all around me and the claustrophobic feeling started to dissolve. I could see the coast of Somalia and I realized how close we’d actually come to it. But I wouldn’t feel totally free until I got off the water and felt land under my feet in Kenya.

  Then I got to meet my rescuers. The SEALs gathered on the Boxer and I went through the entire line, shaking hands and saying thanks. I’d always respected the military, but now I really felt how selfless and duty-driven these guys were. They didn’t want fame or money or recognition. They just wanted me safe and back with my family.

  “You guys are the heroes,” I told them. “You’re the titans.” And I believe that. What I did is nothing compared to what the SEALs do every day.

  They were happy as hell, too. “Our missions rarely turn out this way,” one of the SEALs told me. “We train for it to go down exactly as it did yesterday.” I saw that I was a kind of good luck token for them, something tangible that had come out of all their years of training.

  The leader of the team that had rescued me came to my room. He asked me how I was sleeping.

  At first, I didn’t want to tell him what had been happening with me. I was a bit ashamed, I guess. My first night after the rescue, I’d woken up in my quarters around 5 a.m., bawling my eyes out. I hadn’t cried like that since I was a boy.

  What am I, a wimp? I’d thought. I’m lucky to be alive and here I am crying like a girl.

  I’d kicked myself in the ass and taken a shower. The crying went away, until the next morning, when the exact same thing happened. Wailing and sobbing right out of a deep sleep.

  The SEAL leader listened to me, nodding. “You need to talk to our psychiatrist,” he said.

  “I’m not really into nut doctors.”

  He smiled. “It’s accepted, we all do it. What you went through is a roller coaster of emotions. If you don’t talk about it, it’s going to stay with you.” He wouldn’t take no for an answer, insisting I see the psychiatrist.

  Finally I did talk to the SEAL psychiatrist. I dialed him up and he explained to me that being a hostage had placed me between life and death, and when the body is faced with that kind of situation, it releases special chemicals to get you through the crisis. And these hormones were still surging through my body.

  “Have you had episodes where you were crying?” he asked.

  I was taken aback. “Exactly right.”

  “It’s normal,” he said. “Everyone goes through it. So how do you handle it?”

  “I yell at myself, tell myself to stop being a wimp, splash water on my face, and get over it.”

  “Next time, don’t end it. Just let it run its course.”

  I had my doubts. But the next morning, invariably at 0500, I woke up in my bunk crying. I swung my legs out and sat on the edge of my bed with my head in my hands, weeping. And I just let it go. For thirty minutes, tears streamed down my face and I didn’t try to stop them. Waves of sadness and grief washed over me. And I let them. It was the strangest feeling.

  And it never came back.

  I spent the next four days back on the Bainbridge. I’ve never felt so old in my life. I was surrounded by eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old navy personnel, both men and women, who were highly proficient, eager, and pushing for more. There was a sense of professionalism, duty, and honor that could be felt throughout. But one thing the navy couldn’t hide even if they wanted to: these men and women were dog-tired. I’m used to putting in long hours and I know the signs: coffee breath, bags under the eyes, tired-sounding talk, slow reactions. They’d been up for days, trying to rescue me. I learned later that Captain Frank had seldom left the bridge during the whole ordeal and I could see it in his face. That was dedication.

  I went back to my quarters that night. As I was getting ready for bed, I noticed a painting hanging above my bed. It was an old-fashioned portrait and the man looked like an American sailor from the nineteenth century. I asked the captain about it later and he said, “Oh, that’s William Bainbridge.”

  I laughed. The old pirate-hunter and Barbary captive was watching over me.

  I had the run of the whole ship. I was there for the evening navigation briefing and listened to the men give the tide report for the upcoming docking at Mombasa. I was standing there for every promotion ceremony. I had seconds at the ice-cream social at 2100. I watched as the vessel met a supply ship in the middle of the ocean and brought on food, mail, and other cargo. Perhaps it would have meaning only for a guy who loves the sea and ships, but I felt privileged to see behind the veil of a great navy vessel.

  I felt a little guilty. I explained to Captain Frank that I’d become the guy I hated to have on my own ships. The guy who makes it to the mess hall for every meal, sleeps fourteen hours a day, and does absolutely nothing. The useless one. But for once in my life, I accepted the role.

  The navy personnel tried to impress upon me the media storm that had broken over my hostage-taking, as did Andrea when I spoke with her. But it never got through to me. The first day on the Boxer, I was sitting in the mess deck when I heard voices I recognized, voices from back home. Startled, I turned around: On the ship’s satellite TV, I saw the faces of my neighbors, my kids, Maersk officials. I turned my back to it. I didn’t want to hear it. A navy pilot said, “Don’t you want to see it?”

  “I already know the story,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it again.”

  The night before the Bainbridge was supposed to make port at Mombasa, the message came across the PA that we’d changed course and were now under way to save another American ship, the Liberty Sun, which was under attack by pirates. I ran into Captain Frank, who began to apologize for not getting me to the rendezvous with my crew. I said, “Not at all, just go get ’em. Save those sailors.” We met the Liberty Sun and chased off the pirates, then turned back toward Kenya and docked amid high security and media scrutiny. I left the Bainbridge at 0400 on Friday morning.

  The SEALs, meanwhile, had slipped off into the night, never to be seen again, without fanfare or recognition.

  NINETEEN

  At the farmhouse, the media frenzy ratcheted up again. Alison went out to make a statement, telling the journalists that it was Easter Sunday and the Phillipses needed family time. Calls poured in. Senator Patrick Leahy phoned and told Andrea they were dancing in the church parking lot where they heard the news. Diane Sawyer called to say she was doing cartwheels. Our Vermont senators and governor and everyone who’d been so good to my family called to express their joy at how things had turned out.

  Late Sunday evening President Obama called Andrea.

  “I just got off the phone with your husband,” he said.

  “You mean I got the second call?” Andrea said jokingly.

  Obama laughed.

  Andrea knew how big a part he’d played in freeing me and she wanted to thank him warmly, but at the same time she knew this man is the president, and you want to ha
ve that respect and formality. The president told Andrea that “the whole nation has been praying for you” and how glad he was that it worked out—and that I sounded really good on the phone. “I couldn’t thank him enough for what everyone had done for us,” Andrea told me. “I remember saying at one point, ‘My Easter basket runneth over.’” I thought it was amazing that he took the time to call not only me but my family in Vermont.

  People were flooding into the house to celebrate. But the emotional release of my rescue had left Andrea drained. “It was like a plug had been pulled and all my strength and energy had flowed out,” she said. “I needed to be alone with our kids.” So she and Alison worked out an exit plan to get everyone back to their families. One of her friends knew she was back to normal when, hours after we got the good news, she heard Andrea’s voice from another room: “WHO SPILLED SODA ON MY RUG?” Andrea doesn’t remember that, but it sounds right. It was such a relief to be back to those kinds of things, she told me: Was everyone eating enough? And who was destroying my house?

  The rescue restored Andrea’s faith—or put back something that had been misplaced for quite some time, as she put it. “I don’t believe in the God that punishes you or keeps track of every sin,” she said, “but I do believe in a God of love. And afterward, I was like, ‘Dear God, I haven’t been your greatest follower, but I owe you a big one.’ And I intend to be true to that obligation.”

  I was rescued on Easter Sunday and I flew home on the following Friday. The owner of Maersk provided his private jet, and a journey that usually took forty-five hours took only eighteen. I’d returned from the sea to Vermont so many times in thirty-odd years, flying in from all points on the globe, but this time felt completely different. Not only the luxurious jet and the direct flight, but the anticipation of seeing my family’s faces again. I sat there sipping a Coke, looking down at the clouds and thinking of that moment when I finally caught sight of them.

  Andrea told me that after my plane landed at Burlington airport, Dan, Mariah and she were walking up to the plane, and Mariah turned to Andrea and said, “Mom, I just have to run.” She said, “Go ahead, run if you have to,” and Mariah went tearing off. It was just like when she was a little girl. The next thing I saw was Mariah pushing through the customs guys and just hurling herself into my arms. I gave her a big hug and a kiss. I grabbed Dan in a bear hug and then I saw Andrea. She jumped into my arms and I was too overcome to speak. She said, “Oh, God it’s so good to see you.” The second thing she said was “You didn’t change your clothes?!” Because I was dressed in the same jumpsuit I’d been in four days ago when she first saw me on TV. I laughed. I’d kept the clothes on to keep my connection with the Bainbridge, the Boxer, and the Arleigh Burke. I even wore the standard-issue white T-shirt the Navy gave me, something I rarely do. Then Andrea went into nurse mode: she started taking care of my wounds—months later, I still had scars on and numbness in my arms and wrists from the ropes—and cooking for me and making sure I got enough sleep.

  It was like that time when I was almost crushed by a load in Greenland. You don’t realize what you have until you come this close to losing it. And then it just seems so much more valuable.

  At the airport, we were surrounded by crowds of people, by media, by well-wishers and government officials and everyone else. I could see on their faces how much they wanted to welcome me back. But I was just dying to get home. I wanted to go back to the life I loved, to the family I’d missed so much.

  As we drove home, we saw people outside the airport holding up signs, people along the roads home, people in front of the house. They’d hung a sign up at the general store saying, welcome home, captain phillips, and hundreds of people had signed it. When we pulled into the driveway, it was hanging on the barn across the road. I couldn’t adequately express my thanks to all of them.

  It wasn’t until we got home that the full emotional weight of what I’d been through really hit me. And when it did, I went back to one particular moment on the boat. I remembered sitting there when I was saying my good-byes to my family and thinking about how Dan would say, growing up, that he didn’t have a father and that his dad didn’t love him because he was always away. That memory just pierced me through and through. I couldn’t let another minute go by without doing something about it.

  I pulled Dan aside, tears welling up in my eyes. “Dan,” I said, “you know how you used to joke about not having a father?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Don’t ever say that again, okay?”

  He nodded. Just thinking about my son saying those words had hurt so deeply I didn’t even want to joke about it. Now that I’d been given back my family, I didn’t want to leave a single doubt in their minds about how much they meant to me.

  Andrea and I knew how close we’d come to losing each other. We’d be sitting together alone in the house, on the couch, and I’d say, “You know, Ange, I really shouldn’t have come out of this one alive.” And she’d say, “I know.” And I did know. Then she’d say, “The next time you are feeling lucky, could you please just buy a lottery ticket?”

  Those first few weeks, Andrea was afraid to let me out of her sight. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her reaching out for me, afraid that my side of the bed would be empty. Andrea doesn’t even remember doing that. I’d tell her, “It’s okay, Ange. I’m right here. Go back to sleep.” After a few days, I started telling friends, “She won’t even let me go to the bathroom by myself!” That was an exaggeration. But not by much.

  I still had no idea that the whole world had been watching my ordeal. I was totally amazed by how many people were caught up in it and touched by it: people who watched the situation unfold from a hospital bed, or who’d gone through something similar, or who just wanted to reach out and say that they were proud of me. There was a farmer out west who promised to carry feed or livestock wherever I wanted (I had to tell him I didn’t own any cows) and a Vermonter who offered me the use of his hunting camp. People just wanted to feel connected to my story. I was floored.

  “It restored my faith in people,” Andrea said. “After sixteen years as an emergency room nurse, where you see people in terrible situations that rarely turn out well, your faith can get ground down. At times you forget there is good out there. But after how generous people were to us, how concerned they were about us, I saw that there really is good out there in unexpected places.” It wasn’t the celebrities that we met that made us feel differently, but the ordinary people like us. The neighbor who sent over the home-cooked meals day after day without wanting a word of thanks in return. And the Somali refugee living in Burlington who works at Andrea’s hospital who came up to her to tell Andrea how happy he was for me and how he wanted to apologize for the bad people in Somalia. Andrea told him, “There are bad people everywhere.”

  And there are. But there are more good people. I believe that now.

  We did get to do things I’d never dreamed of doing. Going to the Washington National Opera, black-tie events, meeting some incredibly influential people. It was just unbelievable. There was a moment when we were sitting in the Oval Office, and Andrea whispered to me, “How did I get here?” It was a hard way to get a ticket on an unbelievable Ferris wheel ride, as Andrea put it. She was a Vermont girl who felt she’d been let into this huge amusement park. She kept telling me she was going to write a book on the “101 things you can do with Richard Phillips.”

  But the most moving event was a Navy SEALs reunion. The SEAL wives told Andrea they admired how she’d handled herself. She was in disbelief: They were saying how they admired her. “We knew our men were going to do their jobs,” they said. “But you had to sit there and agonize about what was coming.” All the while, we were in awe of them, young women in their twenties and thirties, some of them widows. A Navy SEAL wife never knows if her husband is coming home after a mission. Andrea had tears in her eyes, and so did I.

  Everyone asks, “Did the experience change you?” I�
�m stronger in my faith, no doubt. I’m not the kind of guy who makes pacts with God, and I never asked him to get me out of that boat in return for a lifetime of church attendance or anything like that. It’s not an honest deal. But I did pray for strength. I prayed for wisdom. I didn’t ask for an outcome, just for the ability to be my best self when I needed to.

  I’ll be grateful for what the SEALs did for me until the day I die. And these days I can’t go to a ball game and listen to the “Star-Spangled Banner” without choking up. When other Americans risk their lives to rescue you, that anthem becomes more than a song. It becomes everything you feel for your country. The bond we all have with one another that is so often invisible, so often demeaned. I was lucky enough to experience it in a way that perhaps only soldiers do.

  But the experience didn’t change me. It only made me see things that had been in front of me all the time. Like the value of trying to see things through other people’s eyes. During my career as a captain, whenever one of my crew members did something truly strange, I didn’t just correct them. I asked them why they were doing it that way. Being interested in people’s motives, the way they saw the world, helped me anticipate the moments of danger I faced later on. Especially onboard the Maersk Alabama. The crew and I were ready for each crisis not only because we’d drilled for exactly those kinds of situations, but because we thought three moves ahead of the pirates. I knew they’d want to talk to their leaders. I knew they’d want some reward, even if it was only a few thousand dollars. And I knew that they’d want to corral my men in one place. That helped immensely.

  But what kept me alive was mental toughness. I just refused to let the pirates beat me. I’ve always loved winning when I wasn’t supposed to. Even when playing basketball now and I know the other team is better. When the odds are against you, winning feels even sweeter. You have to train your mind never to give up.