A Captain's Duty (5 page)

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, free
dom, 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 Antarctic, 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.

T
he 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.

The morning of April 2, I walked up to the bridge and grabbed my cup of coffee. The radar was clear. I looked over at Shane, the chief mate, who’d been up there since 4 a.m. We talked about our plans for the day, what kind of overtime was likely to be needed, what projects he was working on. Fairly quickly, the conversation turned to bullshitting about sports and the latest news. I’d told Shane before the trip began, “I’m going to start backing away on this run. You’re going to step up and do more: overtime budgets, maintenance, safety and emergency stuff. You’ve already shown me you can do it.” He was on his way to being a captain and I knew he was ready for more responsibility.

After a few minutes, I said, “We’re running an unannounced security drill today.”

A chief mate is by far the hardest-working man on a ship. He’s running around fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and a security drill just makes his life more complicated.

Most mates would say, “Damn it, Cap, do we have to?” But Shane was different. “Great, I love unannounced drills,” he said. Music to my ears.

“Eat your breakfast and we’ll do it at 9 a.m.,” I said. “You won’t finish any work today, but we have to do this.”

“We’re ready,” he said. “Let’s—”

“Don’t tell me what you’re going to do,” I said. “Let’s just see how we perform.”

At two minutes to nine, I climbed up to the bridge. My third mate, Colin Wright, was there with an AB. I walked up to him and said, “There’s a boat coming along, starboard side. Four men, with weapons, acting hostile.” It was the start of the security drill.

He looked at me.

“Ohhhkay,” he said.

I waited. He was just looking at me. “Well, you’ve got to do something,” I said.

“Oh! Okay,” Colin said. And he rang the general alarm, which sounds all over the ship.

“No, we don’t want to do the general alarm first,” I explained. “We want to do the whistle first.” You want the pirates to know you’re aware of them and are getting ready to defend yourself. The general alarm rings only inside the ship, while the whistle can be heard up to five miles away.

Colin sounded the whistle. I watched the crew swing into action. Each man had a muster point that he was supposed to run to; about half of them were heading the wrong way. Not good.

“Fire pump,” I called.

“Right,” Colin answered. On a ship like the
Maersk Alabama,
you have probably thirty-five fire stations with hoses and nozzles. But the pirate hoses are specially placed to repel an attack. These five hoses—three on the stern and two fac
ing back aft—are secured into position and left in the “On” position so that you can hit the pump switch from the bridge and
boom,
you’re shooting water. You want to be able to control the fire hoses from the bridge during a pirate attack. Not only is it impossible for the pirates to advance up a ladder when that stream is hitting them full force, but the fact that the hoses are going full blast tells the intruders that we’re ready for them, even if they’re miles away.

When Colin hit the button, however, nothing happened. It turned out a valve on the fire pump had been left open, which meant no water could flow to the hoses.

An absent-minded able-bodied seaman was on the bridge, just standing there looking like he’d lost his dog. He needed to know the correct routines, as well, so I started going over them with him.

“We’re under attack by pirates,” I said. “What are you supposed to do?”

He looked at me. “I’m…supposed…to…,” he said slowly.

“You’re supposed to give the security signal first.”

Sounding the proper signal takes the right touch; you’ve really got to accentuate the horn or it’s going to sound like “abandon ship” or another call. And this man could never do it. It always sounded like he was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the thing. Another foul-up. I ordered him to hit the fire pump, which has a red “off” button and a green “on” button. Of course, he pushed red and walked away. “No,” I said. “You have to push green and then check to make sure it’s flowing.”

“Got it,” he said.

No you don’t,
I wanted to reply.

Next I sent the AB to lock the three bridge doors. If the pirates board the ship, all the key access points—engine room, bridge—should be locked. You want to prevent the pirates from gaining control of the ship. Because once they do, they can set course for the coast of Somalia, where there’s no police presence, and stuff you into a safe house where Jack Bauer himself would never find you. Then they could sell you to the highest bidder, like Al Qaeda.

That was my deepest fear, and I knew it rattled my entire crew. To end up in some stinking hole with a blindfold on, chained to a post like an animal and at the mercy of fundamentalist militants, is the worst fate imaginable. Every one of us worried about being the next Daniel Pearl.

The AB ran off the bridge. Colin was doing all the right things. He’d switched the ship’s radio to VHF, he’d hit the lights, he’d gotten the fire pump going, and he’d begun simulating evasive maneuvers.

“What’s the nonduress password?” I called out. That would let anyone inside a locked door know the mate on the other side of the door didn’t have a gun to his head.

“Mr. Jones,” he said.

Wrong. “Mr. Jones,” in fact, was the code for the SSA, or secret security alarm, which is a button the captain presses in the case of an emergency, instantly patching him via satellite to a rescue center manned around the clock. The agent there asks a question, “Is Mr. Jones there?” If you answer “no,” you’re not under threat and the agent will debrief you on the situation. If you answer “yes,” you have an AK-47 at your back and the agent will break off contact because he knows you can’t answer freely.

It is like the president’s nuclear code. The third mate wasn’t even supposed to know it.

“Not even close,” I said. “It’s ‘suppertime.’”

Colin winced. We clearly had our work cut out for us.

Meanwhile, the AB arrived back on the bridge. He’d been tasked with closing the three bridge doors, which should have taken about twenty seconds. He’d been gone five minutes.

“Where’ve you been?” I already knew the answer.

“I went to close the doors.”

“Which doors did you close?”

“Every door on every level.”

“Did they have locks on them, these doors?”

“Ah,” he said. “No.”

The whole purpose of locking doors is to isolate decks against penetration by the intruders, to create safe zones where the crew can move in case their hiding places are breached. Unlocked doors don’t offer much of a safe zone.

“So you were closing the doors, not locking them?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, “I was just closing them.”

“Which doesn’t do much good, does it?”

“No, I guess not.”

Colin shook his head. “I’ve gone over this with him six, seven times,” he said.

I nodded.

“We are in search of excellence,” I said, “but oh, we will accept so much less.”

A few of the guys laughed. They knew that was one of my sayings.

The drill ended. I gathered all the crew except the third mate in the ship’s office and broke down what had gone right
and wrong. It hadn’t gone perfectly by any means. I don’t want to give the impression that this was a ship of fools. Most of these guys were good sailors, but every captain has their own way of doing things, and you have to teach the mates your approach. That first drill was a shake-out exercise. I knew the crew would step up and things would improve drastically.

During the critique, Mike, the chief engineer, called out, “What about a backup safe room in the after steering room?”

If pirates attacked, the chief engineer would go immediately to the engine room. The first and third engineer would go to the after steering room. The rest of the crew would run to the ship’s office. But if the pirates breached that door, the crew would need a second safe room and after steering was a perfect candidate. It was hidden off a tiny corridor and would be nearly impossible for the pirates to find.

“Good point,” I said. “Let’s make it happen.”

“What if they’re listening in on the radio?” an AB asked.

“Unlikely,” I said. “But it’s a good point. So we won’t mention locations. If I hear from the chief mate, I assume he’s on deck. If I hear from the second mate, I assume he’s at his muster point. Engineers in the engine room. If you don’t have a muster point, I’ll assume you’re in the safe room. Everyone got that?”

The men nodded.

“What else have we got in case of pirate attack?” I asked.

“We’ve got twist locks and flares,” somebody called out. A twist lock is a heavy metal lock used to secure containers to the deck. They were great for throwing down at pirates and braining them, but completely inaccurate. We had ten on the bridge ready to go.

“Okay, everyone know what they need to work on?”

More nods.

Whenever you get a bunch of sailors together to drill for pirate attacks, there’s usually one guy who’s seen just one too many John Wayne movies and wants to go toe to toe with the bastards. Usually, he’s sixty-five years old and three hundred pounds and gets out of breath running to be first in the dinner line. Sure enough, as we were wrapping up the drill, this crusty old AB spoke up. “Cap, we got to have weapons,” he said. “I want to fight.” The motto of the United States Merchant Marine Academy is, after all,
Acta non verba
, or “Deeds, not words.”

But it wasn’t going to happen. This guy could barely climb a ladder and now he wanted to take on a group of young, fit pirates who would as soon gut him and throw him overboard as look at him.

“Listen,” I said. “We don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight. Fighting is an option, but we have to play it by ear. First, we muster. Then we get the hoses and lights ready. Then we secure ourselves. Got it?”

Nods all around.

“Then, if we find out that all they have is knives and clubs, we can use hatchets and axes and lead pipes that we have stockpiled. We can use twist-lock poles”—long steel bars used to secure the containers—“as pikes.” The image of doing battle with pirates like medieval warriors might seem ridiculous, but there had actually been cases where a crew charged out of their safe room waving poles and axes and the pirates freaked out and jumped over the side. It was a dangerous move, but the prospect of spending four months being held for ransom drove the sailors to desperation.

We also decided that if the pirates boarded, no one would walk outside with their keys. If the pirates captured one guy with a set, they could access the whole ship. I also ordered every seaman to lock every door behind them. On an earlier trip with Mike, the chief engineer, I’d complained about the pirate cage bars on the engine room, which the crew liked because they allowed air to pass into the hot interior. But that meant the heavy watertight door was often left open, and I wanted it secured at all times, as the engine room led directly into the house and intruders could race straight up to the bridge. Mike agreed to get the pirate bars off and to have the big steel door secured at all times. And we’d previously agreed that deadbolts needed to be installed on the inside of the watertight doors, in case the pirates were able to shoot off the locks. We’d already done that on the superstructure, but there were a few doors elsewhere that still needed the deadbolts. Mike ordered his guys to get on it.

“Good,” I said. “I know these precautions are a pain in the ass, but they might save our lives. We need to do better next time.”

With that, I let the guys get back to their work. The drill had taken fifteen minutes, the critique thirty.

Another captain might have taken that moment to pull some crew aside and chew them out. But over the years I’d learned a different way of command. I didn’t want to be a screamer like my father or some captains I’d sailed with. I knew how completely that had turned me off to what he was saying. I didn’t want to aim for perfection when some guys weren’t capable of it. We had to crawl before we could walk. Then we could think about running.

That instinct also went back to my initiation into the merchant marine—my first trip on my license.

When I left the academy, I had a third mate’s license, which allowed me to work at the bottom of the officer ladder on any ship. But you have to wait for the call. I went home and started painting houses, waiting for the right job to come along. I’d passed on Florida and Bahamas runs—too boring for my taste. I was at a girlfriend’s swimming pool when a personnel guy for a shipping company called me and said, “I’ve got a ship and I need a third mate.”

“Where you going?”

“Alaska.”

Alaska sounded different, alluring even. I was on a plane to Seattle three hours later.

After half a day in the air, I pulled up to the dock in a taxi. The driver stopped in front of what looked like a floating junk pile. “Wrong place, buddy,” I said. “I’m working on a ship. This is a barge.” And he looked at me like I was slow or something and said, “You’re the third guy I dropped here today. This is your ship.”