Richard Phillips: A Captain's Duty

“You’re not halal, you’re filthy, an animal,” he cried. He forced food down my mouth, to make me dirty. He laughed at me. He walked away and went back up to the cockpit. Turning dramatically, he took his right hand and made a cutting motion, first across his throat, then both wrists and finally across his balls.

“You son of a bitch,” I said. “If you kill me, I’ll follow you. I’ll come back and haunt you.”

They tried to force my feet onto a blue bag lying on the floor. I was sitting on the outer edge of the seat arm, with my feet across the aisle on the opposite arm. I was still trussed up. It was too dark to identify who was doing what, but a pirate with an AK was behind me, shining a flashlight. All I could see was my head in silhouette against the far wall. There was another Somali lying by my side, another AK pointed up at my gut. The boat was really rocking in the swells.

“You can’t die a clean death,” someone said in the darkness.

I felt warmth on my leg again. I was pissing myself. It was so degrading, to have to sit there like a farm animal. I cowered, drained of strength, while the pirates were sniggering all around me.

This is the end, I thought. It’s over. And something in me was happy about it. I wanted the navy to open up on the lifeboat with that .50-caliber gun and just end everything. I didn’t care if I died at that moment—I just wanted the whole thing over with. My frustration boiled over and I was ready for the end.

But then I thought of my family and I told myself I had to go on.

My thoughts were going in two different directions at once. I believed the pirates were going to kill me and I didn’t. I wanted this to be over and I wanted five more minutes of life. I think what was really confusing me was the pirates’ motives. Why would they try to intimidate me? I thought. I have no power to give them their ransom. What is this about? Could it really be just a test?

I heard someone move behind me. It was so dark I couldn’t even tell which of the Somalis it was. He began dry-firing the AK-47 and he ordered me up on my feet. I staggered around, trying to stay upright. He was timing the click of the rifle to the starboard roll of the boat. It was this strange dance. It seemed to go on for three hours. “Sit,” they cried.

I was ready for death. I straightened my back and sat up as tall as I could. The sweat was pouring down my face. My stomach was a knot, like I’d just done three hundred sit-ups at Four Corners back at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

“Military posture, verrrrry good,” the Leader mocked.

This went on for hour after hour. I staggered around trying to get ready for a dignified death while the click, click, click beat like a metronome.

Finally, I’d had it.

“Get someone back here who can fucking shoot that thing,” I said, collapsing on the chair, drenched in sweat. “I’m done. Do whatever you fucking want.”

The Leader looked down at me from the cockpit. “Okay, that’s it, no more action tonight, no action.” The other Somalis relaxed and the tension drained away.

But for the remainder of the night, they started a bunch of new rituals. They put the gun on me and told me to move from this seat to that seat, to pick up this object—a cloth, a hatchet—and place it over there. They hit me if my halal line touched the deck. And I couldn’t drag my ropes on the ground. All the while, they were calling me “animal…crazy…typical American.” It was like I was dirty and they were trying to get me clean through these ceremonies. I was hopping from one place to the other, still bound. At one point, I just toppled over onto the deck when a swell hit the boat.

When morning came, I thought, I won’t make it through another day like this one. Something had to give.

When I woke up Sunday morning, the boat was dark, gloomy. It matched my mood.

“Hey, Phillips,” the Leader said. “I have a new job now. I’m going to a blue Pakistani tug and check it out for the navy, make sure they’re not Al Qaeda.”

I just grunted at him.

“I’m going to help them, tell them where to get food and fuel.”

The navy came calling again. They wanted proof of life, obviously. I saw them out the back door, floating by on a Zodiac about fifteen feet away, peering in at me. I gave them a wave. The pirates were grouped near the door, half shielded by the hull, their guns pointed outward at the navy guys.

The corpsmen took a quick look at me and asked if I was okay, and I said yeah, and that was it. No James Bond stuff, because there were very tense and paranoid pirates standing three feet away from me. “Here’s our Al Qaeda contingent,” one of the navy guys said, almost joking with the pirates. The Somalis were putting on their tough-guy faces, really playing the part. That feeling of familiarity was so clear. I wanted to shout, “Do you know these guys?” But the Zodiac just passed back and forth a couple of times and left.

The Leader left the ship. I couldn’t see where he went, or how he got there, but he claimed he was going to check out the blue Pakistani tug.

Young Guy took the opportunity to talk with me.

“When we get to Somalia, you want to go to the movies with me?”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“I’m going out with my girlfriend,” Young Guy said. I looked over at him. The guy barely ever spoke, so this was new.

“You’ve got a date?”

“Yes, a date. With my girlfriend. And her mother’s there. You can go out with her mother.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I will go with my girlfriend and you can go with the mother,” he said. “We will go to the movies.”

He leaned over to me. “And then, to a hotel.”

I laughed.

I wondered, Where am I? Are we close to land, sitting in a little navy anchorage? It was strange to me that there were three navy ships and all this activity that the pirates were describing to me—tugs and other vessels—that wouldn’t occur three hundred miles from shore. I was disoriented. Nothing about what was happening around me made sense.

All of a sudden, I saw a school of dolphins through the aft hatch. There must have been a hundred of them. I picked my head up and tried to track them through the water, but they were gone. A minute later, the dolphins reappeared right in front of the aft hatch. Surfacing and gliding through the water, spray shooting out of their blowholes.

To see a school of them swimming together gave my heart a lift. Maybe this would be a good day, I thought.

But the Somalis wouldn’t leave me alone. They were obsessed with the knots again. They would tie a knot and tell me to undo it. If I touched the wrong string, they’d slap me in the head and tie a second knot. Then, if I didn’t do things exactly right, a third. Pretty soon there were six knots I was trying to untie.