Richard Phillips: A Captain's Duty

Andrea lay in bed, unable to sleep. The minutes clicked by, 6 a.m., 6:30. She could have kicked herself. She was thinking, Everyone, even the worst Catholic, goes to church on Easter morning. Why didn’t I ask the bishop of Vermont to request all the priests to use that little homily in their masses? I could have had the whole state of Vermont saying it! That image of thousands of people from Burlington to the college kids in Brattleboro to all the sleepy little farming communities repeating those simple words was very powerful to her.

“I had to do it,” Andrea said.

She jumped out of bed, ran to Alison, and asked her if she could request that both Father Privé in Morrisville and Father Danielson in Underhill say the homily. Then she went about her morning routine. My mom arrived from Florida—she couldn’t stay away any longer. And my sisters were getting ready to go home to their families.

Little did Andrea know, Alison called the priest and couldn’t get a hold of him, so she jumped in her car and started driving. The GPS sent her the opposite way and she ended up driving mile after mile in the wrong direction, terribly afraid that she would miss the priest. But she finally turned around and made it to the church and Father Privé said he’d be happy to do it.

Around 11 a.m., Andrea thought, Where the heck is Alison? She’d been gone for five hours. Right then, her co-worker, Jonathan, walked in and said, “You’ve got to hear this.” And he took his iPhone, hit “Speaker,” and put the phone on the kitchen table. Alison, being Catholic herself, felt the need to stay at the church. And Andrea could hear a mass in progress, and it came to the homily and the priest began to sing, “God is good!” and the people in the church called back, “All the time.” Father Privé had managed to put our family motto into a song. Andrea felt a huge wave of emotion sweep over her.

She leaned her head against the wall and started to cry. She thought of all those people who didn’t really know me, doing this for our family. Through her tears, she looked up and out the dining room window. It had begun to snow, which is one of my favorite things in the world.

Andrea felt this was her sign. She turned her face to the wall. And she said to herself, “Oh my God, he’s really going to be okay.”

The navy lifted the Zodiac onto the Bainbridge with a davit. I was walking with my hand on the shoulder of the SEAL striding ahead of me. We walked into the back hangar, where navy guys called out, cheering and congratulating me. But it was still very tense—there were corpsmen running back and forth, with headphones and voice sets, obviously checking for more pirates and getting the situation on the lifeboat squared away. I waved and called “Thank you” as I was being led straight to the sick bay, where a medic was waiting.

Relief just flooded through me. Everything had happened so fast, it seemed like I’d been teleported out of that hellish boat onto this huge ship. The tension began to drain out of my body, slowly.

Thousands of miles away, Andrea hadn’t heard a thing by Sunday morning. People were still coming and going and calling the house. She said good-bye to my sisters, who had to go back to their families, then went upstairs around 11:30 a.m., hoping to take a nap. Her bedroom was her safe zone, and it was understood that it was off-limits. Thinking she would fall asleep to the TV, Andrea turned to a movie channel and there on the bottom of the screen was a little ticker that said, “Captain Richard Phillips freed.”

She didn’t believe it. She went flying down the stairs and found Jonathan, screaming, “YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT IF THIS IS TRUE!”

In the jubilation and the excitement, everyone had forgotten to call my wife. They just assumed someone else had done it. I guess when information is so ubiquitous, you can’t imagine anyone not knowing some important piece of news, especially when they’re married to the central character. So Jonathan had to call Maersk and the Defense Department to get the scoop. Andrea didn’t care—all she needed was to know that I was safe.

Jonathan got confirmation almost immediately. “I went running through the house shouting the news,” Andrea remembered. “And then I called everyone I knew.” Soon, the house filled with family and close friends.

Soon Andrea started to see pictures of me on TV. That was when she really knew I was okay—when she could see my face. She became glued to the set, not caring how many times they played the same tape. “I just couldn’t get enough of it,” she told me.

Around 3 p.m., the phone rang. Her friend Paige answered it. The farmhouse was getting so many media calls that she adopted a tough tone when she said, “Who is this?”

And I said, “You mean to tell me you don’t recognize my voice?”

She screamed.

I could hear Andrea run over to the phone and I heard Paige blurt out, “It’s Richard.” I heard Andrea’s voice saying, “Hello, hello?”

I did my usual, “Is your husband home?”

“No,” Andrea said.

“Good. I’ll be right over.”

Andrea told me that she had tears in her eyes.

“I’m just so glad you’re okay,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. And then, “What were you thinking getting into that lifeboat?”

It was so good to hear her voice. That’s all I needed, just to listen to her. The words hardly mattered. I asked her about the kids and she asked if I was hurt anywhere and if I’d had anything to eat. She went into nurse mode.

The call was cut off. Andrea told me later that she started flipping out because she finally had her husband back but couldn’t speak to me. Paige called back a bunch of numbers and ended up getting a Navy SEAL onboard the USS Boxer , which was sailing near the Bainbridge. She told him how happy and overwhelmingly grateful they all were, and he said, “Oh ma’am, we’re just doing our job.” She invited him and the other SEALs to Vermont for a home-cooked Italian meal. It was exactly what Andrea wished she could have said to the SEALs. Paige was crying when she hung up.

The medic cut off my clothes. For the first time, I could smell myself. On the lifeboat, I hadn’t realized how funky I’d become. I flashed back to the days onboard the Patriot State, the training ship at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. That first summer, some of the other youngies and I had a contest to see who could go the longest without a bath or shower. There was no AC on that ship, so it was like a duel to our death. We called ourselves the Rude Family. I thought, I would have won that competition.

The medic gave me the okay, and I was taken up to the deck and straight onto a helicopter and flown to the USS Boxer, a big navy assault ship that had arrived after the Bainbridge. Two of the Navy SEALs came with me, still mission-minded and completely focused on what they were doing.

After I got on the Boxer, I went through another physical exam. I was given some new clothes—a T-shirt, a blue jumpsuit, and a baseball cap. I was then escorted to VIP quarters. A guy came in. “Anything you need?”