Richard Phillips: A Captain's Duty

“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.

The thing I saw the clearest was the lesson I learned on the lifeboat: we are stronger than we think we are. There were so many times during my ordeal that I was afraid that I didn’t have what it takes to get through the next five minutes. Especially during the mock executions. That ultimate fear, of watching yourself die, was so terrifying that I thought I would collapse into a jibbering mess. But I never did. It taught me that I could handle far more than I’d given myself credit for.

We all set our endurance levels low, out of fear we will fail. We think, So long as I have this job, or this house, or this partner, or this amount of money, I’ll be okay . But what happens when those things are taken away from you? And more—your freedom, your dignity, even things we take for granted, like your ability to use a bathroom? What happens when people try to take away even your life? You find that you are a larger and a stronger personality than you ever imagined you were. That your strength and your faith don’t depend on how secure you are. They’re independent of those things.

“You could do what I did,” I tell people. “You just haven’t had to yet.” And they always say, “Well, I don’t know about that.” I do. Believe me. Every time I doubted myself, I came through it. Every time something was stripped away from me, I found I didn’t really need it. We are stronger than we think.

And then, of course, there is the H word. “Hero.” When I got home and the media left and friends said their good-byes and drove back to their homes and lives and the Hollywood agents stopped calling, I had a chance to sit down and read the letters that people had sent me. Some were addressed to “Captain Phillips, Vermont.” I laughed about that, like I was Lindbergh or Abraham Lincoln—or Santa Claus at the North Pole! But I didn’t feel different. I was a regular guy. Truly an ordinary person. And now people were using the word that I’d reserved for people like Audie Murphy and Neil Armstrong.

“You’re my hero.” It brought tears to my eyes. But they weren’t tears of happiness. Honestly, I felt like an imposter, a phony. I didn’t do anything special, I thought. I don’t deserve all this. I don’t want all this. I really don’t take compliments well. It goes back to being raised with seven brothers and sisters in an Irish-Catholic home. I know how to deal with someone trying to kick my ass. But not with a compliment. In fact, the third night after I’d gotten back, I had a dream that the whole thing had been fake. There’d been no pirates, no hostage-taking, no rescue. And everyone was thinking I was a hero, but it was all made up, shot in a Hollywood studio. I was a flimflam artist, and everyone found out and hated me. I woke up in a cold sweat.

But I saw that everyone who’s been through something extraordinary is called a hero. And they go on the talk shows and say, “You know, I don’t think I am one.” What they’re really saying is, “If I’m a hero, it’s by accident. You have this potential inside you, too. If fate put you in my shoes, you’d have done the same thing.” And it’s true. I didn’t discover something about myself out there off the coast of Somalia. I discovered something about the potential of everyone who trains their mind to be strong. I’m an ordinary guy from Vermont who was given a glimpse of something very few people are lucky enough to see.

After all the interviews and the speeches and a kick-ass welcome-home party (five hundred of my closest friends and neighbors at the town park for a picnic), I’m back being a father and a husband. I finally got my new dog, Ivan, who is a mix of spaniel and mystery-dog DNA and is just as disobedient as Frannie. On hot summer days, he comes to the creek across from our house, the one that all the locals know about, and dives in after me. Then we walk back through the trees to my farmhouse.