A Captain's Duty

ship, as captain, I asked myself the same question: Was the ship better than when I came on? Is it run better, is it safer, is its crew more motivated or smarter about what they’re doing? That’s how I judged myself as a captain. DidI make a difference? There were times the answer wasn’t what I was looking for, and then I analyzed why I hadn’t succeeded.
    In some ways, I’m an accidental leader. I was just an ordinary guy who wanted more for his family. I wasn’t driven to wear the stripes and have power over a group of men. When you walk onto a ship as the captain, you get the good room, the good hours, the good pay. But you have to accept everything that goes with them. And that includes putting your crew’s lives before your own.
    “The captain is always the last off a ship” isn’t just a line in the movies. It’s your duty.
     
    When you enter the merchant marine, you’re walking into a different world. Danger is your frequent companion. There are any number of things that can kill you: there are people who want to steal what you’re hauling, or the ship itself. It’s not rare to lose a man. Containers drop, wires part, a heavy piece of cargo shifts and turns into a man-killer. A fire onboard can be a death sentence, because there’s nowhere to run and no one to come to your aid. And the loneliness is a fatal part of our lives, too. Men simply lose the desire to return to their lives on land and just disappear in the middle of the night.
    I’ve had my brushes with the grim reaper. In 1988, I was unloading a fire truck in Greenland, trying to get it off the deck onto a barge, and having to do it with a bunch of army guys who’d never been on a ship before. We were sitting at anchor and I was between a heavy spreader bar and a metal hatch combing. The ship took a little roll and suddenly four tons ofmetal came swinging toward me. I went to hold it off but it kept coming at me and I thought, I can duck down and this steel may crush my head or I can take the hit. So the bar swung in and crushed up against my body and then swung back out as the ship corrected its roll. I broke four ribs in two places each, snapped my collarbone, collapsed a lung, and separated my shoulder. Another three inches and the load would have crushed my chest cavity and I would have been dead.
    The army guys and the crew left on the ship thought I’d been flattened. When we all recovered from the shock, they put me onto a metal stretcher, tied my arms down so I wouldn’t hurt myself any further, and lowered me to the barge about twenty-five feet away so I could be loaded on a landing craft and taken to the base clinic. I knew if they dropped me, I’d be dead—I’d drop straight into the water and to the bottom of the fjord. The soldiers hot-wired a bus and rushed me to the local clinic over a rutted, rock-strewn road, sending jolts of pain through me with every bump.
    And the first thing that ran through my mind, even though I was in constant agony, was “Andrea is going to kill me for getting hurt.” Just out of the clear blue. Maybe it took getting that close to death to know what I would miss about life.
    Then I said to myself, “What the hell do I care what she thinks? I’m the one who’s hurting.”
    I knew I loved her then, if I hadn’t before. I wanted nothing more than to see her again.
    Andrea was in Boston when she got the phone call from Greenland. It was the captain on my ship. Even back then, she knew they never call with good news.
    “What happened?” she said. “Tell me he’s alive.” The captain described the accident and said they were airlifting me down to Fort Dix. Andrea flew down immediately. Soon after I arrived, she was sitting on the corner of my hospital bed. My company, Central Gulf Lines, had flown her down and even found her a room at a local hotel.
    She kept a close watch over me. One of the Fort Dix doctors kept inserting chest tubes—which was excruciatingly painful—without any narcotics. Being a nurse, Andrea knew things are done differently at different hospitals, but I was suffering so badly she couldn’t stand it. She went and chewed the guy out, really giving him hell. To this day, when I’m having trouble with a mechanic or something like that, I’ll look at him and say, “Listen, do I need to bring my wife in here?” And I’m only half-joking.
    Andrea wanted me moved to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was working, and my company had me airlifted