A Captain's Duty

Enormous five-hundred-foot ships carrying ammunition and dynamite to the front lines were torpedoed, blowing up in explosions so violent they never found a trace of the tons of metal or the hundreds of men aboard. They just disappeared into thin air. Which is fitting, really. Themerchant marine has always been the invisible service, the guys who brought the tanks to Normandy, the bullets to Okinawa, but no one ever remembers us. What General Douglas MacArthur said was true: “They brought us our lifeblood and paid for it with their own.”
    But when the boys from the cargo ships went home, there were no ticker-tape parades, no G.I. Bill, nothing like that. They’re still trying to get recognition so they can live out their lives with dignity. There’s a bill before Congress that will guarantee them standing as World War II veterans and pay them a small stipend, but it’s taking so long to get through the political process that most of the guys will be dead before it’s passed. That’s a shame.
    When I was coming up in the service, I met guys who’d served in World War II and had ships shot out from beneath them. And I remember what one guy told me: “I was in the merchant marine when the war broke out and I saw ships going down left and right. I got so scared I joined the navy.” He was just playing the odds. Being a merchant mariner was a good way to meet your maker in those days.
    A lot of us have a chip on our shoulder. We’re patriots. We have a proud tradition. We’re rugged individualists with a few mixed nuts thrown in to keep it interesting.
    But we never make the headlines.
     
    On that trip to the Maersk Alabama, I had one of those history books packed in my carry-on luggage, but I sat on the plane thinking about what I had to do once I got aboard. My flight left at 3 p.m. I was headed to Salalah, Oman, on the east coastof the Arabian Peninsula, where the ship was loading up its cargo holds. I’ve flown as long as forty-two hours to get to a ship, and this time the journey was nothing unusual: Burlington to Washington, D.C., D.C. to Zurich, Zurich to Muscat, Oman, where I crashed at a hotel for ten hours. The next morning, I headed straight back to the airport for the flight to Salalah. I left Vermont on March 28 and arrived at my destination on the thirtieth. Wherever there’s work as a merchant mariner, you go. Joining me on the trip was Shane, my chief mate and an able-bodied seaman, who was also headed to the Maersk Alabama .
    I rolled out of bed on March 30, my brain cloudy from jet lag, and jumped in a car that took me to my ship. The Maersk Alabama was sitting at the dockside, its two cranes swinging containers onto the deck, when I walked up the gangway, boarded the ship, and went up to my office to meet the relieving captain, who debriefed me on what was going on. The captain left and I dumped my gear in my quarters, which were connected to an office, one floor below the bridge on the starboard side. To get from my room to the ship’s bridge, all I would have to do is walk down the hallway to the center door. Opening it, I’d be in the chimney, or central ladder way. One flight up and I’d be on the bridge, the command center for the whole ship.
    The house was what we call the seven-story superstructure at the stern (or rear) of the ship. A small condolike structure, it contained our living quarters, our mess hall, and our hospital. The top level was the bridge, where large windows ran from the ceiling to about waist-high and were met by a metal wainscoting that dropped to a special antifatigue rubber floor.(Watches are kept on the bridge, where a mate and an AB, or able-bodied seaman, are constantly scanning the horizon, so you want them to stay alert.) It looked like a greenhouse in there, with views for miles in every direction. In the middle of the bridge was the conning station—that’s where we steer the ship from—and a flat electronic console filled with navigation aids. That’s where you’d find the radar. Radar doesn’t look like the cathode tube setup you see in Humphrey Bogart movies. These days it looks more like a TV, with ships still appearing as a small blip, but now with data streaming down the right side of the screen: the speed of any vessels, CPA (closest point of approach, which tells you the point at which you’re going to intersect with that approaching ship), and time to CPA. On the port side stood a chart table, where the second mate—the office man