A Captain's Duty

boat rides Andrea and I would take on Lake Champlain, skinny-dipping at night. Then in the early morning before the sun came up, Amber would wake up with Andrea and they’d talk about her fears. “She became my rock, my Richard substitute,” Andrea joked.
    The one disagreement they had came when Amber wanted to sleep on my side of the bed. Andrea said, “Amber, there’s no way! I’m not going to fight you over that. I’m his wife, I win.” They laughed about it. But mostly they tried to imagine what I was going through at that exact moment on the other side of the world. Nobody had any clue, actually. I could hardly fathom it myself.
    Predawn was always Andrea’s lowest point. That’s when she would have her “alone thoughts”: What if he doesn’t make it? What will I do? Saturday morning was no exception.
    Amber woke up and they started talking: “What if he doesn’t make it, Amber? What am I going to do? I don’t know if I can live without him. He’s my ground. And what about the kids? Could I keep the house? And, my God, I’d have to work full time!”
    Amber laughed.
    “He’s got to be so tired, so hot,” Andrea said. She knew how much I hated being hot. It just drained my strength and sent me right up the wall. “How much longer can he keep going?”
    “Rich is stronger than you think,” Amber said. “He’ll never give up.”
    She did her best to reassure Andrea. Finally, they dropped off to sleep for another hour.
    Later Jonathan and Alison told Andrea that the people at the Defense and State Departments told them around this time: “You need to prepare Andrea for the worst. You need tobe ready to break it to her that her husband is dead. Because these things usually don’t end well. They end up with a phone call to someone who can’t bear to hear the news they’re about to get.” But by then, I think, Andrea had faced the facts. “I got it,” she told me. “The ship was safe and the crew was safe. Rich was just one man. You can’t expect to save everything.”

SIXTEEN
Day 3, 1900 Hours
    The pirates on the lifeboat sounded desperate. “We are surrounded by warships and don’t have time to talk,” one said. “Please pray for us.”
    —Reuters, April 9
    “The situation will end soon. Either the Americans take their man and sink the boat with my colleagues, or we will soon recover the captain and my colleagues in the coming hours. But if the Americans attempt to use any military operation I am sure that nobody will survive.”
    —Da’ud, Somali pirate, Bloomberg.com, April 11
    A ll Friday, they kept trussing me up with these intricate series of knots. Musso explained to me how they worked. The white line you could touch only with the right hand. The red line you could touch with either hand. The white lines are the “halal ropes.” You tie it on here. So you have to tie this knot and then this knot and you connect itover here. The ropes could never touch the deck. And if I was going to touch one of the halal ropes with my mouth, I’d have to clean it first. It was very important to them to keep those special knots clean and not to touch them with anything except my right hand. The purpose of all this knot-tying was to prove how superior the Somalis were as sailors, and also to be a pain in the ass.
    Musso kept trying to get me to tie some. I played along for a while. Finally, I gave up. It would take months to get as good as Musso, and I wasn’t planning on being with them that long. I stopped tying the knots.
    “You baby, Phillips. Lazy American.”
    I thought about how different this was from the ship. That had been a battle of nerves and wits. Like chess. The crew and I had won because we’d prepared to win, because we’d been ready for the unimaginable. And because we knew the ship and its systems. We’d outsmarted the bastards.
    But that wasn’t going to work on this lifeboat. This was something rawer. It was a battle of wills. The pirates were constantly trying to wear me down, to confuse me, to humiliate me, to turn me into a child instead of a man. I was trying to persevere. To prevail.
    This was making what happened onboard the Maersk Alabama look easy.
    The sun sank down. It was Friday night. I dozed off to sleep and I must have been out a couple of hours when, suddenly, I snapped awake. It was dark in the boat. We were into Saturday morning now. The moonlight filtering in showed me that the four Somalis were in the lifeboat. The hatches were all