A Captain's Duty

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?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’d love a beer.”
    The guy nodded. “We can do that.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the captain of the Boxer.
    He turned away and just as he began to walk off, I called out, “Hey.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Think I can get two beers?”
    The captain smiled.
    “Yeah, you can have two beers.”
    The guy left and I stripped off my clothes and got ready for a shower. I was brushing my teeth buck naked when the captain returned, with two sailors hauling a huge cooler. It was full of beer.
    “Holy crap,” I said. “How long am I going to be here?”
    They laughed at that, and the captain told me I could make a phone call. He also let me know President Obama wanted to talk to me. I finished my shower, jumped into my clothes, grabbed a beer, and followed the captain.
    The sailors showed me to my room and I just sat on the bunk taking it all in, drinking my first beer. I’m free, I’m alive, I’m safe. It felt unreal. It seemed like I’d been taken from the living hell of that lifeboat to this clean, calm ship in a split second.
    President Obama called. I picked up the phone and there was that familiar baritone voice congratulating me.
    “I think you did a great job out there,” he said.
    “Well, all the credit goes to the military,” I told him. “I can’t thank them enough. And I want to thank you for the part you played.” And I meant it. I knew the order for the rescue had to go all the way to the top, so in a way I was speaking to the man who’d gotten me out of that hellhole in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
    “We’re just glad that you’re safe,” the president said. Then we talked a little basketball—he’s a hardcore Chicago fan and I’m a Boston diehard, so we chatted about how the Bulls matched up against my beloved Celtics. I couldn’t believe I was chatting with the president from a navy ship halfway around the world, and talking about Kevin Garnett’s jump shot.
    The next day, the corpsmen asked me what I wanted to do. “I want to look around, see the ocean full around on the horizon,” I said. I still had that feeling of confinement, of being trapped. They brought me up on deck and I just looked at the huge ocean all around me and the claustrophobic feeling started to dissolve. I could see the coast of Somalia and I realized how close we’d actually come to it. But I wouldn’t feel totally free until I got off the water and felt land under my feet in Kenya.
    Then I got to meet my rescuers. The SEALs gathered on the Boxer and I went through the entire line, shaking hands and saying thanks. I’d always respected the military, but now I really felt how selfless and duty-driven these guys were. They didn’t want fame or money or recognition. They just wanted me safe and back with my family.
    “You guys are the heroes,” I told them. “You’re the titans.” And I believe that. What I did is nothing compared to what the SEALs do every day.
    They were happy as hell, too. “Our missions rarely turn out this way,” one of the SEALs told me. “We train for it to go down exactly as it did yesterday.” I saw that I was a kind of good luck token for them, something tangible that had come out of all their years of training.
    The leader of the team that had rescued me came to my room. He asked me how I was sleeping.
    At first, I didn’t want