A Captain's Duty

Arleigh Burke . I even wore the standard-issue white T-shirt the Navy gave me, something I rarely do. Then Andrea went into nurse mode: she started taking care of my wounds—months later, I still had scars on and numbness in my arms and wrists from the ropes—and cooking for me and making sure I got enough sleep.
    It was like that time when I was almost crushed by a load in Greenland. You don’t realize what you have until you come this close to losing it. And then it just seems so much more valuable.
    At the airport, we were surrounded by crowds of people, by media, by well-wishers and government officials and everyone else. I could see on their faces how much they wanted to welcome me back. But I was just dying to get home. I wanted to go back to the life I loved, to the family I’d missed so much.
    As we drove home, we saw people outside the airport holding up signs, people along the roads home, people in front of the house. They’d hung a sign up at the general store saying, welcome home, captain phillips, and hundreds of people had signed it. When we pulled into the driveway, it was hanging on the barn across the road. I couldn’t adequately express my thanks to all of them.
    It wasn’t until we got home that the full emotional weight of what I’d been through really hit me. And when it did, I went back to one particular moment on the boat. I remembered sitting there when I was saying my good-byes to my family and thinking about how Dan would say, growing up, that he didn’t have a father and that his dad didn’t love him because he was always away. That memory just pierced me through and through. I couldn’t let another minute go by without doing something about it.
    I pulled Dan aside, tears welling up in my eyes. “Dan,” I said, “you know how you used to joke about not having a father?”
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “Don’t ever say that again, okay?”
    He nodded. Just thinking about my son saying those words had hurt so deeply I didn’t even want to joke about it. Now that I’d been given back my family, I didn’t want to leave a single doubt in their minds about how much they meant to me.
    Andrea and I knew how close we’d come to losing each other. We’d be sitting together alone in the house, on the couch, and I’d say, “You know, Ange, I really shouldn’t have come out of this one alive.” And she’d say, “I know.” And I did know. Thenshe’d say, “The next time you are feeling lucky, could you please just buy a lottery ticket?”
    Those first few weeks, Andrea was afraid to let me out of her sight. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and find her reaching out for me, afraid that my side of the bed would be empty. Andrea doesn’t even remember doing that. I’d tell her, “It’s okay, Ange. I’m right here. Go back to sleep.” After a few days, I started telling friends, “She won’t even let me go to the bathroom by myself!” That was an exaggeration. But not by much.
    I still had no idea that the whole world had been watching my ordeal. I was totally amazed by how many people were caught up in it and touched by it: people who watched the situation unfold from a hospital bed, or who’d gone through something similar, or who just wanted to reach out and say that they were proud of me. There was a farmer out west who promised to carry feed or livestock wherever I wanted (I had to tell him I didn’t own any cows) and a Vermonter who offered me the use of his hunting camp. People just wanted to feel connected to my story. I was floored.
    “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 Somalirefugee 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