In Greenwich to recount bloody events with Somali outlaws

• 
  
  Captain Richard Phillips commanding officer of the American-flagged MV Maersk Alabama talks about his experience being rescued from pirates off the Somali coast as John McCarty listens during a visit the seaman made to the Riverside Yacht Club Wednesday evening. Photo: GT, David Ames / Greenwich Time

GREENWICH -- "Somali pirate, Somali pirate, coming to get you."
Those were the words that Somali pirates radioed to the crew of the American cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama on the night before they attacked it last spring, recalled Capt. Richard Phillips. Later taken hostage by the pirates on a lifeboat, Phillips was rescued when Navy SEAL snipers aboard a destroyer killed the gun-toting captors with a volley of precisely timed shots.
The merchant mariner from Underhill, Vt., recounted his ordeal to more than 100 people Wednesday night at a dinner in his honor at the Riverside Yacht Club.
The morning after the warning came, Phillips said his crew spotted a speedboat three miles away moving quickly toward their 17,000-ton ship that was carrying emergency supplies to Mombasa, Kenya. The crew began evasive maneuvers, he said, but couldn't shake the pirates.
When they closed to within two miles, his crew began shooting up flares, and when they came within a mile, Phillips sounded the alarm. When the pirates drew closer, he began shooting flares at their boat, hoping it would catch fire.
The pirates returned fire, he recalled.
"Now the pirates are shooting at us. I'm shooting flares at them, and I can hear the ping, ping, ping of their bullets (hitting) the side of the ship."
By the time the pirates boarded the cargo ship, most of the crew had hidden below deck, as per safety protocol, while Phillips and two other members remained on deck.
Phillips said he played dumb when asked where the crew had gone.
"I don't know where they are. I'm here with you," he told the pirates.
Ordered to pilot the ship, which had been brought to a halt, Phillips said he lied to them: "I can't make it go. I can't, because you broke it."
The pirates' hijacking plans soon began to unravel, Phillips recalled. One of the four men was captured by crew members when he went below deck to search for them. And the pirates' damaged boat had sunk.
Phillips said he decided to cut a deal with the leader. "We'll give them back their missing guy, and all four will sail off to Somalia," offered the captain, who volunteered to help the pirates board the Maersk's lifeboat, thinking it would be the best way to protect his crew and cargo.
Phillips said that it was a common misconception from media reports that he surrendered himself as a hostage. "The fact was, without the assistance of one crew member to get the lifeboat into the water, the pirates couldn't leave the ship. I decided that crew member would be me."
But the pirates reneged: Once in the boat, they refused to let him reboard his ship, as they had promised.
"It's another lesson I learned: Never trust a pirate," he quipped.
Phillips said his hopes of being rescued began to fade as the days passed inside the enclosed lifeboat, where conditions became unbearably hot in the warm weather.
But he remained defiant in his dealings with his captors. "I vowed that I would not give up. If I gave up I truly became nothing but a hostage, just something they could ransom for money or murder for notoriety," he said.
One night, he tried to escape -- quietly slipping past three of his captors as they slept and pushing the fourth into the ocean as he urinated off the side of the boat, then diving into the ocean to swim away. His escape attempt failed after the screams of the overboard man awoke the sleeping pirates, who gave chase and brought Phillips back on board, where they beat and taunted him.
The pirates became increasingly tense after the Navy destroyer Bainbridge showed up and began monitoring them, Phillips said. Soon, the pirate leader ditched the lifeboat and surrendered to American forces.
The remaining three began to argue about what to do. When Phillips tried to leave again, the tensions boiled over and one fired a warning shot with his AK-47.
That put the destroyer crew on alert, Phillips recalled.
And when a sailor came to check to see whether the captain was alive, the pirates appeared to panic. Two poked their heads out of a hatch and assured that everything was OK. The third remained in the windowed cockpit. That's when Phillips heard gunfire.
"There were a bunch of shots -- more than three," he recalled.
Phillips later learned that the snipers had continued to fire into the boat after the initial volley, to ensure that their wounded targets couldn't make a last-ditch attempt to harm him. "It seemed like a long time, but it was probably two or three seconds," he recalled of the shooting. "I got sprayed with fiberglass and blood. The pirate in the coxswain seat wound up right next to me on the deck. He was alive but I could tell he didn't have long. Then there was silence."
Phillips was rescued unharmed.
One lesson he's taken from the experience: He was braver than he thought he could be.
"When faced with a threatening situation, somewhere within us, we find the strength to do what must be done," he told residents Wednesday. "You are stronger than you realize."
Phillips has been speaking about his experience since the ordeal, and plans to put out a book this spring.
Staff Writer Colin Gustafson can be reached at colin.gustafson@scni.com or 203-625-4428.