Maybe her strength came in her DNA. Andrea’s mom had her own load to carry. Andrea was a teenager when her parents divorced and her mother was left with six kids to support. Andrea’s mom worked full time and then came home to a houseful of rowdy children. Andrea knew how hard it was because a lot of the responsibility for the kids fell on her. She learned to be pretty resourcefuclass="underline" how to cook, mend clothes, and keep the house clean. When he was young and fell and skinned a knee, Andrea’s younger brother Tommy would run to her. Her mother was hurt by that, but later she realized she’d raised a pretty capable woman. One thing that meant a lot to Andrea is when her mom pulled her aside and said, “I’ll never have to worry about you or any of my daughters.” I often felt the same way. Andrea can handle almost anything.
As a merchant mariner’s wife, you know it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” your husband will face a dangerous situation. We both just hoped the most dangerous—a pirate attack—wouldn’t happen to us.
On April 5, Andrea e-mailed me with some family news about her stepmother Tina and her husband, Frank:
Hey there—
So it’s 0700, Mariah had to wake me up to tell me it was snowing. She was heading to the barn…. Tina’s reception [memorial celebration] was really nice, in spite of the cold wet weather…. Perhaps we should get my mom and Frank together? I laughed.
So I must be missing you. I find myself waking up on your side of the bed. Hope things are OK with you. Miss your voice.
FIVE
-3 Days
“You only die once.”
The trip to Djibouti went smoothly. There was chatter on the radio about pirate boats being spotted, but we didn’t see anything on the radar or on the watch. We sailed southwest along the coast of Yemen and arrived on April 5. We spent an exhausting day off-loading cargo in the port there, and the next day, April 6, we left port and steamed due northeast. We were halfway through our Gulf of Aden run. We’d made it in. Now we had to get out alive, and around the Horn of Africa.
Every port in the world has a reputation. Sailors judge ports by a strict set of criteria that hasn’t changed for three hundred years: Is it cheap? Are there girls nearby? Is there beer? And is there something to do? That’s it. If the answer to all four is yes, sailors all over the world will be brawling in their union halls to get there. Alexandria, Egypt, is a great port because it’s inexpensive and you can jump on a train for an hour and see the pyramids. Subic Bay in the Philippines has dirt-cheap beer and scads of pretty women with questionable morals. On the other hand, Chongjin, North Korea, is a god-awful port because you’re restricted to the ship and even if you got off it, the people there are terrified and poor. There are harbors in Colombia and Ecuador where you hear automatic gunfire at night, where you can watch stowaways shimmy up your ropes, and where you stand a fair chance of getting rolled or chopped up in the waterfront bars. But any sailor will take those little inconveniences over Kim Jong-il’s hellhole.
African ports have a mixed reputation. Mombasa, where we were headed next, was fairly secure, with armed guards patrolling the fences and very basic security measures in place. Locals would slip in under the cover of night and load their skiffs with twist locks, then sell them back to you for $25 apiece. No harbor in the third world is entirely safe.
I’d been to Sierra Leone during the civil war and watched people waving from the shoreline. You could see that their right hands had been chopped off by the rebels, because they’d voted. I was in Monrovia, Liberia, a week before they had the revolution and Charles Taylor took over the country. It was another world: as we glided into the port, we could see there was no electricity except for those places that had generators. The West African peacekeepers came onboard and immediately started shaking us down for bribes. There was no security at all, just hundreds of people on the pier waiting to hand us letters, some of them written on the backs of matchbooks. They would say, Leave me, but take my family to America. I spoke to one guy who told me: “I’m a college professor, I can’t get any work, my family is starving. Can you give me something to do?” I felt just awful knowing there was so little I could offer people like him.
One time in Monrovia, there was a guy who desperately needed to work, so I said, “Okay, I need four workers. You pick out four guys, you’ll be the boss, and I’ll take care of you. If they don’t do a good job, I’ll get rid of you.” The standard pay at the port was $1 a day, which was actually a good wage in Monrovia. And this guy earned it, working hard for seven or eight days straight, no messing around, which I liked. On payday, he came to me and said, “I don’t want cash, I want plywood.” The country had been so devastated that there was no building material there, and plywood was like gold. I tried to talk him out of it, telling him cash was safer, but he insisted. I gave him a truckload, packed it down to the springs, and he was ecstatic. The next day he came to me and he was beaten to a pulp. The man could barely walk. As he’d left the port the day before, the peacekeepers started to steal the plywood from the truck, and he just lay across it and took a vicious beating so that he could keep a third of the stuff. I gave him money and clothes and we took care of him, but they’d nearly killed the poor bastard over some flimsy wood.
In Monrovia, Liberia, every day at one o’clock would be the Show. We would off-load the first pallet of peas and wheat and then, when it hit the deck, this huge crowd would converge. Hundreds of people milling around the pier would just pounce on it and policemen would lash them with heavy wooden clubs. Guys would heave these sixty-pound sacks of wheat through holes in the pier and then dive in after them. And the security forces would come up behind them and stick their guns in the holes and blast away.
Any captain who sailed East or West Africa saw the desperation of the people there.
By 1 p.m., we were safely away from Djibouti without any incidents. As we made our way around the Horn of Africa and mirrored the Somali coastline, I knew we were still in the middle of the most dangerous part of the trip.
I scheduled a “fire and boat drill” for 1300 hours. We were training the new guys, checking out the lifeboat and going through how to launch it. Then we went over to the MOB (the “Man Over Board” or rescue boat) on the starboard side and showed the new guys how to adjust the safety harnesses. Each man is assigned a position on the lifeboat, so we also practiced taking our places on it. Shane was running the drill, asking each sailor what he’d do in a particular situation and then correcting the answers. It was a blazingly hot day, with a little bit of swell on the water, caused by the first of the monsoon winds. The bridge was baking in 95-degree heat and visibility was seven miles.