The captain was a short Greek guy named Jimmy Kosturas. He was like a statue on the bridge. As the storm tried to rip his tanker apart, he stood there and lit one of these little cigarillos that he liked and then he calmly watched the waves come at him. Jimmy was grace under pressure personified.
“Course?” he’d say.
I’d give him the course.
“Speed?”
I’d give him the speed.
He’d nod and take a puff on the cigarillo.
Then CRAAAAASSSHHH! The wave would hit and the water would slither down the bridge windows, black against the green glass.
Jimmy stood calmly, a curl of smoke wafting up from his cigarillo.
I watched as the captain barely ate and barely slept and yet kept his crew focused like a laser beam. By showing no fear. If that hurricane had turned us lengthwise, we would have broken up. But he was as calm and cool as if he were sailing a little dinghy across Boston Harbor on a calm summer day. He barely said a word, but he inspired such confidence that I never doubted we’d make it through.
Deeds, not words. I’d always remember Jimmy, standing there like Gary Cooper as the ocean tried to kill him. I liked that.
By the time I got my captain’s license in 1990, I’d seen the good, the bad, and the really bad. I wanted to be the kind of captain I’d loved serving under.
I can still remember taking charge of my first ship, the Green Wave, a container ship out of Tacoma, Washington. I’d been serving as chief mate on it and a good friend of mine, Peter, was captain, and we were carrying military supplies—planes, helicopters, M16 ammunition, you name it—from base to base all over the West Coast. It came time for the captain to leave and I had to take over. We did our handover of the ship all day and then went out to dinner. We rolled back to the port around 10 p.m. and Peter pulled up in front of the gangway. We got out, and I was standing there looking up at this immense ship in the darkness, and he turned to me and said, “Okay, you’ve got it.” We shook hands and he laughed and said, “Good luck, Cap.” It was the first time anyone had ever called me that in my life.
I was nervous. I didn’t feel ready. But I had to do the job, so it didn’t matter how I felt.
I’m sure I made a thousand mistakes that first trip. I was just holding on, trying to learn as I went. But I didn’t try to whip the guys under me into my idea of a perfect crew. I didn’t want to be the Coach Marshall of the high seas. I felt that if you did the job right, if you let people be themselves and cracked down only when they blew an assignment, then morale would take care of itself. You have to show people that you deserve the respect that goes along with the title Captain. You can’t browbeat them into looking up to you.
My motto became “We are all here for the ship. The ship isn’t here for us.” That really served me, because it’s true. When you’re out of port, the ship is your mother, your temporary country, your tribe. And there was an unspoken part of that saying that I kept to myself: “The captain is here for the crew.”
Coming up, I got a reputation of being a tough guy to work for. When I’m working, I’m working. I become a little obsessed with making sure things are done right. So if you’re lazy or just plain bad at your job, I’m going to be a nightmare for you. But if you’re on top of your duties, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll never give a good man make-work just to feel like I’m in charge. My attitude is “You hope for the best, but you train for the worst.” Because one day, the worst will find you.
A bosun, one of the hardest workers I ever had, gave me the best compliment from a crew member. He’d worked with me on more than one ship. “You know, you are a pain in the ass, but I know what you’re going to say before you say it,” he told me. Meaning: You’re consistent. And I am.
When I got off the ship, as captain, I asked myself the same question: Was the ship better than when I came on? Is it run better, is it safer, is its crew more motivated or smarter about what they’re doing? That’s how I judged myself as a captain. Did I make a difference? There were times the answer wasn’t what I was looking for, and then I analyzed why I hadn’t succeeded.
In some ways, I’m an accidental leader. I was just an ordinary guy who wanted more for his family. I wasn’t driven to wear the stripes and have power over a group of men. When you walk onto a ship as the captain, you get the good room, the good hours, the good pay. But you have to accept everything that goes with them. And that includes putting your crew’s lives before your own.
“The captain is always the last off a ship” isn’t just a line in the movies. It’s your duty.
When you enter the merchant marine, you’re walking into a different world. Danger is your frequent companion. There are any number of things that can kill you: there are people who want to steal what you’re hauling, or the ship itself. It’s not rare to lose a man. Containers drop, wires part, a heavy piece of cargo shifts and turns into a man-killer. A fire onboard can be a death sentence, because there’s nowhere to run and no one to come to your aid. And the loneliness is a fatal part of our lives, too. Men simply lose the desire to return to their lives on land and just disappear in the middle of the night.
I’ve had my brushes with the grim reaper. In 1988, I was unloading a fire truck in Greenland, trying to get it off the deck onto a barge, and having to do it with a bunch of army guys who’d never been on a ship before. We were sitting at anchor and I was between a heavy spreader bar and a metal hatch combing. The ship took a little roll and suddenly four tons of metal came swinging toward me. I went to hold it off but it kept coming at me and I thought, I can duck down and this steel may crush my head or I can take the hit. So the bar swung in and crushed up against my body and then swung back out as the ship corrected its roll. I broke four ribs in two places each, snapped my collarbone, collapsed a lung, and separated my shoulder. Another three inches and the load would have crushed my chest cavity and I would have been dead.
The army guys and the crew left on the ship thought I’d been flattened. When we all recovered from the shock, they put me onto a metal stretcher, tied my arms down so I wouldn’t hurt myself any further, and lowered me to the barge about twenty-five feet away so I could be loaded on a landing craft and taken to the base clinic. I knew if they dropped me, I’d be dead—I’d drop straight into the water and to the bottom of the fjord. The soldiers hot-wired a bus and rushed me to the local clinic over a rutted, rock-strewn road, sending jolts of pain through me with every bump.
And the first thing that ran through my mind, even though I was in constant agony, was “Andrea is going to kill me for getting hurt.” Just out of the clear blue. Maybe it took getting that close to death to know what I would miss about life.
Then I said to myself, “What the hell do I care what she thinks? I’m the one who’s hurting.”
I knew I loved her then, if I hadn’t before. I wanted nothing more than to see her again.