A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy Seals, And Dangerous Days At Sea, by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty

It is little surprise that the dramatic events over a few days off the coast of Somalia would be turned into a heavily-memed movie most famous for the image of a skinny and dangerous Somali pirate pointing two fingers to his eyes and saying, “I am the captain now.” If it seems as if the internet regards Somali piracy as a joke, it is certainly no laughing matter to those involved in the logistics trade, who have had to adopt expensive tactics of sailing far away from the coast of Somalia, burning fuel trying to run away from pirate vessels, and paying expensive ransoms for those merchant mariners caught in the grip of piracy in the Red Sea and areas around it. This book is but one story of that larger problem, but it is perhaps the most notable story of it, since it was the first time an American ship had been taken by pirates in quite a long time, and thus forced the United States government to figure out how it was going to handle the safety and security of cargo that flew the United States rather than one of the other flags of convenience that have much less status and prestige attached to them.

This book is a bit short of 300 pages in length and is organized in a chronological fashion focusing on a period of roughly two weeks or so between when it is that Captain Philips (the author) left for a several days’ long cruise between the coast of Saudi Arabia and Mombassa, Kenya. Around halfway or so during his journey he found himself caught up in a period of extremely intense pirate attacks where a great many ships were assaulted, and where he ended up as a hostage after having delivered the rest of his crew and his ship from their hands. The cat-and-mouse games that the author discusses are pretty intense and the book is clearly cinematic in nature with a natural and dramatic plot as the captain engages in a test to outlast the pirates who hold him prisoner in distressing circumstances in a lifeboat after he sought to make a trade with the pirates of his life for the pirate leader’s life to be completely free from them. He admits to making several mistakes along the course of his dealings with the pirates, which is understandable enough, and the dramatic rescue that concludes the main narrative of the book, along with the author’s sense of humor and that of his family are certainly enjoyable to read as well.

There are only a couple of real flaws with this book and they are fortunately not extremely important ones. For one, this book does not contain a great deal of information about what happened to Richard Philips after he tangled with Somali pirates. Did he end up going back to sea? Towards the end of the book he refers to his job as a captain in the past tense, so what did he do after being delivered from captivity? For another, not all of the information included in this book either can be wholeheartedly believed nor is it really necessary to the story. On the one hand, the author pads this book, as is common in such memoirs, with plenty of information about the author’s family life and personal background, not all of which is necessarily all that interesting or relevant to the story. It is probably good, for personal reasons, to talk about the media siege of the Philips residence and the toll it took on the captain’s family, but the real gripping story is in the Red Sea in the duel of wits between Philips, the US Navy, and a four Somali pirates. Similarly, the author says that the experience did not change him, except for pointing out what was most important at life, and I consider it far more likely that the good captain suffered a fair bit of PTSD from his experiences that he might be reluctant to admit for fear of not appearing to be such a tough guy. That is understandable, although lamentable.