“It was amazing, absolute fantastic precision.” —Chief Petty Officer Steven Taylor
Sailor from North Collins describes pirate drama
Steven Taylor, as the recruiting slogan goes, joined the Navy to see the world. Fighting pirates was never mentioned.
But when Navy SEAL snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge fatally shot three Somali pirates to free merchant Capt. Richard Phillips on Sunday, Taylor watched and listened as the drama unfolded from the tactical control center below the ship’s bridge.
And when the SEALs earlier parachuted from a helicopter into the Indian Ocean with their inflatable life rafts and climbed up the side of the Bainbridge, Taylor, a chief petty officer, watched as the senior enlisted sailor on the bridge.
“It was amazing, absolute fantastic precision. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Taylor, 35, who left North Collins 14 years ago to join the Navy. “It was a full moon that night. Those guys were absolute professionals — really cool.”
Taylor’s ship, a guided missile destroyer, had the leading role in this latest battle with pirates on the high seas, carrying on a Navy tradition that began in the 18th century.
As four pirates armed with AK-47s and .45-caliber handguns held Phillips captive aboard his merchant ship’s enclosed lifeboat, Taylor and his crew mates on the Bainbridge could only watch and listen as negotiators talked with the pirates over a five-day span.
Taylor recounted the ordeal in a satellite phone interview with The Buffalo News on Thursday. It came on the same morning that the Bainbridge, blaring the Lynyrd Skynyrd rock anthem “Sweet Home Alabama” on its ship’s speakers, delivered Phillips safely to the port of Mombasa, Kenya.
Phillips, the skipper of the Maersk Alabama, was dropped off in Kenya on his way home to Vermont, thanks to the Bainbridge’s daring rescue after he gave himself up to the pirates in exchange for the safety of the freighter’s 20-member crew.
“He came and had some coffee in the chief’s mess with us,” Taylor said of the merchant captain. “He was in very good spirits and seems to be recovering, both physically and mentally, from the whole ordeal pretty quickly.
“He’s a resilient guy, but I wouldn’t expect anything less from a seafarer.”
Taylor’s own path to the sea came after he graduated from North Collins Central High School in 1992 and spent a couple of semesters at Fredonia State College before realizing that it wasn’t for him.
“I was looking for something that would allow me to see the world,” Taylor said. “I walked into the recruiting office in Hamburg.”
As a chief electronics technician, Taylor is responsible for all the electronics in the ship’s radar, communications and other systems.
Fighting pirates is not in the job description, but as Taylor points out, it has been part of the Navy’s role since the war against the Barbary pirates off the coast of Africa in the late 1700s.
The Bainbridge, on patrol in the Indian Ocean, was the first to arrive after pirates took Phillips aboard the lifeboat, demanding $2 million for his return.
Inside the Bainbridge’s Combat Information Center, Taylor listened to the tense negotiations between the Somali pirates and the Navy, which was being advised by the FBI.
“The threats on his life were almost in every demand,” Taylor said. “ ‘Do this or we’ll kill him, do that or we’ll kill him, give us food or we’ll kill him, give us fuel or we’ll kill him.’ That was the way they operated.”
The pirates spoke only Somali, and the Navy had a translator onboard. But Phillips later told the crew that the pirates spoke to him in broken English.
As the ordeal stretched on day after day, Phillips told the Bainbridge crew later, his concern for his own safety grew.
“There were several times where it escalated and de-escalated as far as how he felt that his life was being threatened,” Taylor said. “It often went, during the negotiations, that he would feel more threatened if the pirates felt the negotiations weren’t exactly going their way. It wasn’t anything that changed in the environment, it’s just as the event drew on, the pirates grew less and less patient, and he was threatened more frequently.”
Taylor also had concern for the safety of his own crew of electronics technicians, who were manning the ship’s machine guns and other weapons during the siege.
“They’re very desperate young Somali men, who honestly felt they had nowhere else to turn but piracy,” Taylor said. “These guys were heavily armed — AK-47s and .45 revolvers.”
One of the pirates, who had suffered a gash, came aboard the Bainbridge after crew members took food and fresh clothing to the lifeboat Sunday. The pirates also allowed the boat, which was out of fuel and bobbing in the choppy water, to be tied to the Bainbridge with a 200-foot line.
After President Obama gave the authority to shoot if the Navy felt that Phillips’ life was in danger, the SEALs set up on the fantail of the warship and slowly reeled in 100 feet of the towrope.
“It was very cloudy, completely dark; we could barely see the life raft being towed behind us,” Taylor said. “It was barely visible. It was a really cloudy, hazy night.”
Taylor was at his post in the Combat Information Center as the rescue began.
The snipers, using night-vision equipment, saw one of the pirates with an AK-47 pointed at Phillips’ head, and they all fired simultaneously.
From a platform in choppy waters, shooting in total darkness, each of the snipers found his mark.
“The snipers that took the shots were actually radioed right into Combat Information Center,” Taylor said.
“They called us to say Capt. Phillips was in the inflatable boat, and the three pirates were dead. There was a cheer; everyone was so relieved the ordeal was coming to a close.”
There was little time to celebrate. The next day, the Bainbridge steamed to where another freighter, the Liberty Sun, was under fire from pirates.
Although it took fire from rocket-propelled grenade launchers and AK- 47s, the freighter was able to escape relatively unharmed after the Bainbridge called for assistance from warplanes. By the time the Bainbridge reached the ship, the pirates had fled.
During the last three days of the siege, the Bainbridge was cut off from the outside world, so Taylor’s parents, Karen and David, who own Concord Nurseries in North Collins, were no longer in e-mail contact with their son and had to watch the news with the rest of the world.
They look forward to seeing their son on his next leave. He’s engaged to a research chemist currently working in Sweden.
Asked whether he joined the Navy to fight pirates, Taylor laughed, saying:
“Absolutely not. That was probably the furthest from my imagination.”
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