For more than seven hours, Columbine High School graduate Glenn Sanchez and 10 other members of a U.S. Navy P-3 surveillance aircraft were the first and only U.S. presence above the Maersk Alabama and the lifeboat carrying Somali pirates and Capt. Richard Phillips.
As the aircraft raced toward the U.S. cargo ship last month, Sanchez and the P-3 crew listened as the pirates mocked the American seamen they had taken hostage.
“They were using profanity in English and mocking everything they said,” Sanchez, a Navy petty officer from Littleton, recalled in a phone interview Tuesday. “If the Americans would make a distress call like, ‘Help us. This is the Maersk Alabama,’ they would come back and — using a whiny, baby voice — mock them, using profanity and other obscene things.”
Once over the Maersk Alabama, Sanchez and the crew kept in touch with the USS Bainbridge, a Navy destroyer that was steaming toward the seized freighter, and they tried to comfort the Alabama crew.
“We actually would call them (the Alabama) every 15 minutes, letting them know the P-3 was there and that we weren’t going anywhere — that they wouldn’t be by themselves ever again, that they would have the U.S. with them the whole way,” Sanchez said.
He was operating the plane’s radar and operating the aircraft’s sensing equipment, which picked up the body heat from the pirates on the lifeboat.
Sanchez, whose wife, Sarah, lives in Littleton, as do his stepfather and mother, wasn’t the only Colorado resident involved in helping the Maersk Alabama.
On the USS Bainbridge was Petty Officer Carissa Riedman of Loveland, the vessel’s tactical-information coordinator.
For the next five days, Riedman would help coordinate the aircraft and U.S. ships that converged on the Alabama and the lifeboat.
She was on duty when the first distress calls from the Alabama reached the Bainbridge.
Riedman said her reaction and that of the Bainbridge crew was one of astonishment that the pirates had taken on a U.S. ship. “All of us were like, ‘Are they crazy? Messing with us?’ It was like, ‘What are they thinking?’ ”
It was nerve-racking. The mood of the pirates could change dramatically, said the graduate of Mountain View High School in Loveland.
“Some days, they’d be kind of laid back,” Riedman recalled Tuesday in a phone conversation. “Keep in mind, it is extremely hot down here, especially with them being in the enclosed lifeboat. It was basically, ‘We want this, we want that, or otherwise, we are going to kill the American. Any time they would threaten to harm Capt. Phillips, that was the most stressful.”
There was an immediate sense of relief on the Bainbridge when the crew knew Phillips was safe, she said.
Riedman said her mother, Diane Hull of Loveland, kept e-mailing her with the basic message, “Be safe, my girl. I love you.”
“I told my mom, and she went crazy,” said Sanchez, speaking of his mother, Littleton resident Jennifer Gaughen. “She was telling everybody.”
He said: ” It feels good to have done this, and it ended perfectly.”
