What's the Dope on the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama?

Factual Questions
1

So I watched the Tom Hanks movie, and I immediately tried to look up a few things. Some I found on the internet, some I couldn’t find answers to.

Question 1 : Did the crew of the Maersk Alabama really manage to overcome the leader of the pirates and take his weapon? Wiki says he did, but I find it remarkable. When it got to that part in the movie, I said out loud " 'Merica. Those pirates better watch out, they are quite screwed now that the good guys actually have a gun!"

Question 2 : Did the Maersk Alabama follow the lifeboat to keep it from disappearing after the pirates left with Captain Phillips onboard?

Question 3 : I read this on a blog supposedly run by a former Seal. Apparently, the leader of the Seal team tasked with rescuing Captain Phillips wanted to drug the food and water given to the lifeboat so that everyone would fall unconscious and the pirates could be taken into custody without bloodshed?! I found that hard to believe : the popular conception of Navy Seals is that they are quite comfortable with taking lives (especially pirates!), and one would think that shooting the pirates would have a higher probability of getting Phillips back uninjured.

Question 4 : So apparently the shootout in real life was quite a bit more dramatic than the movie made it seem? In the movie version, Hanks is being held at gunpoint, wondering if the pirates are finally going to shoot him this time. He’s having an emotional breakdown from the extreme stress. There’s 3 simultaneous shots, and his former captors are all lying dead, blood sprayed everywhere.

So apparently, according to what I read, more like 18 shots were fired, including several rounds fired by seals who somehow zip-lined down the tow cable connecting the lifeboat to the navy ship and fired the rounds at point blank range inside the lifeboat! Instead of a mere 3 shots, it must have been a hail of gunfire, bullets punching holes all over the lifeboat, followed by a seal doing a maneuver straight out a comic book, followed by several deafeningly loud gunshots at point blank range!

That sounds like something right out of Hollywood!

Anyways, does anyone have primary sources on these details for this story? The movie was quite excellent.

One final note : why on earth was it so difficult for the merchant ships to be authorized to carry weapons?!

When you watch the gutwrenching scene of the hijacking, you realize very quickly that the crew of the ship has every imaginable tactical advantage. If a few crew members with some kind of rifle + a medium range optic were stationed in the prone position at various spots along the ship, they would be able to pick off the pirates with ease.

The reason is that the pirate gunners have to somehow cover the entire upper section of the gigantic ship, while the crewmembers can fire away at the pirates crowded into a tiny boat, or climbing a rickety ladder. Whenever a crewmember takes fire, he can just stay low and back away, then reposition to another firing position elsewhere. A helmet and maybe a kevlar mat to lay on and a flak jacket to protect from ricochets would make it very very difficult for the pirates to even harm him.

It might be harder to defend the ship at night, and there are other problems, but tactically it seems pretty straightforward. Perhaps there’s a reason why the pirates have yet to hijack a ship with armed guards onboard.

2

As a USMC grunt who has worked with SF that was not involved with this as far as I know.
Question 3: Anything that will tip the odds in our favor is used.
Question 4: Almost. anything you see in a movie is over stated.
Question 1: An American getting a weapon does not transform them into John McClain.
Special forces move hard and fast when the odds favor them. Any real movie showing their actions would be a boring 90 minutes of them tilting a situation in their favor and a chaotic 3-5 seconds of them taking care of business.

3

First mind that the movie was largely drawn from the story told in A Captain’s Duty, which is Captain Phillips book about the incident. Tom Hanks himself mentions that obviously some details are different in the movie than in the book.

In the initial weeks and months after the hijacking, Phillips was praised as a hero by pretty much everyone including his crew. But as the fame of his story resulted in a lucrative book deal and movie you’ve now seen some grumbling from his crew saying they have another story to tell. So we can’t 100% for sure believe that Phillips story is the true narrative.

Yes, they took “Muse” hostage after a struggle and worked out a deal to exchange him for Captain Phillips. When they gave him back to the hijackers they reneged on the deal. This is widely verifiable on Wiki, Slate, various other reputable news outlets that have covered the story.

Initially, but by April 9th (the hijacking was on April 8th), U.S. warships arrived and followed the life boat from that point, the Maersk was escorted out of the area while the hostage situation unfolded.

I have no idea on the drugging people claim–but most likely if it was considered it is because shooting targets through the walls of a lifeboat at sea where an American is a hostage with guns trained on him sounds a lot riskier than drugging everyone. I doubt it would have anything to do with a Navy SEAL having moral qualms about shooting a pirate who had a gun trained on an American and all about the inherent risks of taking shots in that situation. You could hit the hostage or you might not hit all the hijackers, and they could execute the hostage in response.

I’ve heard zero evidence for this account. Just looking through all the wiki pages and the news accounts (that I read at the time this happened) it is all exactly as I remembered: once given an order (from the captain of the Bainbridge) three SEALs simultaneously fired one shot each at a selected pirate, each shot was lethal. So essentially three shots, three pirates dead. There was no big shoot out or all the stuff you mention, the shots were fired from the deck of the USS Bainbridge.

Yes, try Slate, CNN, then read the Wiki page which cites many news articles. I found a smorgasbord of information on this incident in a few moments of searching.

Most countries do not allow you to come to port with armed guards, it’s as simple as that. Ships that can’t legally dock are of little value. That situation has not materially changed. But what has happened is a lot of private security companies based throughout the region have made arrangements to meet up with ships that contract their services at sea or in a few rare ports where it is legal and armed guards come on board. Then, near the end of the voyage they disembark onto a smaller vessel and go back where they came from. Any country can prohibit private ships with armed guards from docking, but there isn’t really any regulation against them picking armed guards up at sea and them leaving prior to getting into the territorial waters of another country.

4

There was a few months ago an incident where the Egyptians arrested a boatload of people - supposedly “security” for commerical shipping, planning to meet ships and provide armed support.

The Egyptians, like many of those countries, are a bit touchy about boatloads of heavily armed men cruising their waters - makes it a bit more difficult to separate the good guys from the bad guys if you have to wait to see how they use the weapons. Outside of the USA, the right to bear arms is severely limited.

yeah, some of the crew grumbling I heard about the time the movie came out - the captain was more of a dick than a hero; he ignored warnings about pirates and steered too close to the coast. His book made him out to be the big hero of the whole thing, when he mostly caused the mess.