Captain Phillips meets his wife, Andrea, at a Boston dive bar, called Cask'n Flago. Captain Phillips and his wife, Andrea, have two children who are currently in college. He lives in a farmhouse in the small Vermont town of Underhill. His wife, Andrea, is a registered nurse. Captain Phillips travelled the world on rudder of a multimillion-dollar commercial tanker and cargo ship for the majority of his life. He would be out at sea for three months and be home for three months. In those months he was at home he did mostly everything for his kids. "When our kids, Dan and Mariah, were young, from the moment they got up to the moment they went to bed, I'd take care of them." (pg.10) No matter how much Captain Phillips loved being out in sea, he loved being a husband and father more. The hijacking of his ship is not the first brush of death that Captain Phillips has experienced. Two years before the hijacking, Captain Phillips was in a football accident, were he suffered a broken neck, and nearly became quadriplegic. .
Before the Somali pirates boarded the Maersk Alabama, Captain Phillips and the twenty other crew members practiced the standard procedures in case of a pirate attack." You have to be prepared for a staggering amount of possibilities" (pg.60) The following day Captain Phillips received an email from the "Office of Naval Intelligence" in Maryland. It contained the latest Worldwide Threats to Shipping Report. "I skipped ahead to the East Africa section. There were thirty-nine attacks reported. For a single week." (pg.60) However in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the entire Atlantic section, "there wasn't a single incident reported". Captain Phillips and the Maersk Alabama were near the coast of Somali, Africa when they first got signal of Somali pirates. At 3:30 a.m Captain Phillips got a call from "second mate", Ken.
