ABOARD USS DONALD COOK — The blue-painted fishing dhow with the suspicious hooks on its railings appeared as a low, curved shape on the destroyer U.S.S. Donald Cook’s high-powered security cameras.
It was a day in mid-September, three months into the Virginia-based warship’s deployment to the Gulf of Aden as part of a five-ship NATO counterpiracy task force. With hijackings declining across East African waters, Donald Cook’s 250 crew had had little to do on most days. The appearance of the dhow and, on it, what looked like grappling hooks useful for boarding large vessels, raised the prospect of a much-anticipated encounter with pirates.
A voice on Donald Cook’s ship-wide address system alerted the scattered members of the warship’s Visit, Board, Search and Seizure (VBSS) team to grab their gear and weapons, and race to the deck. There, the sailors muscled a small, rigid-hull inflatable boat into the water. The VBSS team, led by Lt. j.g. Christopher Bowie, climbed in and sped towards the dhow, rifles trained on its occupants.
Boarding teams man the front lines of the war against piracy. When one of the roughly 40 international warships currently deployed to East African waters encounters a pirate boat, more often than not it’s the warship’s VBSS team that’s tasked to apprehend the boat’s crew. “It’s basically the nautical equivalent of having boots on the ground,” Capt. Derek Granger, Donald Cook’s commanding officer, said during World Politics Review’s four-day embarkment on the 9,000-ton warship. “You’ve got to have guys up there that can conduct those inspections and provide intelligence back to the ship of what they see from 10 feet, as opposed to a thousand yards away.”
It’s dangerous work. More than one boarding team has been fired upon. On at least one occasion, a team has fired back. In November last year, a British Royal Navy VBSS team from the frigate H.M.S. Cumberland killed two pirates in a brief firefight. “When we go into these uncertain situations where we don’t know what’s going to come out of it, I definitely worry a bit,” Bowie said.
But boardings are usually peaceful. And increasingly, they represent the point of contact between a powerful naval coalition and a community of буйствующее whose livelihoods have, for years, been threatened by Somali pirates. In interviews with WPR last year, Kenyan fishermen recalled years of harassment, abduction and theft by Somali pirates. NATO and other military commands with a stake in maritime security have begun using VBSS teams to reach out to legitimate East African seafarers, in an effort to enlist them as allies in the counterpiracy war.
More often than not, suspicious-looking dhows turn out to be innocent fishing boats. That was the case in Donald Cook’s September encounter. Bowie’s VBSS team climbed aboard the dhow, shepherded the crew to one side, and inspected the “grappling hooks.” They turned out to be simple anchors of an unusual design.
So the boarding team shifted gears. Seeing that one of the dhow’s occupants had an injured hand, they rendered basic first aid. Meanwhile, the Americans communicated with the dhow’s crew in a mix of basic English, hand signals and illustrated pamphlets. “It can be tricky,” Bowie said of the language barrier. Donald Cook had had a Somali interpreter on board for a couple weeks, but he’d been called away on a more urgent mission.
The boarding team’s immediate goal in talking to the dhow crew was to find out if they knew where any pirates were. More broadly, the VBSS team wanted to convince the Africans that the United States had come to help the region’s legitimate fishermen — and that they should pass the message on to their friends. The latter goal should ultimately enable the former, by persuading fishermen to keep plying their traditional waters, despite the dangers, and call in any pirate sightings.
NATO’s mission “is not just to interdict what we think to be pirates,” said Lt. j.g. Zoe Sherman, Donald Cooks’ operations officer. “It’s also winning the hearts and minds of local fishermen who want to keep their local safe havens safe.”
“Mostly, the locals around here are anti-pirate,” Sherman added. “They want to be able to go out and safely conduct fishing. And they can’t do that when they’ve got pirates coming out here in these same waters.” NATO hopes to forge a unified front, with the military and East African seafarers working together to continue driving down Somali piracy.
For the VBSS teams like Bowie’s, that means a lot of risky boardings and a frustrating language barrier. Even after the successful, peaceful visit with the dhow’s crew in September, Bowie was downbeat. “Usually the extent of what we can learn from them is somewhat limited,” he explained.
David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of “War Bots.” He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.
Photo: U.S. Navy Lt. j.g. Andrew Mechling, the lead boarding officer with a visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) team, during an approach operation on a dhow near the USS Anzio, in the Gulf of Aden, Aug. 30, 2009 (Defense Department photo by U.S. Navy Spc. 2nd Class Brian K. Fromal).
