Mamou merchant mariner returns to research for book

A Mamou resident returned to Evangeline Parish from his home in Texas to try to find more newspaper clips about his capture by Somalian pirates three years after he graduated from Mamou High School in 1967.
Terry Vasseur said he plans to have someone write a book about his 45-day ordeal of being held in a prison by armed guards.
He’s inspired by the movie “Captain Phillips,” which he says is widely known to have inaccuracies. The movie is about a hijacking of the Maersk Alabama in 2009. According to Wikipedia, “It was the first successful pirate seizure of a ship registered under the American flag since the early 19th century.”
However, Vasseur says that’s not true, and that there are other distortions he is aware of about the movie. He says his experiences are more interesting, and more real, than the movie.
The August 20, 1970, edition of The Mmou Acadian Press had a story about the incident. According to the newspaper report, Vasseur had been sailing for five years aboard the Midnight Sun, an oil exploration ship, in the Gulf of Mexico for four years. The ship, owned by Guazzetta Offshore Marine, homeported in Berwick, Louisiana, until it sailed to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf.
Vasseur flew there in early May of 1970 to join the crew of four Americans and three crew members from Singapore. Vasseur was the second engineer on the ship.
He was a frequent letter writer, so when letters abruptly stopped coming in mid-June, Vasseur’s mother, Evangeline Vasseur of Mamou, contacted the shipping company and found out officials there believed the ship had been captured at sea.
The ship had left Bahrain two weeks before being hijacked on June 24. Somalian authorities claimed the Midnight Sun was a spy ship violating the country’s territorial waters, was not flying a flag to identify its nationality and failed to respond to an order to stop.
Vasseur said the crew was fed buzzard soup that had feathers and insects in it and also was fed monkey meat. According to the newspaper report, the crew became sick after a month, and the cook was allowed to go back aboard the Midnight Sun to get some food.
He said his captors would pretend they were going to shoot a member of the crew but when they pulled the trigger, the crew found out there were no bullets in the gun.
The crew’s Somali captors “wanted ransom but they didn’t get it,” Vasseur said. He remembers an American consul in Geneva, Switzerland, working with Soviet officials finally got the crew released on August 9.
He returned to the U.S., to Morgan City, after a two-month journey on the Midnight Sun.