(UNDATED) I can’t get it out of my head. Some Somali mother’s son thought he could negotiate with the United States of America, and three of his thug-buddies got killed.

You remember. The Somali pirates boarded the U.S. merchant ship Maersk Alabama on its way to deliver a shipment of food aid to Kenya. The American crew grabbed and wounded one of the pirates; the pirates grabbed the American captain.

The Americans thought they’d play fair — we give you a lifeboat, you leave. That didn’t work out. So the captain, Vermont native Richard Phillips, ended up in a covered lifeboat with four kid pirates. Yes, kids. That’s what they were, kids with AK-47 rifles and bad attitudes.

Their message: You want your captain? Give us some money.

I forget what the ransom was –$3 million, $30 million — it doesn’t matter. Four kids stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean eventually ran out of food, water and fuel, and decided to accept some American aid personally delivered by the United States Navy.

So there they were, four kids and a captain, bobbing around until the destroyer U.S.S Bainbridge showed up, delivered the groceries, and took the lifeboat in tow out to calmer seas.

Four kids with AK-47s thought they could face off against the officers and sailors of a ship named for the 19th-century U.S. Navy commodore who commanded the U.S.S. Constitution, laid the keel of the U.S.S Independence, and was once prisoner of Barbary pirates.

I guess they didn’t cover those finer points of U.S. history in Somali pirate training school.

Even dumber, the four of them apparently did not know that once in tow they could be reeled in, ever so slowly, closer and closer to the rear end of the Bainbridge, where Navy SEALs with very expensive night-vision scopes on their very expensive high-powered rifles waited for an opening.

Then one of the four pirates, the teenage son of a poor mother and poorer father, who probably never heard of night-vision scopes and certainly never heard of Commodore Bainbridge, got off the lifeboat into a Navy launch because he needed medical treatment. While there, he was going to negotiate a ransom he would carry back to his pirate friends. Together, the four dreamed of an end to day after day of the same rags and dirt and rice that ground away their innocence and infected them with greed.

That kid was dumb enough to get off that lifeboat onto a U.S. man-of-war.

The U.S. sailors were not much older than he was. We don’t know exactly, but metaphorically at least, they were from Kansas and New York and Puerto Rico. They were black, like that kid; they were white, like the captain. To be sure, they were better fed, better educated and better off than the Somali mother’s son who thought he’d found his pot of gold at the end of poverty’s rainbow.

You remember how it ended. The boy got into the launch and boarded the Bainbridge. Two young thugs aboard the lifeboat popped up to get some air while the third kept watch over the captain. The seas were calm. The night was clear. The three were clearly in night vision scopes.

Three mothers lost their sons that night.

The Americans got their captain back.

And the Kenyans got their food.

How has the world’s poverty become so intertwined that U.S. kids who needed jobs became sailors who kill poor Somali kids on the high seas because a U.S. merchant ship was carrying American food aid to even poorer people on the shore?

(Phyllis Zagano is a Fulbright Fellow in Religious Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. She also holds a research appointment at Hofstra University.)