River Bend couple's vacation turns tense in Mumbai

A pre-dawn phone call jolted Phil Seymour and his wife, Lynne, from their sleep in Mumbai, India.

The call was from a neighbor in River Bend, thousands of miles away, who had heard about the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and wanted to know if they were all right. The call was how they learned of the violence four miles away from their hotel.

Afterward, they lay in bed in their five-star hotel room, wondering if they would be the next targets of a terrorist attack.

They fit the profile.

Their friend, Dave Holmes, the neighbor in River Bend, had called at 2:45 in the morning.

"I don't want to alarm you," Holmes said in an even tone. "But terrorists are attacking Mumbai."

And then: "They are looking for Americans and Brits."

The Seymours' hotel was just four miles away from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, the site of the terrorist siege that began Wednesday evening. They had toured the Taj that same day, cutting the late-afternoon tour short to pack their bags and turn in early before flying home for Thanksgiving.

This was to be the last leg of a three-week vacation in India, and they were worn out. They went to sleep around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, and would have no idea what was happening around them until they got the call from Holmes.

After the phone rang, they lay there listening - to an eerie calm.

"We listened for gunfire, for screaming, for people running," he said.

"We looked for fire - for something," she said. "There was nothing but quiet."

They weighed their options.

They considered the similarities between their hotel - Le Meridien Mumbai - and the Taj.

Both were luxury hotels.

Both were popular choices for Westerners.

The Taj was downtown, but they had chosen Le Meridien instead because of its nearness to the airport.

And they knew Le Meridien had a file that would immediately identify them as Americans.

"The first thing they did when we checked in was copy our passports," he said.

In bed, they were in one of the farthest spots away from the door, and felt there was not any safer place in the room.

They wanted to know what was happening, but were afraid that the sound of a television might make an attacker choose their room instead of someone else's.

And so they lay there.

And listened. And waited.

Phil Seymour knew how to be ready for an attack.

He had learned that during a tour in Vietnam.

But he didn't know how to prepare for an attack like this one.

"I felt naked - naked in the sense of being without a weapon," he said. "Even in Vietnam, I had a gun. I had a way to defend myself. I might have died, but I would have died trying to defend myself. In the dark in that hotel room, I was in an indefensible position."

He thought of the small dagger he bought during an earlier part of the vacation.

It was his for display in the Seymours' home in River Bend.

But in India, he would cling to it for several hours in the dark.

"It was all we had," he said. "It would not have defended us against an AK-47 - or much of anything really.

"But it was all we had."

They lay there in the quiet- not sleeping, but waiting - until nearly 7 a.m. Thursday.

The morning light brought the first feeling of safety for the Seymours: Armed guards and policemen surrounded their hotel.

Soon, a person in their travel group called the room to check in with them.

"We figured if other people were awake and moving around, it was at least safe enough for us to turn on the TV," Lynne Seymour said.

The couple were surprised at how "normal" things seemed inside their hotel that morning, they said.

"People were going to breakfast, were moving about," she said. "Of course, that was all they were talking about, but there was no sense of panic."

At least 172 people were killed and 239 wounded in the series of attacks, according to the latest reports.

But the Seymours left Mumbai just as they had planned, with only a couple of extra security stops between them and the airport.

"An experience like this makes you so grateful for your blessings, and they aren't material things," Phil Seymour said. "They are the very basics of this life in America: food to eat, a roof over your head and the ability to go to bed at night without fear."