Star Trek tribute to 9-11

When I hear mention of nine-eleven, it brings back memories of what I thought was a movie I hadn’t seen. I realized after a few minutes of watching it was no movie. It was real.

American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m., after the people on board fought back.

Nearly three thousand lives were lost that morning; 2,977 people, not counting the hijackers. Firefighters, police, Port Authority officers, office workers, passengers, Pentagon staff. Whole companies. Whole families.

The military response started in the air before anyone had the whole picture. Fighters were scrambled. Combat air patrols went up over American cities. What followed was a long war, and a country that had to relearn how to watch the sky. At Ground Zero, that other response was already underway: FDNY, NYPD, construction crews, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and volunteers who just showed up with gloves and water and the willingness to stand in the ash. We rose from that. Not clean, not quick, but we rose.

Gene Roddenberry had been a U.S. Army Air Forces pilot before he wrote Star Trek. Starfleet is not a civilian club. It has ranks, a chain of command, and a ship that can fight if it has to. The Federation is the dream of what a service can be when it also explores; and a lot of that shape comes from the United States military. In “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” an Air Force interceptor meets the Enterprise over 1960s Earth. That picture still holds: the jet and the starship in the same sky.

We salute those who lost their lives on 9-11-01, and those who have made and make our country safer.