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From 9/11 to Ukraine: Why I Still Believe in the Spirit of Free People
Twenty-five years after joining the Air Force following 9/11—and after being purged as a transgender service member—Bree Fram reflects on solidarity, freedom, and an aid convoy to Ukraine.
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Bree Fram is an astronautical engineer and retired U.S. Space Force colonel who served 23 years before being forced out by the Trump administration. Her service included Pentagon assignments in space policy and national security planning. She has published three books and is a former congressional candidate. Subscribe to her Substack.
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On the evening of August 24, a few hours after crossing into Ukraine with an aid convoy, I walked into Lviv’s Rynok Square looking for dinner and got trapped in a crush of people squeezing themselves in.
By the time I worked back to the edge of the crowd, the mayor and a band had appeared on a balcony. Music started. Hands went to hearts. So did mine. The crowd quickly came to a halt.
I had walked right into an Independence Day celebration, another year where the Blue and Yellow still flew. Here was a massive gathering, many in traditional Ukrainian clothing, in defiance of any Russian air threat. And they sang together.
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The next morning, before departing for Kyiv, we visited the Field of Mars. I had never seen anything like it. A terrible and beautiful display: Ukrainian war dead, in above ground graves with a bench at each. Every grave was a custom work of art: unit flags, paintings, Zen gardens, favorite candies. The central piece of each was a picture of the deceased, full of life. Tears rolling, I tried to look at every face. Seeing a few holding their pets felt like a vise on my heart.
And then there was a moment of silence. A clock ticked down over a loudspeaker, ending with “Slava Ukraini!” and “Heroiam slava!” Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!
I first felt the visceral reaction of “Fuck Putin” that adorned our mission patches. Beyond that, I felt a sense of solidarity. I thought I had felt it once before. It brought me back to 9/11.
“Turn on the TV, something terrible has happened,” my mom shouted at me, waking me up. I had just graduated from college and was living at home while applying for jobs. My life changed as I watched the towers fall.
More than anything, it was the passengers of Flight 93 that moved me. They almost certainly knew they weren’t going home. They refused to remain passive, acting in service of something greater, and saved countless lives.
Four days later, I drove two hours to see my girlfriend, who is now my wife. Halfway there, an American flag hung from a highway overpass and I struggled to see through my tears the rest of the way. Somehow I made it, and walked into Peg’s apartment. I set my small bag down.
“I’m going to join the Air Force.”
“Holy shit. Really?” Peg seemed incredulous, this had not been the plan.
“Yeah. I think it’s my turn.”
On the 17th, I shared, “A Rambling Letter on What I Learned This Week” with friends and family. I had never felt compelled to write, or even to share my deepest feelings before; there was much about myself I kept hidden.
“I learned a lot this week. I learned about shock, grief, anger, fear, hope, and patriotism. However, the things I learned the most about this week were religion, faith, and the human spirit.”
I wrote that the world’s great religions, at their core, shared messages of peace, love, and respect for one another. I also wrote about the people who corrupt those beliefs into permission to hate.
The terrorists had justified mass murder as an act of faith. At the same time, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were blaming the attacks on pagans, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others whose very existence they considered an affront to God.
“No one deserves such a horrible fate,” I wrote. The follow-on was blunt, a warning that has continued to guide me:
Extremism in all forms must be fought. We must even guard against extremism in our quest for justice and vengeance. We must not blindly lash out at those who are different, or those who we somehow suspect; else, we sink to the level of the terrorists. Wrongs must be righted and peace restored, but not by sacrificing the way we live and who we are.
I wasn’t yet able to admit I was writing, in part, about myself.
Even then, I had a sense that America’s test was not if we could overwhelm the people who attacked us with the might and skill of our military. It was whether the fear we held would overcome our beliefs in justice and make us abandon the principles we claimed to defend.
Immediately after September 11th, our unity felt real. First responders had run towards danger. People rushed to give blood. Flags, like the one I saw from the highway, were everywhere. It was almost a moment of unconstrained pride in being an American, knowing we were “the good guys.”
Sadly, the cracks in the unity were there almost from the beginning if you cared to look. For some people, a collective desire for justice easily tipped into vengeance and threatened Americans who happened to be Muslim, Arab, Sikh, or South Asian. The American answer to terror included torture, off-shore detention, intrusive surveillance, and generational wars. Defending freedom and betraying it could often be seen hand-in-hand.
Yet our ideals weren’t naive. They made the distance between what we claimed and what we did impossible to ignore. Loving the country meant continuing to ask it to bridge the gap.
Near the end of my 2001 letter, I remarked that our strength had been revealed, that it wasn’t military, political, or economic, it was “the spirit of free people everywhere.”
With less innocence, I still believe that twenty-five years later. But the spirit is neither inexhaustible nor invulnerable. It can be frightened, manipulated, distracted, lulled into complacency, and subverted. We have to keep choosing action to defend freedom.
I ended my letter with far more certainty than I could summon today:
Our spirit of love, respect, peace, and patriotism cannot be crushed by mere terror. Because of this, we will fight on, persevere, and win. The flame of hope for all mankind will not be extinguished. I will do my part in this and hope all of you will as well.
I can’t promise that America will inevitably persevere and win.
But I can still make the promise that belonged to me then.
I will do my part.
In 2001, I didn’t understand yet what that part would demand. But I had made up my mind where it would begin. I raised my right hand and swore an oath to protect and defend. I spent twenty-three years keeping it.
In April 2025, when it looked like the courts might stop the Trump administration’s effort to purge transgender service members like me, the government made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. The very same day, I was at a secure facility being trained on continuity of government. I had been picked to be one of the people who kept a bag at the ready, to be able to go on a moment’s notice, should the country call. I was the national backup plan for the next September 11th scale, or worse, disaster.
Two weeks later, the Supreme Court concurred that people like me were the emergency.
As I was forced out, the hardest thing to leave was the clarity of purpose, the feeling of a defined mission where I got to play a part. I lost a world I understood and faced a thousand doors into the unknown.
After a five-month run for Congress, as I planned what my next part would be, a friend reached out: want to go to Ukraine on an aid convoy?
My only question was: when do we leave? If I could help, I would be there.
Which is how, on August 24, as soon as the final border guard waved us through and we crossed into Ukraine, I hit the gas. Nicklas, my friend from Finland, had something keyed up on his phone. The speakers blared into life, and Kenny Loggins told us exactly where we were headed. Highway to the danger zone. And off we went.
When I deployed in 2004, as the C-130 pilot announced we were crossing into Iraq, my iPod landed on “Danger Zone.” Nicklas brought it full circle. This danger zone was worth heading into.
The car we were driving wasn’t just filled with gear, it was the gear. Like much of the convoy, it would become frontline transport. Part of the constant refresh needed due to Russian destruction. Almost entirely driven by volunteers who felt they were doing their part. This was the spirit of free people at its finest.
Leaving Ukraine, I visited where my family had come from in Poland and Germany. In Berlin, the day after having seen Auschwitz-Birkenau, what stuck with me were the examples of East Germans risking their lives to cross the wall for freedom in the West. A woman who leapt from a third-floor window to her death. A border patrolman whose mad dash somehow ended in a leap over barbed wire to the West.
Then, in Poznań, I wandered into a former citadel, now a park. Descending a hill, I found myself in a cemetery. There was something special about these graves, they were lovingly tended like the Field of Mars in Ukraine. I started translating the headstones. Many of the inscriptions marked mass graves to the unknown who had perished in Hitler and Stalin’s terror. Some were to individuals.
Andrzej Gliński, 1941-1956. His tombstone says he died for freedom, justice, and bread. Someone had taped his school photograph to the candle sitting on his grave. He was fifteen when hundreds of tanks put down the protest he joined.
What is the price we pay for our freedom? Some choose to pay, others aren’t given a choice. Sometimes it’s hard to find the line between them. But I know where too many of us are standing right now: on the sidelines. You don’t have to drive a truck into Ukraine. You don’t have to raise your right hand. But you have to choose something, because complacency is a choice too, and someone else always pays for it.
What I Saw on Independence Day In Lviv, Ukraine | ||||||
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I spent last week’s Ukrainian Independence Day in Lviv, Ukraine. It was an unintentional choice, a function of scheduling the travel days of an aid convoy from Helsinki to Kyiv. But it was the perfect place to consider a country caught between forces of darkness that tried to drag it into the past and a people determined to live in a better world of their own creation. | ||||||
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On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I wrote of how the world changed, a journey, and that some things are worth fighting for. On the fifteenth, I encouraged a rejection of fear and hatred in a heated election year. On the twentieth, I pondered if the events of 9/11 truly changed who we were or just revealed who we could become.
On the twenty-fifth, I’m still working on the answer. September 11th revealed things about my country that inspire me and things that terrify me. Things I struggle to understand given the history we should have learned from. Though I still recognize so much of myself from my letter, the certainty has been replaced. But the worthiness of the cause? The striving for better? That conviction has only grown.
I saw that conviction in my fellow volunteers. Different countries, different lives, different reasons for being there. Doing far more together than any of us could have done alone. I was proud to stand with them, hopeful we could live up to the legacy of those who were unable to stand there with us. My thoughts kept turning to the photographs at the Field of Mars; the humanity extinguished. A boy in Poland who never grew up. And while “Danger Zone” felt motivational, it was always Springsteen’s “Into the Fire,” about 9/11 first responders heading up the stairs of the towers, that humbled me and provided an ideal to strive for. Their lives mattered. Their lives changed mine.
I hope fewer and fewer people have to pay the price for freedom. No kids who wonder if they belong. No families grieving those lost in wars of territorial aggression. Gatherings in public squares that don’t worry about air raid sirens and terror attacks. That’s the future I thought of when I wrote down a few things I learned in 2001.
Twenty-five years ago, I told Peg, “I think it’s my turn.” I could not have imagined where that decision would take us, or how many people would help me keep the promise that followed.
The second half of that promise was never a throwaway. It was an invitation. Your part doesn’t have to look like mine. It can be a protest, a ballot, a classroom, a donation, a letter to the people you love. But it must be something, and it needs to be now.
“I will do my part in this and hope all of you will as well.”
I still mean every word.
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