Star Trek: Enemy of My Enemy

My grandfather, Randall Eickhoff, was a minor officer in Starfleet. By this I mean he never had command of a starship, never part of a command crew, even. He wasn’t insignificant, though, by which I mean he had real responsibilities. Everyone knew who he was. 

Admittedly, this might be because he never stopped talking about Jim Kirk. Jim Kirk, now everyone certainly knows him. You don’t have to be a Federation citizen, even, to know the name Jim Kirk, you don’t need to have served in Starfleet. Everyone knows Jim Kirk.

Which means, there’s a lot of people who shaped their own reputations based on Jim Kirk’s. My grandfather didn’t serve with Kirk, never came even had an assignment that brought him aboard the Enterprise, let alone as a member of its crew. No, he studied with Kirk at the Academy.

They shared only one class together: Klingon Field Tactics. Now, for those of you who only know about the Klingons from the many conflicts between the Klingon Empire and the Federation, you will probably assume the class was meant to prepare cadets for battle with them. Actually it was exactly what the course title says it was: an in-depth look at Klingon tactics.

This was the class Kirk would later mention as having taken when he came upon General Korrd on Nimbus III. At the time, Federation-Klingon relations were beginning to thaw after more than a century of hostilities. It was suddenly okay to view the Klingons as something other than the enemy.

Klingon Field Tactics was an elective, meaning if Jim Kirk said Korrd’s strategies were required reading, they were, in this class, taught by an old Klingon lawyer named Kolos, said to have had personal ties to Jonathan Archer.

It becomes still easier to understand all this when you know Korrd’s strategies were employed not against Starfleet but the Tutt Raiders.

Chances are, unless you’re Klingon or are exceptionally well-informed, you’ve never heard of the Tutt Raiders. These guys are largely responsible for making the Klingon Empire the aggressive institute it became. They were the enemy of our enemy. They were, worst of all, if you were a Klingon, totally without honor.

They were the scourge of deep space travel for many worlds. They set the pattern of conquest the Klingons would later follow, but were far more ruthless, and random, about it. They took without any thought to the future. And one day they came upon Qo’noS.

Do not be mistaken: the Klingons were already quite Klingon; Kahless was quite unforgettable even at that time. Warriors honed their skills with the bat’leth. Yet these were things known only on a single world, and as such, there was no idea of empire.

Until the Tutt Raiders.

They came as in a swarm. They cared little for the conditions facing them, or the challenge, foolish enough to believe they could take on any they found. The greatest of them was Anles Tutt, and the long period of warfare finally led to a reckoning between Anles Tutt and General Korrd. 

When Jim Kirk and my grandfather were being taught this by Kolos, it was still fresh news. It was indeed a glorious day for the Empire, when Korrd led his small fleet against the combined forces of the Tutt Raiders. Slowly the Empire had carved itself out of the worlds scoured by their foes, until the day came that even Anles Tutt, the greatest of them, could no longer withstand the tide.

But the fate of even the greatest warriors must be shared. One day they die in battle, or there is simply no longer a fight left for them.

Korrd grew old. He had presided over the final defeat of the Tutt Raiders, and then it was left to younger men than him to contend with the Federation problem, a different one, one that required different tactics.

Since the defeat of the Tutt Raiders, in fact, no major war has been prosecuted, by the Klingons or anyone else. The Klingons and the Romulans seem intent to change that, and we have all heard about the Cardassians, but those are matters for the future. Or maybe tomorrow. Who knows?

My grandfather always liked to talk about those days, how exciting that class was, and sometimes I think it’s not entirely because of Jim Kirk, that it really was about a war that meant nothing to anyone else, and everything to him. Sometimes I think he wished he was a Klingon.

And even today I wonder what a Tutt looks like, if I would even know if I saw one. They’re a threat consigned to the ancient past. But chances are, they would still be no friend of the Federation, even if they were the enemy of our enemy.