Community Corner

The Day the War Really Came Home

Fathers had turned against sons, brothers against brothers.

Forty-one years ago this morning history skipped a beat.

A rag-tag gaggle of citizen soldiers, direct from an exhausting week-or-so attempting to quell a truckers' strike, tramped up Blanket Hill on a bright and beautiful May morning.  They turned to march down the hill again.  And then, in a flash there was a fusillade of bullets.

The slugs hit their marks a football field's distance away.  Four were dead in Ohio.

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It was 1970, an awful time in America. Fathers were turning against sons. The Vietnam War. America, love it or leave it. Hard Hats vs. Doves. There was no room for discussion.  You either favored the war or ...

And on that formerly serene, tree-blessed Kent State campus, Americans were killing Americans.

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I had recently completed my stint as editor of the campus daily.  Now I was a stringer reporter for The New York Times and the Associated Press. And I was constantly in that no-man's-land between the protesters and the Ohio National Guard  -- except to my luck, on that May 4 morning.

The previous few nights were marked by civil disobedience and property destruction.  President Nixon had ordered the war expanded into Cambodia. Downtown Kent was trashed.  Was it in reaction to Nixon's move? Or was it first sparked by the city police who ordered an unruly gang of drunken Hell's Angels out of a bar and into a rough and tumble on the street?

The governor played hardball.  He was in a tough senatorial election race.  He called a press conference. He called the students "worse than brownshirts." And he called in the Guard.

Did the radicals, led by the SDS, take advantage and turn the mob? Someone pushed a burning rag through the window of the ancient wooden ROTC building as the crowd sang the Doors' hit, "Come on Baby Light My Fire." Firefighters were attacked. Hoses hacked. And soon stored ammunition began to pop-pop-pop.

At dawn there was only ashes. Flowers are better than bullets.

By May 4, a glorious golden day about to turn red, a few hundred gathered on the Commons to continue their anti-war chant.  And a several hundred more gathered on the crest of the hill watching in curiosity.  The riot act was read over a buzzy-sounding bullhorn, and the troops moved forward.

Tear gas flew in both directions. Bayonets were at the ready. And the troops moved forward, up over Blanket Hill, around Taylor Hall, past the pagoda and onto the practice football field. Protesters were in retreat.

Guardsmen knelt, took a firing stance, then stood up and turned as if to leave.  An old reel-to-reel tape recorder in a nearby dorm window captured the sounds as suddenly the guardsmen, many as young as the students around them, whirled and fired -- 63 blistering shots in 13 seconds.

Did they hear three shots from FBI undercover spy Terry Norman's pistol? Did a single guardsman squeeze off the first shot from his pistol? Did an officer actually call out: "Right here. Get set. Point. Fire"?

Whatever ignited the barrage, four American students were dead.  One was an active ROTC student and another a co-ed simply walking between classes along the only way between two buildings. Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder were dead. Nine others were wounded.

America held a collective breath.  How could it have come to this? How could America's military open fire in an American campus? How could America's warriors come home without honors and parades?

Eventually the war wound down and slipped into the history books.

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For years I maintained a web page devoted to chronicling May 4.  But last year, on the 40th Anniversary, I put it aside in mid-development. You can see it here.

To follow the events of the 41st commemoration, see Kent Patch, student-run KentWired, the May 4 Center and the Huffington Post.

And now they're building a May 4 museum in my old student newspaper office.

Saul Daniels is editor of Chatsworth Patch.


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