Four Dead in Ohio

I remember exactly where I was the day before the Kent State Shootings occurred. I was in a battle. No, not  Vietnam. It was a mock battle, a Civil War “reenactment” in Columbia, Tn.  Though a few of us were bonofide “reeanactors” (as well as we could manage it at the time) the bulk of the participants were cadets from nearby Columbia Military Academy. Those portraying Union soldiers wore their dark blue winter coats and those on our side grey fatigue shirts. Not a single cadet wore a hat or carried a firearm or had anything on himself that was remotely nineteenth century.  Two or three dozen waved flags.  The scenario was “Pickett’s Charge.”  But it was more like a youth stampede. Only a few of us had black-powder firearms. When the order was given, we marched out in front of the cadets, burned some powder, made some noise, got a few hearty cheers from the spectators, and had a jolly good time. I cannot remember if our assault was repulsed or not.  The amazing spectacle lasted approximately thirty minutes.  On the authenticity level the whole thing registered about as high as a “Dixie Stampede” dinner theatre, the sort of event modern reenactors would laugh at and call a “farb fest.”

Our event was the headline news of the local paper the following Tuesday morning, May 5, (there was no Monday edition for May 4) Only years later did I pull that paper out of a box, take another look, get a good chuckle at the “reenactment “ photos and notice a story near the bottom of the front page: TWO DIE IN SHOOTINGS AT KENT STATE UNIVERSITY. We were the big story and this “Kent State” business was the footnote.  It was nearly forty-two years ago, a battle in Ohio of another type of civil war.

I do remember how I felt in the Spring of 1970 because I was one of the local “hippies” in my neighborhood and school. Being “far-out” dudes a number of us in the Bellevue community decided to grow our hair long.  And certain “redneck-athlete” fellow  students along with certain school officials, folk not so friendly to the counterculture, told us that they were not going to allow it. Being the kind of fellows who enjoyed a good rebellion we grew our hair that Summer anyway. We expected trouble that Fall, oh a dozen or so of us, but it never really happened. Well,  maybe a little. One fellow, an aspiring barber, threatened to give me a haircut whether I wanted one or not, but after I punched him in the nose he changed his mind. I wasn’t a very commited “flower child.” I enjoyed a good fight from time to time. Or a big mock battle.

Then I went  to see the movie “Easy Rider.”  This was one cool movie, the story of two fellows, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, eager to get to Mardi Gras riding their motorcycles from California to New Orleans, and having lots of adventures with cute girls and smoking a lot of pot on the way.  Then two stupid rednecks with bad haircuts and missing teeth in an old pick-up truck shot them and it was over and the credits rolled and we walked out of the theatre on that cheerful note. This didn’t help the mood of things. It seemed like us, the hippie counterculture folk, against the world.  At times we even felt sorry for ourselves.

To make matters worse, along came the Kent State shootings. And  the song. “Four dead in Ohio”- repeated over and over again, angry and outraged.   Man, did I love those guys-Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I had both their albums and played them over and over again on a great stereo with headphones. The story, I heard later, is that they went into the studio a few days after the Kent State event and did this Neil Young song in one bloody take.  It zoomed to number fifteen, I think, on the billboard charts, got lots of airplay, and made Mr. Young lots of money. Musical talent with a dose of outrage can be profitable. Over the next year or two whenever my buddies and I would get together with guitars we’d play this song (the guitar lick was pretty accessible)  and rock the night away. When we got tired of that we’d recite long passages from Firesign Theatre albums and laugh our heads off. Then we’d eat potato chips or run down to the bagel shop because we’d have a serious case of the “munchies.”  Pretty groovy huh?

Soldiers are cutting us down – sang Mr. Young. What a nasty bunch these Guardsmen were! For some time I saw this thing as a pretty simple case of good vs. evil.  Rednecks and trigger-happy soldiers hassling us and cutting us down when all we wanted was a little freedom. “ They see a truly free person and it’s gonna scare ‘em” said the Jack Nicholson character in EASY RIDER.  We began to feel like it was time for a revolution.

We didn’t like the Vietnam War either.  Mostly out of curiosity (sorry I was never really a radical) I attended an anti-war gathering at the Tennessee State Capital one afternoon in the early Spring of 1970. Women in black robes and painted faces silently waved around models of B-52s. The keynote speaker was Jerry Rubin, of the “Chicago Eight” fame. I couldn’t make any sense out of what he was saying but he seemed to be in earnest. And very excited.  And he looked pretty cool too in a hippie sort of way. I hung around and listened for twenty minutes or so.

For some reason I remember the year  1970 very well. Forty-two years later we’ve had some time to mull this thing over and sort out as to who was to bless and who was to blame as to the Kent State tragedy.  The verdict? Kinda hard to say. Like so most conflicts, there’s plenty of blame to go around. But the one who, in a tactical and practical sense came out on top was the guy with the deadliest weapon.  For me, that’s lesson numero uno in this cautionary tale. Angry insults and hurled rocks and debris do not triumph over modern weapons. Don’t piss off the guy with a gun unless you have a bigger gun and you’re ready to put your ammo where your mouth is. This is the principal reason why I’ve never wised off to a policeman (or woman). He/she has a gun (among other things) and I don’t. I smile and say “Yessir/mam….thank you for your dedicated service to our fair city, etc.etc.” Say it even if you don’t mean it. Seems to me abysmally stupid to do otherwise. A little flattery can only help.

Here are the facts. A mostly young anti-war crowd upset about the escalation of hostilities in SE Asia converged upon Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, a small town in the Northeastern part of that state, on May 2, 1970.  President Nixon had ordered the bombing of areas in Cambodia in order to curtail the entry of NVA (North Vietnam Army) supplies and reinforcements flowing into South Vietnam.  From a military point-of-view it was sensible but to those protesting the war who had no interest in anything but diminishing US efforts in that part of the world and an ultimate US withdrawal, it was an outrage-the polar opposite of what they wanted. So all across the country they took  to the streets. But this was, in a sense, more of the same. We had been hearing about anti-war protests at colleges and universities since, oh, 1966 or so. Nothing new.

Yet we would learn that this was no ordinary student protest. For some reason those taking it to the streets in the otherwise non-descript and  sleepy town of Kent, Ohio were a bit more excited and daring than in most other places. Or maybe the authorities in Ohio just weren’t as tolerant as those in Berkley or Boston. Just how many angry protesters shouting obscenities, throwing rocks and beers bottles filling the streets and overwhelming the local police is hard to say (estimates vary widely) but it became so bad that the nervous mayor of Kent called for help.

Upon getting the news Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio was outraged. He called the troublemakers in Kent “the worst  type of people we harbor in America.”  He vowed to restore order and “drive them out of Kent” without delay.  He wasn’t kidding. He sent in a National Guard unit armed with World War two vintage M1 “Garrand” semi-automatic rifles, weapons that had sent many Germans, Japanese, and North Koreans to their eternal reward. Just the sight of these fellows marching about, he reasoned, should send the protesters back to class where they belonged. That is, if they had good sense. It was assumed that the sight of rifles with fixed bayonets would adjust attitudes and achieve the desired result, “an appropriate show of force.”

Let’s not forgot just who was sent to Kent. These were National Guardsmen, citizen soldiers, not Green Berets or Navy Seals, the bad ass warriors. These were “weekend warriors”, the guys next door, most of them not much older than the trouble-making students, guys who trained one week-end a month and two weeks every Summer.   Otherwise they mostly led civilian lives like everyone else. This “call-up”  (to Kent State)was an “active-duty” assignment and “active duty” pay was much better than usual. Nearly all the Guardsmen lived in Ohio or in the general area. Some of them might have lived next door or down the street from the parents or relatives of the protestors.  Some likely had relatives among the student protestors. And some of these Guardsmen had likely joined up in order to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. We must never forget that at Kent State on May 4, 1970 it was a something like the Civil War-brother against brother.

Perhaps the riskiest part of the Guard presence on the Kent State campus was the fact that they had little or no training or experience in civil disturbances, mob or riot control, police-type duty, whatever you want to call it and had not the slightest idea of what they were getting into. Their orders were fuzzy, their officers worried.  Surely their eyebrows were raised in surprise when they discovered that they were being sent not to a poor riot-ridden black neighborhood (as we had seen in the years previous) but to a predominately white college campus. One thing they did have, however, a thing that could impose order quickly if all else failed: they had live rounds in their ammo packs.  And some tear gas canisters. And bayonets. Except for a brief lecture on tear gas and the usual bayonet drills, they had no idea of how to peacefully disperse angry crowds, if one wants to call the use of such devices “peaceful.” As infantrymen, most of their training involved the firing of live rounds at static targets. This was what they knew best.

On the evening of May 2, several truckloads of Guardsmen arrived in town. Things had just gotten worse just prior to their arrival. As they marched in they were greeted by the sight of a burning ROTC building on campus and crowds of angry students gathered around it cheering.  When firemen rushed to the scene protestors pelted them with rocks, pushed them around, unscrewed the hose and generally prevented the vastly outnumbered firemen from doing their job. Guardsmen were able to disperse much of the crowd and make several arrests allowing a few students to experience the business end of a bayonet. Though no one was seriously hurt, the ROTC building burned throughout the night while a mob of students  surrounded it chanting and singing, an altogether different sort of campus bonfire. The next evening on May 3, another large rally was held on campus. Guardsmen used tear gas to disperse the crowd and they did. So far so good.

But the overall mood of the place was still nasty and Kent State’s luck was running out. The morning of May 4, despite numerous efforts on the part of town and campus officials to prevent it, another mass rally, two thousand or so protestors, formed on the campus commons.  Around noon approximately 77 of the Guardsmen moved toward them with tear gas canisters ready to break up the meeting.  Upon their approach many of the protestors wisely walked away, and the crowd fragmented into two or three large groups uncertain exactly what to do but unwilling to leave.  Several daring protestors hurled rocks and beer bottles at the guardsmen. A few of the Guardsmen were struck by protestor-thrown projectiles and one was injured.

At 12:24 pm it happened. Twenty-nine of the Guardsmen opened fire. The volley lasted about thirteen seconds. Exactly why they opened fire or  even if they were ordered to do so, has never been firmly established and forty-two years later is hotly debated.

Four students were killed instantly. Two of these, in easy range of the shooters, were active in the protest. Twenty-year old Jeffrey Miller was seen hurling rocks at the Guardsmen seconds before he went down. The other two students killed had no part in the protest. They were some distance away, simply walking to class with books in hand. Ironically, one of these was a member of the ROTC battalion.  Nine students were wounded and survived and one of these remains paralyzed from the waist down to this day. It was a Monday and classes, astonishingly enough, had not been cancelled. Perhaps the campus authorities felt that if they had to miss class to do it, students would be less likely to participate in the disturbances.  The unfortunate result was simply that a number of students going about their ordinary routines were put in harm’s way when the shooting started.

It was front-page news across the nation. Kent State university closed for the next six weeks. Large-scale protests erupted at most major US universities. And an iconic image appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine of  fourteen-year old runaway Mary Ann Veechio  kneeling in  anguish over the body of Jeffrey Miller who had been shot seconds before, a photo that won the photographer a Pulitzer prize.

Though hearings were held in the following months, no Guardsman was ever criminally charged and arrested for the murders of the students. In the mid-seventies families of many of the victims opened a civil case against eight of the guardsmen along with a number of other officials going all the way up to the governor himself.  At the conclusion of things the amount of 675,000 was awarded to be distributed equally to the plaintiffs and officially the matter was dropped.

Yet Kent, Ohio was officially burned into the US historical consciousness. Over the years various memorial services have been held and memorials on the campus erected. Alan Canfora, one of the wounded that fateful day and an activist of sorts, remains convinced that the guardsmen were given orders  to fire and that the government conducted a cover-up and silencing of witnesses to protect the guardsmen and those who ordered them to Kent State.  He, and quite a few others who speak at annual memorial services, are not willing to forgive or forget. And that photo of the girl kneeling over the fallen protestor, like the Iwo Jima flag-raising or the image of the South Vietnamese officer shooting a terrorist suspect, is instantly recognizable. We all know what it is.

A few weeks after the tragedy I traveled to Lisbon, Ohio, a small town about forty miles SE of Kent, and was myself involved in a shooting incident-in a manner of speaking. There was a Civil War reenactment occurring there and for us, it was like, well…Woodstock.  Four of us piled into a my father’s brown Opel Kadet station wagon (no A/C) with our gear and made the journey.  I still do not know how that pitiful little four-cylinder vehicle did it. It was a four day trip. One long day to get there. Two days for the event itself. And one long day to return to Nashville.  In those long hours of riding in the car we talked of many things including the recent breakup of the Beatles. (I’m still not over that) But, curiously, I don’t remember any discussion of the Kent State shootings.  If I had been angry about the shootings, I guess I was over it. Like the Columbia newspaper, it had become a footnote. Student protests come and go but to old rebel hippies like me the Civil War goes on and on.

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