War and Remembrance

This past Tuesday, May 4, 2010, marked the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. I remember those chaotic days before and after that event as if if happened yesterday. I was 13 years old at the time and being a lifelong Kent resident, it seemed unreal that the Vietnam war was coming home to my own backyard. It all started out innocently enough. On Friday, May 1st, students at the bars began to react to the announcement the night before by President Nixon that the war would be escalated into Cambodia. Before long, things got a bit out of hand and windows were smashed in downtown businesses and a bit of a riot ensued. We heard about this on Saturday morning, May 2nd. Figuring that it was nothing more than an isolated incident, we thought nothing more about it for the remainder of the day. That evening, a neighbor of ours called to tell us that the ROTC building on the KSU campus was on fire. She had heard it on her police scanner. A neighbor of ours who was a professor stopped by to tell us that he was going to go up to campus and see if he could calm down the students. He returned later to tell us that the students were cutting the firehoses. Later that night, the National Guard were called in to try to calm things down.

The next day we figured that things would calm down and that everything would return to some semblance of normal. We went to Mass that day and on the way home, we stopped at a nearby store to pick up necessities. As we kids sat in the car waiting for our mom, some press vehicles and limousines pulled up to the fire station across the street from the store, and out came TV reporters and the Governor of Ohio at the time, James Rhodes, and they went into the fire station for a press conference. It was there that Governor Rhodes managed to inflame things even worse by describing the protesting students as "worse than the night riders, brownshirts and vigilantes, the worst kind of people we harbor in America." Or something to that effect. He was, at the time, running for a seat in the US Senate on a law-and-order platform. As we drove home from Mass, we also stopped to see the burned out ruins of the ROTC building that burned down the night before. Later that night, despite an imposed curfew, protestors gathered on campus and National Guard helicopters spent the night chasing them around trying to herd them back to dormitories. We watched them from our sister's window since we were so close to campus and anyway, with all the noise of them flying overhead, it was too hard to sleep.

The next morning we awoke figuring that the worst was over, that the weekend troubles were over with the advent of the new school week. So we went to school that morning thinking nothing more would happen. How wrong we were. I was in the 7th grade at Davey Junior High School at the time, and that afternoon after lunch, in my 7th period Ohio History class, we were having a test when the assistant principal came over the PA system to tell us that there had been a shooting on campus and that two students and two National Guardsmen had been shot and killed. We were also told that the town was full of snipers, in particular, on Water Street, which I had to cross to go home. I completed my test, turned it in, raced to my locker, gathered my things and rushed to my sister's locker to see if I could meet up with her since we were also told not to walk alone, but to walk in groups for safety. I didn't find her so I went on alone, meeting up with a large group of fellow students who were walking home. At one point, their walk home went one direction and mine went another, so I continued on by myself, racing madly across Water Street and up Crain Avenue toward home until I met up with my sister and we sprinted home together, where our mom met us and demanded that we get in the house immediately. She left to fetch our two younger siblings from the grade school, returning later with them in tow.

It wasn't until the 6:30 CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite that we found out what happened, that four students had been shot and killed by National Guardsmen. Oddly, the day before the shootings, I'd taken a walk to our old elementary school, which was being used as a kind of impromptu military base. I spoke to a Guardsman and I noticed his rifle and a strap of bullets across his chest and asked if I could see a bullet since I had never seen one before. He took one out and showed it to me and it was big and heavy, about the size of my middle finger. I asked him if he was going to shoot anyone and he said at that point he was ready to shoot anyone at that point. I've wondered for 40 years if that young man shot anyone and if that bullet killed or injured anyone.

Those chaotic days before and after are some of the most memorable of my life. I've never forgotten any of it. This is just a brief synopsis of what I experienced during those days of 1970. I hope that someday, we'll find out exactly what happened, who fired and why. It's a sad chapter in American history and in the history of Kent State. And it happened in the town I've called home my entire life. May we never forget what happened here forty years ago. May we always remember, and never repeat the same mistakes that created this tragedy in the first place.