Thoughts from Dr. Joe: Remembering the Kent State massacre
If they had lived, Jeffrey Miller and Sandra Scheuer would have been 66, and Allison Krause and William Schroeder 65. But on May 4, 1970, they were struck down by the Ohio National Guard. America had lost its mind and the Vietnam War came to Ohio.
Last week marked the 46th anniversary of the Kent State massacre.
I was in ‘Nam at the time. There wasn’t a lot of sympathy for the students. The soldiers fighting the war had seen too many friends die and were tired of being called baby killers. When I read the story of Kent State and saw the picture of Mary Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, I understood the devastation that Vietnam would have on the psyche of America. America had imploded. We should have packed up and headed home, but instead, we endured three more years.
In 1968, Nixon was elected president and promised to end the Vietnam War. However, a series of catastrophic events juxtaposed the possibilities of peace and the continuance of the war. On April 30 of that year, Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia and opened the floodgates for the insurrections that followed throughout campuses across America.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were symbols of the countercultural movement during the student insurrections of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Shortly after Kent State, they released “Ohio.” After seeing the photos of the massacre in Life magazine, Neil Young wrote the lyrics. They evoke the turbulent mood of horror, outrage and shock in the wake of the shootings: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. We’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio.”
Two of the dead students were simply on their way to class.
From May 1 through May 3, college demonstrators accosted the town and burnt Kent State’s R.O.T.C. building to the ground. The demonstrators fell into the abyss of violent demonstrations. And with the invasion of Cambodia and the cessation of student draft deferments, the quagmire of Vietnam would continue. This set the stage for the catastrophe massacre. The students influenced by outside agitators were pitted against an untrained, undisciplined and poorly led National Guard.
The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. American troops killed four American citizens who were not threatening them with lethal force. At the Boston Massacre in 1770, there were at least manslaughter convictions of the British troops who fired on colonists. In Ohio, no one was held responsible. The government said it was sorry. Their rationale for the actions made perfect, plausible sense except for one fact: there were four dead students lying on the ground. The presiding judge in the inquiry said there was not a strong enough case to take forward.
A series of heads should have rolled for this, but none did. The government had to ensure there would be no indictment of the war effort. Inexplicably, it saw this as an unfortunate accident for which no one should be prosecuted, despite the four dead students.
“Soldiers are coming, cutting us down should have been dead long ago. What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground.” The guardsmen fired indiscriminately into the protesters.
Kent State provided the fourth red flag that we were off base in Vietnam. The first three occurred in 1968: the Tet Offensive, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese villagers. How many red flags would it take?
Regardless, America survived. Today we remain as polarized. However, what should bring us together is the memory of the “Four Dead in Ohio.”
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JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.
