Kent State Remembers Shooting Victims : Memorial: The school dedicates a plaza 20 years after Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire at a war protest. Four students were killed.

Maybe it was a catharsis or maybe just a fixation, but the wounds and weariness of Vietnam seemed fresh as ever Friday as thousands gathered here in driving rain for the dedication of a memorial to one of the war’s most tragic but pivotal incidents.

The theme was reconciliation at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the day Ohio National Guardsmen shot 13 Kent State University students during an anti-war demonstration, killing four of them.

Yet the event served as a stark reminder that Americans still have trouble shaking the legacy of anger and distrust left behind by the country’s most divisive war. More than 15 years after hostilities ceased, speakers continued to condemn both past and present government policies toward Vietnam and betrayed a lingering suspicion that the full story behind the Kent State shootings had yet to be told.

“The injustices committed here should never be forgotten,” said Dean Kahler, who was paralyzed from the waist down when his spine was severed by a guardsman’s bullet.

Nevertheless, Kahler praised construction of the memorial, a $100,000 plaza near the site where he and others were gunned down, as a positive contribution to the healing process. “Bitterness is the prerogative of a loser and I am not a loser,” Kahler declared.

The keynote speaker, one-time Democratic presidential contender George S. McGovern, said the Bush Administration was prolonging the pain of the Vietnam experience by refusing to establish diplomatic and economic ties with Hanoi.

“As matters now stand, the war in Vietnam is unfinished,” charged McGovern, who campaigned on a stop-the-war platform but was trounced by Republican incumbent Richard M. Nixon in 1972.

“The killing has stopped but the arrogance that produced it survives, and so does the agony, the guilt and the separation. We have not yet come to terms with the tragedy of Vietnam and until we do America will not be the great and good country that we want it to be.”

For years, the university has offered courses, lectures and seminars on the fatal confrontation that took the lives of students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer and William Schroeder. But, until now, the only permanent memorial had been a small slab erected by a Jewish group in the parking lot where the victims fell.

The 70-foot wide plaza is a serene, tree-lined stretch of black granite built on a hillside near the parking lot. Engraved in the stone floor are three words: “Inquire, Learn, Reflect.” Planted on the slope below are 58,175 daffodils, one for every American who died in Indochina during the war.

Construction of the memorial has been a long-festering source of controversy at Kent State that in many ways mirrored entrenched political divisions toward the war itself. Some veterans groups were opposed to the idea that they felt glorified unpatriotic dissent. Activists, on the other hand, pressed for something far grander than was finally built.

Displeased with the final product, a few hundred protesters--some not yet born when the shootings took place--boycotted Friday’s official ceremonies as they attacked school administrators for doing too little, too late to commemorate the dead.

Standing with fists clenched and their backs to the speakers, demonstrators raised signs demanding “Build it all” and dismissing the plaza as an “Insult.” Others featured more generic expressions of outrage. “Vietnam 70, El Salvador 90, Stop the War,” read one.

Many of today’s students said they were fed up with what they described as an unhealthy preoccupation on the Kent campus with the shootings and the Vietnam War.

“It’s a touchy subject,” said 19-year-old advertising major Lauralee McArdle of Pittsburgh, Pa. “May 4 is all you hear around here. . . . I’m a freshman and I’m already tired of hearing about it.”

Tom Williamson, a freshman from Seven Hills, Ohio, said the monument was a fitting enough tribute to the dead and that those who continued to bicker over its adequacy were doing little more than pouting. “I think they should put this behind them and get on with their lives,” said Williamson, 18, a political science major. “This has become Kent State’s only claim to fame.”

But sophomore Tammy Phillips, 21, said continued debate and discussion of the war has helped her better understand the behavior of her own father, a Vietnam veteran who refuses to discuss anything about his experiences.

“My dad served in Vietnam so this means more to me than most people,” she explained. “I definitely have more respect for veterans than many people do. Some people around here think it ought to be forgotten. . . . But it’ll never be forgotten. It’s never going to be.”