Remembering the Fallen

On the very spot where the M-1 bullet caught Jeffrey Miller in the face, where he spun and fell to the ground, blood gushing from the enormous hole in his head, there is today an anonymous gravel-strewn patch of roadway.

Where Sandy Scheuer died, shot through the neck, the blacktop is cracked and gouged by tire tracks. Where Bill Schroeder lay dying after a bullet traveled up his back and through his lung before exploding out his left shoulder, there is a small pile of cigarette butts where a car ashtray has been emptied.

And, on the aisle between parking spaces where “flower child” Allison Krause fell, there is a puddle of oil spreading where once her blood seeped.

Since May 4, 1970, when the four students were killed by National Guardsmen brought in to quell unrest at the Kent State University campus here, there has never been any question about where it all happened. In 1980, the school even published a map that labels with letters from A to M the sites where the four who died were shot and where nine other students were wounded.

But until now, the spots have never been officially memorialized--or even closed to traffic. Although students and faculty will continue to park their rusted-out Pintos and shiny new LeSabres over the sites until at least May 4, 1999, for the first time in the long, troubled history of Kent State memorial-making, a plan has been approved to permanently block off the four parking spaces where the students were struck down.

How they will be marked and isolated from the other parking spots, whether by floral planters or decorative barriers, is at the center of debate among students, faculty and administrators.

Closing four slots in a 60-car lot on an 800-acre campus with dozens of other parking lots might seem like a modest proposal, but when it comes to the Kent State tragedy, no suggestion, however common-sensical or modest-sounding, is considered without controversy.

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“If you ask me, Kent State is running this memorial business into the mud,” graduate student Muata Niamke told a visitor recently. “I don’t have anything against the students who died, of course, but if for every death in a social movement anywhere in the U.S. we put up a memorial, we’d have them all over the place. Enough.”

That attitude is shared by some townspeople whose natural sympathies have historically been with the guardsmen and not the students who died. As a worker at a motel near campus put it, “Remember, it was just some hippie college students who didn’t know the meaning of law and order. I think we should have stopped talkin’ about them a long, long time ago.”

But Kent State graduates like Claudette Mejean, class of 1969, don’t think there has been enough talk about how and why and where the students died.

“I come here every year for the May 4 anniversary vigil at the parking spaces just so people will remember,” she said. “For nearly three decades, that’s been the only day of the year the university will shut down the parking lot.”

Students on the university’s ongoing May 4 Task Force say it took them “300 people marching to the university president’s office, 2,000 signatures, letters from all the families, and 28 years” to win the president’s July 1 approval to close the four “sacred sites.”

Kent State President Carol Cartwright, who came here in 1991 from her post as vice chancellor at UC Davis, says she did not agree to closing the parking spots in the past because she was not sure that was what the families of the slain students wanted. Now, Cartwright says, she is convinced by recent conversations with some family members that the new plan is needed to complete “some unfinished business in the history of May 4.”

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Blanket Hill is a grassy knoll in the center of campus, named by students who for generations have used it to spread their blankets and take in the sun--or at night to make love under the stars. According to the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, it was from here, shortly after noon on May 4, 1970, a hot spring Monday, that a detachment of Ohio National Guardsmen, armed with World War II-vintage Army rifles, fired a volley of at least 61 shots, killing four students and wounding nine.

Although the commission concluded that “the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable,” criminal charges brought against eight of the guardsmen were dropped for lack of evidence.

The soldiers had been ordered to the campus just 40 hours before, arriving late Saturday night after a wooden ROTC barracks was burned down in protest of President Nixon’s decision to expand the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia.

By the time the young soldiers formed up Monday morning to disperse students gathering for a noontime peace rally, the Guard units had had an average of three hours’ sleep the night before. Most of the 2,000 to 3,000 students standing on the commons were curious spectators waiting for the rally to begin to find out why the Guard was still on campus, according to later investigations.

But a few, including Allison Krause and Jeff Miller, were there to deliver a message to the Guard: “Go home.” Or as some protesters chanted, “Pigs, off campus!”

The afternoon before the rally, Allison, a 19-year-old Honors College student from Pittsburgh, had been more courteous. She approached one of the soldiers and dropped a yellow flower into the muzzle of his M-1 rifle.

“Flowers are better than bullets,” she said sweetly. The soldier smiled and discreetly flashed her the peace sign.

But on Monday, Allison was angry at the soldiers’ continued presence on campus, and, she told friends, a little bit scared by it. Not Jeff Miller. His mop of curls bouncing above a rainbow-colored headband, the happy-go-lucky 19-year-old joked to a friend about going to play “war games” before he joined a few hundred other demonstrators taunting the soldiers.

As the others were heading to the rally, Bill Schroeder, 20, was taking an ROTC exam in battle strategy. Although he personally opposed the Vietnam War, Bill had come to Kent State on an ROTC scholarship and wasn’t eager to get involved in anything that would jeopardize his $1,600-a-year stipend. He headed over to the parking lot as the guardsmen began launching a barrage of tear gas canisters at the protesters and unknowingly walked into a firing range.

Sandy Scheuer, 20, whose Hebrew name, Gittel, means goodness and kindness, was on her way to a 1:10 speech and hearing class on the other side of campus. Tears were streaming down her face as she dashed to the parking lot to wipe her eyes with a tissue and catch her breath.

Allison, who had been running with her boyfriend to escape the clouds of gas that seemed to be following them, ducked behind a car in the lot when she heard what sounded like firecrackers.

A wing of guardsmen, isolated by their bulky gas masks from the students--and some say, from the horrific reality of what they were about to do--suddenly turned and fired. Many fired into the air, but some did not.

The nearest student hit was 71 feet away, the furthest, 745 feet--or more than two football fields away. Jeff was 265 feet from the nearest guardsman; Allison, 343 feet. Bill, who had dropped to the ground when he heard the first shots, was 382 feet away when a bullet hit him where he lay. Sandy, also hit in the back as she dove for cover, took a bullet fired from a gun 390 feet away.

“You can’t imagine how this happened and how truly tragic it was until you stand in this parking lot and look back at Blanket Hill,” says sociology professor Jerry M. Lewis, who was walking behind Sandy when she was shot. “When Jane Fonda came here not long after the shootings, she could hardly believe the students were shot from so far away.”

While Lewis believes the parking lot should stay open “for historical reasons,” some others, including most of the students who were wounded May 4, 1970, say that parking cars over places where young people died mocks their memory.

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The first tribute was only a metal plaque with the slain students’ names. It was laid on a tiny grass island at the entrance to the parking lot in 1973 but disappeared a short time later.

When the plaque was returned the day after the May 4, 1974, anniversary, it was shot full of holes. Although Kent city police confiscated the plaque as evidence, no arrests were ever made. Later, a small piece of polished gray granite engraved with the dead students’ names was planted deep in the grass on the same parking island, where it remains, largely ignored between anniversaries.

The next effort was more ambitious.

A national competition was opened in the early 1980s to find a design for a proper and permanent memorial to the events of May 4, 1970.

The most prominent entry was from famous American sculptor George Segal, who created a life-size bronze of Abraham killing his son Isaac. But the bloody image, a sketch of which hangs on a wall in Kent State’s closed-to-the-public archives, was deemed “inappropriate” by the school’s board of trustees.

In 1986, the various memorial groups finally settled on an “environmental design” by Chicago architect Bruno Ast.

And, on the 20th anniversary of the students’ deaths, it opened--but on a far smaller scale than Ast had envisioned. (According to the university, there wasn’t enough money raised to build the full-size version.)

The Ast memorial plaza is part of a walkway in front of the Kent State School of Journalism, which stands just below where the guardsmen stood and fired. The stark plaza consists of four coffin-like granite boxes near a stone threshold engraved with the words “Inquire, Learn, Reflect.”

Although the memorial is reminiscent of the coldness of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it is tiny in comparison, and some say its message is a conundrum. On a recent summer day, several campus visitors, including one with a video camera on his shoulder, stood in the middle of the plaza looking for the memorial.

“This is it?” one woman asked.

“It’s not what I expected,” said Janet Rogers, a parent of a 1970 graduate. “It was such a shocking, horrible thing to have our own country’s Army firing on our own children. . . . Well, there should be something more than this for kids who lost their lives.”

Originally, there was to have been another, more vibrant memorial. The hillside below Blanket Hill was planted with 58,175 daffodil bulbs to symbolize the number of servicemen and women who died in the Vietnam conflict--and to honor those who died at Kent State because of it. But in winter, the hillside is covered with snow and ice, in the spring with mud and in summer and fall, the area is overrun with weeds.

In April, when the daffodils usually blossom, their colors fade quickly. In this part of the country, spring is short-lived, and the flowers almost never bloom on May 4.