Kent State Massacre, 50th anniversary

The anniversary was as painful to him that day as it had been last year and the year before. It was as if no amount of time could heal the wound he suffered on May 4^th, fifty years ago. He stopped on the path to Taylor Hall to let the ache in his stump calm down, it had been a long walk to his destination and what remained of his leg always complained. Yes he suffered from PTSD, but even that didn’t compare with the emotional damage caused by what happened down there on the field. An incident remembered in such terrible detail that the images were burned into his mind.

It was a protest, one of thousands across the country. People of all stripes protesting the war, the cost to the nation in dollars and, more tragically, the sacrifice of its young men for nothing more than political intransigence. It was also a time of joy, the excitement of kids being together on a beautiful day. They danced about as if it was a party, a mini-Woodstock, someone said.

He was almost there, and like every time before he felt the tears coming. He would have let them fall but for the young couple sitting on the bottom step, near the spot where John Cleary was shot. That was where he sat fifty years ago. The students were deep in conversation, their books open on their knees. To have everything as it was, he would have to sit right next to them. There was no doubt in his mind that they would think it weird. But perhaps, it would be ok if he explained why he’d come. He moved closer. There was a little room for him at the edge of the step. It would suit him just fine, but he had to ask for permission first. “Hi, excuse me, but would you mind if I sat there with you?” he said politely. “Sitting on this step is a sort of ritual I do on the anniversary.” Glancing up at him without warmth, the young woman said, “It’s a free country, sit where you like.” The young man ignored him entirely.

“Thanks.” He sat, pulling himself in as much as possible to avoid contact with her. She moved away, forcing her friend to move as well and he protested with an angry stare. “Yeah, I’m sorry to bother, but… you know, it’s the 4^th of May, and I come here every year to remember.”

“You’re a day early then, mister. You know that Cinco de Mayo is like uh… tomorrow right?”

“What? Oh, huh,” a small laugh escaped. “I know, son. I know. I’m not here to celebrate that. Don’t you know what happened here on the 4^th? Today is the anniversary of an American tragedy.” He saw the blank expressions and thought, oh my god, is it possible that they don’t know what happened here? “I’m talking about the Kent State Massacre. You know about that don’t you?”

“He-yeah, duh. We all know about that. But it was a long time ago. Get over it, man, okay. Like, lighten up,” the boy said.

They were younger than he thought so he tried not to be offended or get angry. “A moment ago, you said it’s a free country.”

“Yeah?”

“I found that interesting, that’s all. Based on what’s been happening over the past few years.” The boy was about to object. “It’s just that with this President’s attitude towards the media and anyone who doesn’t agree with him, I wonder how free it really is. Back then, we questioned our freedom, which makes me think whether anything has really changed in fifty years.”

“From what I heard it was just a bunch of liberal, commie, hippie types taking over the campus.”

“It’s what Vice President Agnew said about us but it’s not exactly true.”

“You were actually a part of that?”

“Yes, I was. Like I said, I was sitting right here where when it happened,” the old man said calmly. “Sure, there were some communists on campus I suppose, there usually were at schools like this in those days. And there were definitely some hippies in the crowd, but mostly, the kids were students just like you.”

“You were a student here?” said the girl.

“No, but my girlfriend was. Her name was Kimberly. We were down there with the others, but I got tired, and my leg was bothering me, so she brought me up here to sit down. We could see everything from here.” He looked out across the field to the parking lot, remembering it all as his gut began to twist into a knot, and he struggled to maintain control. “We’d met at a party a few weeks before and really connected. I was angry and she seemed to understand. I’d been angry since the day I came back without my leg. I joined a group that organized rallies and marches against the war. What we wanted to do was…”

“Oh, an off campus radical,” the young man said.

“Radical is a strong word, I was a…”

“You were one of the people who caused the

massacre.”

He hadn’t come all this was to be hassled like

this, but again he swallowed his resentment and replied, “That’s what Nixon

said. He said they were over privileged bums causing trouble for America. I

remember that quite clearly. The man was a soulless crook. We saw it

differently and I think history showed who was at fault here. It was a dirty

war and Americans were dying over there for nothing.”

“I thought it was supposed to stop communism,” the

girl said. “Wasn’t it?”

“That’s what they said, and I can’t say that to some extent it wasn’t true, but it failed.”

“If you were so against the war, then why did you go?”

“Because at the time, I thought it was my duty, and, to be honest, I didn’t have much choice.”

“You could have been a draft dodger.”

“Me? No, I couldn’t do that, I showed up when I was called, and I fought for my country. I went over there in December 67 just in time for Vietnam’s New Year. “I’ll tell you the truth, all I could think about was staying alive. And after a while, I couldn’t figure out why we were there. I lost this stepping out of a helicopter. Whatever hit me, took it right off at the knee,” the old man said, rubbing his thigh. He looked out over the field and remembered. “But what happened out there broke my heart. They were sitting in groups down there around the trees when Jeeps rolled in. Then the troops took up positions, 1,200 of them, some formed a line over there by the Pagoda,” he said, then pointing to the left, “others over there on the hill looking down on the parking lot. The kids didn’t take it seriously at first. Why would they? They were on campus, at home in America. The university and the government were overreacting. Those men in uniform had sworn an oath to protect them so they had nothing to fear, they thought. A flower child went up to one of them and stuck a flower down the barrel of his rifle. Those guys weren’t much older than kids and they were frightened of the students.

Some of the students began taunting them, chanting, shouting. The men in the White House had called them names, said they were un-American. They said those kids were a threat to democracy? When your Commander-in-Chief tells you, those kids are the bad guys you believe him. So, having the protesters right in their faces like that, well it got them nervous.

“Then the Guard fixed their bayonets, that really got us going. And the crowd started to back off.” He paused as the scene replayed in his head. “They began firing tear gas at us and people started running back this way, towards Kimberly and me. Some threw stones at the soldiers, then all hell broke loose. The Guard opened fire, people were hit and began to fall. Someone started ringing that Victory Bell back there.” He just stared ahead after that, in a trance, remembering, reliving the massacre.

After a minute or two the girl said, “Mister are you ok?”

“It’s funny, the things you think about at times like this. I had a Peter, Paul and Mary song playing in my head. If I had a Hammer, have you heard that one?”

“I don’t even know who Peter Paul and...”

“Mary. No, I don’t suppose you would, anyhow, when I remembered that bell ringing, that song came to me. They sang, ‘I’d ring out a warning’…,” and he fell silent again, remembering. ‘It’s the bell of freedom, it’s the bell of justice, it’s the bell of love between my brothers and sisters all over this land.’ Then, with tears on his cheeks, he said, “Well, there wasn’t a whole lot of love that day. For the first time in my life, I felt ashamed to be American. I thought, if they could turn on their own people like that, the nation’s children for god’s sake, then was there anything they weren’t capable of?”

“What happened after that? What happened to Kimberly?”

“What happened to Kimberly? Yeah, I don’t know. She ran and I never saw her again. For me there were more protests, more sit ins and arrests, more marches, and speeches, but the war kept going for another five years. We thought that the leaders would get the point, but they didn’t. Other wars had already started.”

“So, what did you accomplish? I mean, the protesting didn’t end the war in Vietnam and you just got people shot at home,” the girl said.

“You’re right of course, people died, and people got hurt. But we did eventually shame the government into stopping it. When I sat down you said it’s a free country. And yes, it's supposed to be a free country, and we had a right to protest the war because it was wrong, our government was wrong. In fact, as citizens of a democracy, when we see a problem, it was and is our duty to protest. Something for you to keep in mind even today. When a government turns its guns on its own citizens, something has gone seriously wrong and I’m pretty sure that you’ll find the problem is with the people in the government.”

“Once a protester always a protester, right mister?”

He stood up and brushed the dust off the seat of his pants. “I guess you’re right about that, son. There never seems to be a shortage of things to protest about though, does there?” he said, and began his long walk home.