The Kent State shootings, thirty-five years ago last week, are somewhat close to home for me. I started college at Ohio University the late summer and fall of 1970, following the spring of the Kent State incident.
Ohio University, like all of the state universities in Ohio that spring, had been forcibly closed by the Ohio governor after the Kent State shootings.
Kent State was in the same athletic conference as OU, the Mid-American Conference, and many OU students had brothers, sisters, cousins and friends at Kent State.
For those too young to remember or for those who didn't think it was important enough to pay attention, on May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine wounded.
The National Guard had been called out by Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes after many state universities in Ohio and nationwide had been rocked by anti-Vietnam War protests that spring.
Then Rhodes shut down the campuses of the state universities and students went home early that spring.
The Vietnam War had been raging for several years by then. The death toll of American troops had not yet reached the final tally of over 58,000, but it was climbing day by day. American troops were returning home severely injured and many were traumatized by what they had experienced in Vietnam.
Young men from age 18 into their mid-twenties were being drafted against their will into the Army, under threat of prison sentences if they did not comply.
Interestingly, many of the National Guard troops who were deployed at Kent State may have joined the Guard to avoid being drafted to Vietnam.
When I started college the following fall of '70, many of the students who had been present the previous school year had, of course, returned. They told us freshmen about the anti-war riots, the tear gas and the eventual arrival of National Guard troops who helped evacuate the campus and shut it down.
There continued to be protests and disturbances on college campuses and on Ohio campuses. But the worst seemed to have passed.
The military draft system had changed around 1970 or so. The draft lottery system was put into place. Three hundred and sixty-five ping-pong balls, each representing a birthday of the year, were randomly picked on nationwide TV, just like the state gambling lottos of today. If your birthday was first to be picked, you were going to be drafted. If you were number 365, you probably wouldn't be.
But the Vietnam War was getting closer to the point where it was starting to wind down somewhat. The war continued during my freshman year and throughout the four years I was in college there through 1974, though American troops were gradually withdrawn from Vietnam. The peak of the war, in approximately 1967-68, had passed.
The four Kent State students killed and nine wounded were just some of the millions of casualties of the Vietnam War. Besides that oft-mentioned 58,000 American troops killed, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops were wounded, many very severely. Many other troubled Vietnam vets remain homeless today, virtually abandoned by our society.
Estimates of about three million Vietnamese deaths -soldiers, civilians, men, women and children -are often cited. And their wounded. Vietnamese children still reportedly suffer from the chemical warfare substance Agent Orange and unexploded landmines and bombs.
The Kent State students were just thirteen of those millions of victims on all sides of the Vietnam War. But those students and that day 35 years ago are worth remembering.
Like the 58,000 Americans killed and hundreds of thousands wounded, maybe it is useful to think of it as friendly fire or fratricide. Killing our own youth and sending our own young people to die and be wounded. Killing our own.
-Steve Hammons, a 1977 OU graduate, is the author of two novels about a special research team called the Joint Reconnaissance Study Group Mission into Light and the sequel Light's Hand. A version of this column was originally posted at www.IntelDesk.com. Send Hammons an e-mail at lshammons@cox.net.
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