In his diary today, Othniel asks us to remember Kent State.
I remember. I remember walking past the student union at the University of Texas early that Monday and seeing Jeff Jones and some of the SDS people sitting on the steps planning a protest of the bombing of Cambodia.
On Sunday, students gathered on the Union patio to burn Nixon in effigy. On Monday, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were killed by the National Guard. . . .
Don’t forget. At a time when most of the American people were sick to death of the Vietnam war, sick of their children coming home in coffins, sick of fighting the draft, sick of napalmed children – Nixon was expanding the war into another country. By the time the bombing was over, 600,000 Cambodians were dead. The devastation of that once peaceful and independent country by American bombs opened the door for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
That’s what the students at Kent State were protesting. That’s what got four of them killed. Saying, stop, stop, stop this madness.
I remember the armed Guardsmen and police lined up shoulder to shoulder along 19th street. I remember the fear.
I remember sleeping on the mall. Years later, when I was a graduate student in the 80’s, every time I passed the patch of grass where I slept those nights, I remembered.
Then the police began firing tear gas. They went absolutely nuts, even shooting off tear gas inside the Capitol as the students retreated toward campus. The state workers who got gassed were outraged. A lot of people were blinded, being led by those who could still see. We were very inexperienced…. The students retreated to the campus; that evening about 10,000 gathered and discussed building an effective strike for the next day.
On Wednesday, an all-day rally brought about 10,000 to demand that the university be shut down Thursday and Friday and in support of the other demands. As helicopters circled overhead, there were speeches on race consciousness and poetry readings.
[Jeff Jones remembers} Protesters had come prepared for violence and more tear gas, wearing long pants in the May heat, and carrying wet rags or gas masks.
The FBI was on top of the Tower and snipers were on top of buildings between the campus and downtown; that night about 200 riot-equipped police lined up along 21st Street. Demonstrators shouted ‘Pigs Off Campus’ and pushed the police back to 19th Street. According to Jeff Friedman, who accompanied police patrols on Wednesday and Thursday nights: I was told they were under orders to shoot and kill anybody who came off campus. I believed it then and I believe it now…. The word was ‘You stop these people. They do not get on the Austin streets period.’ (Third Coast, April 1985, p. 72).
I remembered the power of the march, filling the streets as far as the eye could see.
Over 25,000 took to the streets in a legal march through downtown in protest of the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State murders.
Law students stayed up all night working on legal briefs to sue the City of Austin for the right to peaceful assembly. They won their case just after the march began and spread the word that the march would be legal as the front of the march reached 16th Street. The march was led by a girl dressed in black, flags and coffins were carried. It was about 13 blocks long and lasted over three hours (Daily Texan, May 9, 1970).
Most of all, I remember the hard hats at work on the construction sites downtown cheering us on. Those blue-collar, short-haired guys cheered us on. That’s when I knew that those who opposed the war were no longer just us America-hating, draft-evading freaks.
May 1970. On May 9, 1970, five days after the Kent State killings, 100,000 Americans marched in Washington DC to protest the war.
The first Marines landed at Da Nang in March 1965.
Five years later, in 1970, the majority of the American people wanted our troops home, now.
Soldiers and veterans of the Vietnam War were organizing against the war effort. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was involved in bitter protests, often throwing back their medals in Washington, D.C..
The impact of the May 1970 student strike on the government was great. On May 8, at the height of the strike, officials in the State Department, the Agency for International Development and the Cabinet vocalized their opposition to the escalation of the war, some of them resigning in protest (Katsiaficas, 1987, p. 152).
In September 1970, the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest reported: The crisis on American campuses has no parallel in the history of the nation. This crisis has roots in divisions of American society as deep as any since the Civil War. The divisions are reflected in violent acts and harsh rhetoric, and in the enmity of those Americans who see themselves as occupying opposing camps. Campus unrest reflects and increases a more profound crisis in the nation as a whole…If this trend continues, if this crisis of understanding endures, the very survival of the nation will be threatened. (Garth Buchanan and Joan Brackett, Summary Results of the Survey for the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Urban Institute, Sept. 1970, pp. 9-10).
The killing and dying continued for five more years.
The last American soldier was killed and the last Americans were lifted off of the embassy roof on April 29, 1975.
Excerpts from History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988) by Beverly Burr. Chapter 4.
was the UT student government president at the time. He was the first “long-haired hippie” elected to SG pres at a major university, an event so remarkable that Time Magazine felt the need to run a profile on him.
We have to teach our children what it meant to live in that world, because it is that very kind of world into which Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tim LaHaye and their allies in The Texas House of Jesus are leading us.
In fact, a world where armed federal marshals can force a young woman into religious counseling on the order of Priscilla Owen, or agents of the State of Texas can round up young gay men for “reparative therapy” after Warren Chissum gets his way may be worse.
Our country’s troops are on a mission to reduce Babylon to a role of subservience to The Christian Nation. Our sons and daughters are being sacrificed to the glory of the Theocrat’s god, more surely than the Priests of Baal slew the first born of Phoenicia and Carthage to placate their god.
No. Stop the madness while we can, before we are stripped of what Power, and Right, and Dignity we so dearly earned.
Thank you for teaching our young.
I see the fashions of that era coming back amongst our youth today, and it brings a smile, because of the reminder of my youth.
I was “in-country” at the time of Kent State, and many of the other protests of that time.
I am wondering, if history will repeat itself in this time, again.
Fashion, War, Protests, Government, Religion (which is on a scary move for power that has not been witnessed since the turn of the century), will these things come to pass?
Time, is the only answer, and I hope, that it is the Right One. ; )
Somewhere in the last week or so I’ve read that the famous image of the helicopter taking people off the roof is not actually the US Embassy but the CIA station opposite…
Can’t track down a link.
It was a CIA apartment building opposite the UPI office in Saigon.
Yet another example of what “everybody knows” is often simply not true. E.g. that antiwar protesters spit on returning Vietnam vets.
Everyone! GO READ Jerry Lembcke’s April 30 editorial in the Boston Globe about this.
My memories of returning vets are completely different from the popular myth. They were not the “enemy” to those of us opposed to the war. They were the heart and soul of the antiwar movement.
stated “We don’t belong here.”
Hearing their stories in letters and after they came back opened our eyes long before the media started telling us what was really going on there. There is a misconception that the war was fought on our TVs from the beginning, but in fact it was only happy news about the wonderful things we were doing to bring peace and democracy to the poor people of Vietnam who were oppressed and threatened by the Communists and Ho Chi Minh (sound familiar?) for the first years of the war.
I described my own enlightenment listening to a Marine home on R&R in 1966 in this comment.
My brother’s first impressions were eloquent. I gave his letter to my daughter whose teacher read it aloud in her 2nd grade class. He felt the GI’s looked like bullies automatically because they towered over the South Vietnamese in physical stature. Some GI’s wore holsters with guns even when in their civilian clothes, when they went for R&R in Saigon.
Word was getting around besides the TV coverage.
Today word is getting around about Iraq through letters and photographs from GI’s but where’s the antiwar outrage? It seems to be taking a long time and too many deaths to sink in the American collective consciousness. Although the polls for Bush’s handling of the war are at 35% now.
That was a powerful comment you linked. Just imagine being that guy facing a return to HELL.
In my younger days I was babysitting for an established business man, former anti-aircraft soldier in France WWII. He told me what they did to captured snipers in France.
I have been antiwar every since.
I always wondered where the stories of being spat upon started, as I did not recall them from the time period. As the article you linked states: troops did not come back to public airports, and they were at Military bases. Good link by the way, everyone should read.
And you are right about the soldiers, we loved the soldiers, they were our families, and we wanted them back here so very bad, so why would we treat them that way. I thought that the ones who made it back were blessed for having gone at all, and blessed for makeing it back at all.
Seems like that whole thing was built up to make the case against Jane Fonda and John Kerry, and anti war movement, etc. by the people who did not want the war to end. The same ones who were so ticked that it ended that they did everything they could to get us into another war of the same kind. Finish Vietnam in Iraq??????? Military Industrial Complex needs a war to justify itself, and the longer the better. Should have listened to Ike.
I had a email dialogue last summer with a retired Army man(now a Doctor) who was in Vietnam and he said that that was the best time for Vietnam, when we were there, and he even sited a case of a man, now his patient, Vietnamese who said “Yes, it was the most peaceful time ever for them, etc.” He said we should not have left without the job being done. Just like they say now…..
I take it the doctor and the Vietnamese man are in the US? In all likelihood, therefore, the Vietnamese man was associated however distantly with the South Vietnamese puppet regime.
I’d suspect life in most of Vietnam is now much more peaceful than when they were being bombed, napalmed and shot at by the US.
Yes they were both in the US, and the Doctor was still in active military, so the man must have been associated with the military in some way. I will try to find this doctors posting on conservative Voice, the same thing he told me in email. I always thought the man was telling the Dr. what he thought the Dr. wanted to hear.
Of course he is a Rep. and I emailed him first because of an anti Kerry article he had written, I finally gave up in disgust after about 7 emails, seeing his thoroughly entrenched position on all manner of things.
This man Dr. Brooks Mick, writes frequently for the Conservative Voice, and his many diaries can be found there.
His mind set however, is found quite often in the Rep. group branch of military, I would say.
One wonders about the sanity of such people.
Funny thing though, on the Schiavo case, the Doctor was on the Dem side of things and just got reamed by Reps. on the site. I was quite delighted at that..
Yes, people are often more complex than you first think…
troops did not come back to public airports.
Most who got discharged on arrival caught flights home the day after. To use the military discount you had to be in uniform. Time from combat to discharge: 24 – 48 hours.
I am sure both modes of arrival were used both military and non military, but the private ones would not have been in large groups (and as such would not attract the attention of protestors, etc.) was my point. My ex husaband came back in a military plane and landed at a military base. As there were quite a large number of men rotating out, I am sure that there were transports flying all the time.
Below is a quote from article Janet linked to above.
One of the vets in the tent at our “Stand Down ’93” event would agree in part, and disagree. He couldn’t say whether the person that spit on his uniform in LAX – the day he got back – was a protestor.
My memory is that vets didn’t become the “heart and soul” of the movement until some started speaking out against the war. VVAW.
for sure if these incidents really did happen. However, I remember nothing like this at the time – on the contrary, the people I was around were extremely supportive of the vets.
I think Lembcke is quite likely right that many Vietnam vets “remember” being spat upon, when in fact they were not. Which is not to say they are consciously lying about it. Memory is a funny thing.
Just as now there are many who say that any soldier in Iraq today is an immoral coward if they do not desert, (see various rants over at Kos), there were those during the Vietnam war who declared, loudly and often, that desertion or refusal to be drafted was the only acceptable moral choice. Not having served myself, I can only imagine how a returning vet might have felt when reading such statements, or hearing them delivered to his face.
Years later, when the conservative meme began to grow – “protesters spat on returning vets,” probably some of these guys remembered with pain how they felt when hearing some self-righteous leftie preach at them about the immorality of their service, and thought, “Yeah, just like the time that asshole told me . . . ” Over the years, with the tricks memory plays, this metaphorical spitting may have transformed itself into a memory of actually being spat at.
I have always wondered if there were a few clueless 17-year olds carried away with outrage at the war, or a nutcase or two, who actually did spit on returning troops. Like I said, there’s no way to know.
But like Lembcke, I find it very odd that none of these incidents were reported at the time. The soldiers themselves would be unlikely to call the paper and complain, but supposedly these incidents took place in public and someone would have, if there were more than a few isolated incidents, or if they happened at all.
The hippies, freaks, activists, et al were so vilified at the time – today’s attacks on “liberals” are mild by comparison – that any incidents like this would have been immediately and loudly trumpeted by the war’s supporters if they had happened. The idea that anyone opposed to the war “hated our troops” and was trying to get them killed with their treasonous lack of support for the war was the theme of the day. They’d have used it, if they had it to use, I’m sure.
wish the gunmen had spat on their kids.
People who have gone through combat have one thing in common: they generally don’t talk about it with anyone who hasn’t been there. When they do tell “war stories”, most I know resort to humor, or say they’ll talk about it “some day”.
The man in the tent hadn’t told anyone, including his family, about his experience. It took being in a tent with 8 or 9 vets, 20+ years after coming home. He said he’d carried his “shame” ever since. Maybe faulty memory, but I doubt it.
I really don’t. But for what it’s worth, one of my Vietnam vet friends is really passionate on the “it didn’t happen” subject. He has been involved in many veterans groups through the years, wrote a book about his war experiences, and he says his vet friends have shared no incidents like these with him. Originally I thought they probably did happen – there were many on the left that did all kinds of things that I thought were wrong. Blowing up buildings, for one. But he convinced me that it was unlikely.
He really gets furious at how Vietnam vets are used, as he sees it, to further the right-wing agenda, and he sees the spitting stories as part of that. He was totally livid over the recent Jane Fonda incident.
how Vietnam vets are used
One of the main reasons they’ll never talk about some incidents.
I loved it when those idiots slamed Jane Fonda. They just don’t get it. She was right, they were wrong. They’ll never learn.
I learned a lot those days spent on the mall in May 1970. Since the University was shut down, a number of speakers who had come to UT Austin to give talks came to the mall and spoke to the assembled crowd of protesters there. I remember that John Kenneth Galbraith was one of them, and I also remember that a Cambodian – a diplomat? – spoke powerfully and movingly about what was happening to his country. I wish I knew more about who that was, but I’ve been unable to find out.
One of the main things I learned was the power of an enemy to unite a group. During the day, we could see police lined up at the end of Speedway on 19th Street (now Martin Luther King Blvd.) Here’s a picture of the view we had. At night, they were still there, but we couldn’t see them in the darkness.
During the day, we were all united and very serious. At night, the crowd fragmented and we began to argue among ourselves. Bands played, people danced. Periodically, a speaker would seize the mic away from the band and deliver an impassioned plea that we should be mourning, not dancing. “People are dying! This is no time for a party!” Another speaker would grab the mic and argue back that the dancing was a reflection of our rejection of the culture of death, of the joy of life itself that we wanted to replace it with.
In the morning, we would all come together again. Watching that happen was life-changingly enlightening.
And by the way, if you go to look at the pic in the link – over those arches is engraved, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
I think it is very interesting how different age group dealt with the war. I was in my late 20’s and you were in your early 20’s, your age group especially the college crowd was very active in protests and demonstrations, while my age group was deep into children, Jobs, keeping it all together and trying to live with the long sad pain we felt over the war and it’s effect on our lives.
I must tell you that my age group was so thankful for your group that had the time and the energy to get out there and do something.
But we all had one thing in common, we were passionate about bringing the war to an end,and thoroughly disgusted with the Administration and Congress, indeed some I knew said that if it did not end soon they were going to do something drastic to change the administration. It was that bad. Yes, they were talking a takeover by force. I don’t know how advanced those plans were but they were contemplated by some.
I do believe if the war had gone on any longer the majority of the people would have taken to the streets.
That is what government was afraid of, and thus Kent State perhaps.
Anyone who was old enough to remember Vietnam was able to see the obvious parallels between this war and that. Eerily similar.
We need to keep telling these stories so that the younger among us can hear and know just how bad it can get, especially if there is a draft and the war escalates.
Now that is curious: “…you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free…” is also etched in stone at the entrance to CIA headquarters. It’s supposedly a quote from Jesus, recorded in the Bible – John 8:32.
The killing and dying continued for five more years.
For the Americans. Not so for the people of Southeast Asia. Their governments were in turmoil before we got there, and long after we left.
What infidelpig wrote: “I am wondering, if history will repeat itself in this time, again.”
I understand that the Vietnam terrain is still affected by Agent Orange. The landscape has not fully recovered.
There is excellent article at this site and her are a few paragraphs:
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=5/3/2005&Cat=4&Num=002
Nguyen Trong Nhan, from the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange and a former president of Vietnamese Red Cross, believes the use of Agent Orange was a “war crime”.
Further down the article:
But the ground in many areas of Vietnam remains contaminated by Agent Orange. A number of people in these areas believe they are victims of the chemical.
One woman said the herbicide had caused a skin disease which gave her “great suffering”.
“If the U.S. and Vietnamese governments could care for people like me, that would be comforting,” she added.
Another man said his legs have “wasted away” as a result of Agent Orange.
“When I realize I have been contaminated with poisonous chemicals, and the U.S. government hasn’t done anything to help, I feel very sad, and it makes me cry,” he added. “Now I always get severe headaches. My first child has just died — he had physical deformities. The second one is having headaches like me.” ———Cancers and disease
Food and supplies are still delivered to victims of Agent Orange. Many were not born when the U.S. sprayed the area – but there is strong evidence the chemicals are still having an effect.
This is awful.
Do you remember this. After scientific evidence on the dangerous effects of Agent Orange were shown to President Johnson, he prohibited its use IN THE USA.
Criminal I would say and this article reference was a mild one compared to some I have seen in the past. Birth defects are raging over there much like Chernoble’s surrounding area. We are seeing birth defects in Iraq (soldiers and their wives and children are affected as well) now and more to come, Depleted Uranium, Napaalm, and all the other poisonous mixes we are using in this war we started because of weapons of mass destruction. Highly ironic that we seem to be the biggest users of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps I should have clarified – the killing and dying, of both Americans and Vietnamese, of the years of our war continued for another five years. Many say, as people did then, “we broke it we bought it” or words to that effect. We can’t leave until we’ve made it all better.
But staying longer did not make it better for the Vietnamese – it made it infinitely worse. Iraq just looks like deja vu all over again to me – and has since all I could think of when reading/watching the stories about Iraq’s WMD’s, was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
It was bad before we invaded Vietnam, it was worse after we left. It was horrible while we were there. And America is responsible for what happened while we were there and all of the aftermath that flowed from it.
is startling. Think of the press reaction to the Gulf of Tonkin lies and the press reaction to the WMD lies. Night and day.
What has happened to the press in the meantime. That subject is topic for a few diaries.
I think the difference today is that we just do not see the horrible images on a daily and hourly basis as we did in Vietnam. We saw the raw and gritty pictures, including the body bags of our men, carried, dragged and flown out of war zones. Our daily count of deaths was very high, not just one or two, can’t remember exact figures but they were very high.
We do not see the true pictures of war much at all, unless it is surreptiously taken and then it does not get disemminated into mainstream media.
I am referring to the press reaction to the discovery that the President of the USA lied to the American people about the reasons for invastion.
When the press found out about the Gulf of Tonkin lies it was treated as an outrage. Today, the reaction to the lack of WMD in Iraq has been mild in comparison. Is it the media or have people in general become inured to Administration lies.
Yes the fact of no wmd’s was just accepted as a matter of course by many, which leads me to wonder just how many of us expected none would be found as I surely did, Wonder how many Republicans thought that and still supported the war. Oh yeah, it was 9/11 that justified it, forgot, (snark). That whole Sadam connection.
But nontheless if Clinton had done the same thing he would have already been impeached and exiled if not inprisoned for war crimes and crimes against the people of the US.
Yes, about the inured to lies, in your statement above,that must be so, but I frankly don’t get how so many can be so ambivilant about the whole mess going on now. Maybe it just hasn’t hit home personally with enough people yet. The draft reactivated could be the impetus to a strong anti war movement.
Maybe we need to stir up the outrage.
The Bush administration has us wallowing in outrage.
The polls on Bush’s handling the war in Iraq are revealing though. Only 35% approval.
Damn it! It’s not even a war. It is a military invasion and occupation to unseat a tin pot dictator gone wrong. Gone completely SNAFU.
I’m afraid General Myers appearance was a prelude to the draft.
Well, my memory is generally lousy, and my memory of events that far back is particularly lousy, but I think that once the last Americans left Saigon, the South Vietnamese military folded, and the government collapsed pretty quickly. For all intents and purposes, the war was over in a matter of months, if not weeks.
Folks with better memories or Google skills can correct me if I’m way off base.
The last American officially left Vietnam on 29 April, and the South Vietnamese government surrendered the next day.
Interestingly, there were a number of Americans who missed the last bus out, so to speak. Mostly civilians, guys AWOL from the military, etc. They were rounded up and flown out a couple of weeks later.
you’ve been linked at Burnt Orange Report.
Pretty much the same scenario played itself out in Boulder with National Guard troops, the daily marches, the tear gas, and all the rest.
And pretty much the same scenario played itself out in Berkeley, in Madison, in Ann Arbor, at Columbia, and the list went on and on.
It’s difficult to describe what it was like then. Imagine the top thirty or forty universities in the nation all simultaneously going through what Janet described.
Just to clarify, the parts in the boxes are from Beverly Burr’s excellent (undergraduate?!) thesis. For anyone interested in the history of student activism, I highly recommend it. Although I haven’t had a chance to read it all – I just found the chapter that included the May 1970 events via Google last night – I intend to.
She interviewed Jeff Jones and the other activists and organizers of the protests (or read interviews with them) for much of the information about these events. What she reports is exactly as I remember it.
However, the point of view of Jeff and the others embroiled in the negotiations (or refusals to negotiate) with the administration, dealing with the logistics of the thousands of people on the mall, the real fear that another Kent State could happen at any moment and doing whatever they could to try to prevent that, was necessarily different from the point of view of someone who was just one of the thousands (e.g. me).
And I must say something about the all-night legal work done by the law students to get a temporary restraining order (which prevented the city from enforcing the prohibition on marches) that allowed us to march legally. That removed any justification of a violent put-down of the marchers and may well have saved us from another Kent State. I simply can’t tell you what heroes they were to us – and the exhilaration of hearing early in the march that we were legal. The intensity of emotions as they changed from bracing ourselves for confrontation with dread and fear and what courage we could summon to an explosion of pure celebration that we could march freely . . . I just don’t know how to describe it. But I’ll never forget it.
Maybe these recollections should be sent to University newspapers. Give these kids some ideas of what they might be up against, especially if Bush marches us into Iran in June, as rumoured. Then come the draft. I keep asking myself when will we say enough and take to the streets again. THAT is what got the public involved then and the only way they will come out of their apathetic coma!