The incident, to put it briefly, occured when students at Kent State University staged a protest over the invasion of Cambodia which had been announced by President Nixon on April 30 and which for the US commenced on May 1.
This blog isn't a day by day anything, but we do commemorate certain events, most frequently those of 100 years past, when they occur. Starting in 2018 we started picking up some fifty years past events mostly to mark the epicoal year of 1968. We've continued with that a bit, as that is in some ways the continuation of the original story.
I marked the 1970 invasion of Cambodia, an event that I can personally recall as I noted in a post about that, but I managed to almost miss the 50th anniversary of the Kent State Shootings. I marked it, but only with a post nothing it:
May 4, 1970. Kent State
I nearly missed this somehow.
The point at which the Vietnam War took on a new, tragic, aspect, as a protest resulted in a unforeseen bloodshed.
This deserves a much better post than this, but unfortunately, it'll have to wait a bit.
The event was a huge one in the story of the war as it was the point where protests over the war resulted in bloodshed, something they had not up until then. As the anti war movement had developed some real radicals, it would have some violent incidents after Kent State, but the protest at Kent State itself was never intended to be that sort of confrontation.
It's easy to over explain what happened there, but the real oddity of it is that National Guardsmen, who were drawn from the local area and largely not reflected in the student body of Kent State, were deployed as a riot detail to the protest. That's not surprising but frankly, as a former National Guardsmen, that sort of duty is always dangerous for Guardsmen and the public, to a degree. Guardsmen are trained as soldiers, not as riot police, and the instinct of soldiers is to fire when confronted, no matter how well trained they may be. There are plenty of such incidents all around the globe that have occured when soldiers, even very well trained soldiers, fall back on their training in that fashion.
With that being the case, the shocking thing is that the Guardsmen had been issued ammunition. Normally this wouldn't be the case and I heavily doubt that even regular active duty soldiers who were deployed in similar roles in the 1950s and 1960s were issued ammunition. Likely even those men deployed to disperse the bonus marchers carried nothing more dangerous than than their sabers (they were cavalrymen) in that effort, with sabers making a pretty effective non lethal crowd control weapon in the hands of somebody who knows how to use their flats.
But at Kent State the Guardsmen were issued ammunition for their M1 Garands and at some point, they used it.
What happened remains extremely unclear. The protests had been running for several days as it was so it had grown tense. An effort was made to disperse the crowed and as part of that the Guardsmen advanced with bayonets fixed to their M1 Garands. Some students began throwing rocks and return throwing tear gas canisters. At some point the Guardsmen fired a 13 second volley, which is a long sustained volley. Sixtyseven shots were fired by the 77 Guardsmen, but slightly less than half fired at all.
That seems clear enough, but from there things deteriorate. Forensic examination of audiotape suggests that three shots were fired shortly before any others. Some witnesses claimed a sergeant opened fire with a sidearm first, but the FBI's expert stated that the first three shots were from a M1 Garand. An FBI informant inside the student body was revealed to be later armed and some have claimed that he fired the first shots, but this now seems discounted.
In the end, nine students were wounded and four killed. None of the killed was any older than 20 years old. Given the volume of shots, and the weapons used, it's amazing that only 13 people were hit, which has to lead to some speculation on whether the 29 Guardsmen who all fired actually aimed at anything or even attempted to, or even intentionally did not.
The entire matter was a national tragedy, to say the least. It put protests on the war on a new footing, even though the United States was already withdrawing from South Vietnam at the time, something not entirely evident to Americans given the recent news. It was also a local tragedy, however, which is rarely noted as like a lot of university towns, the residents of Kent Ohio, whose families had contributed those who were in the National Guard, never saw the incident in the same light.
