Return to the Scene of the Crime
By Doug Bradley
Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale was there. So was Congressman John Lewis. And filmmaker Michael Moore. County Joe McDonald too.
And me, I was there.
I’m talking about the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University which took place on May 4, 2010. The intended 50th anniversary, like most public events scheduled for this spring, has been cancelled. Makes me wonder if that 40th anniversary ten years ago might be the last hand-wringing occasion for members of my generation so deeply impacted by what happened at Kent State on May 4, 1970. If so, it’s a bittersweet legacy, because there remains too much pain and confusion and blame and misunderstanding that accompanies the Kent State shootings.
All these years later, it’s still present. You can feel it in the air on that large, sprawling campus in Kent, Ohio.
On May 4, 2010, I was at Kent State as part of a panel sponsored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Our topic was “…Next Stop is Vietnam: The War on Record” to accompany the release of the Bear Family Records compilation of the same name, a pristine box set that includes 13 CDs and a 304-page coffee table book. Craig Werner and I had co-authored a long essay for the book, a scaled-down version of what eventually became We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. My fellow panelists were Hugo Keesing, archivist for the collection, and musician County Joe McDonald, who’d written the Foreword to Next Stop. Our moderator was Lauren Onkey, then director of education for the Rock Hall.
Lauren and I drove together to nearby Kent from Cleveland, Ohio, home of the Rock Hall. We quickly got acquainted, our personal and musical connections laying the groundwork. But neither of us was prepared for what the vibe at Kent State would be like that day. I do remember asking, “How can you celebrate a tragedy?” But I don’t think our conversation went any further.
It was around 11 a.m. when we arrived on campus, already packed with Kent State students, media, alumni, and baby boomers. What we didn’t know was that most of the crowd was already “waist deep in the big muddy” as a result of several days of music, films, and speeches, including a “Truth Tribunal” led by Laurel Krause, the sister of Allison Krause, one of the four young people slain by National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970 when 28 Guardsmen fired between nearly 70 rounds in 13 seconds, killing four and wounding nine.
According to Ms. Krause, the Kent State Truth Tribunal was formed to “establish a clear and correct historical record to help heal the personal and collective wounds from this atrocity.”
Words like “atrocity” hung in the air that sunny afternoon. At noon, all classes were recessed, and the official commemoration began on the Kent State commons. Many of the conveners were spirited, undergrad KSU females who spoke eloquently of why Kent State mattered to them today. At 12:24 p.m., the time of the 1970 shootings, the Victory Bell was rung 13 times — four for the students who were killed that afternoon, and nine for those who were wounded. Next, an assortment of eyewitnesses, family members of the deceased, and activists spoke.
Sandra Scheuer, struck in the neck by an Ohio National Guardsman’s bullet, was a girl with a “bubbly personality who was always doing things for others,” as said in a friend’s note that had been preserved in a scrapbook kept by her sorority, Alpha Xi Delta. “We think about her every day,” said the Kent State chapter’s current president, Sarah Franciosa. Irony of ironies, Sandy Scheuer’s mother had passed away that very morning.
Jeffrey Miller was remembered as a drummer and a radio DJ whose 5-foot-6 stature earned him the on-air name of “Short Mort,” recalled Russ Miller, his older brother. On the night of the shootings, still unaware that his brother had been killed, Russ watched news reports about Kent State with his grandmother in the Bronx. She asked him if Jeff would have gone to the rally. “No doubt,” Russ told her, knowing his brother’s strong feelings against the war. “But I wasn’t concerned, because I knew he would keep his head down.”
No, he didn’t. Jeff Miller died, his brother reminded us, shot in the mouth.
How painful could this get? Just wait…
Ninety year-old Florence Schroeder, mother of Scott Schroeder, used a walker to make her way to the stage. “On May 4, 1970, I was 50 years old, with brown hair and good legs,” she laughed. “Today, I’m 90 and can no longer pitch batting practice.” Her son was an Eagle Scout and a member of ROTC, an honor student who was walking to class when he was shot in the back from a rifle more than a football field’s length away.
“The death of a child is very hard, but life goes on,” she said. Then Mrs. Schroeder read the last line of a poem her son had written: Learning from the past is a prime consideration.
“I pray we have all learned that lesson,” she added.
Allison Krause’s Kent State boyfriend, Barry Levine, spoke of a “sweet, intelligent, loving, warm, intelligent, compassionate, creative, funny, giving, intelligent woman.”
“She sat on the hill where you now sit,” he told the audience. “She walked on those paths where you now stand. Her laughter used to dance through the branches of these trees.”
Allison Krause was shot in the side as Levine pulled her behind a car for shelter from the gunfire. She fell, mortally wounded, in his arms. Levine had rarely spoken publicly about the events of that day, and it soon became obvious that his anger and outrage had been building for 40 years. Riffing on Bob Dylan’s song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” Levine made an impassioned, and at times irate, appeal for justice for the shootings.
Lauren and I were reeling, and we’d only been here for less than two hours. We caught up with Country Joe, who himself seemed woozy from the pushback he’d received from several Vietnam veterans during a film screening he’d held the day before. How in the hell were we going to get through our presentation tonight, given how raw and hurt everyone seemed?
Following the commemoration, we attended a reception in the Student Center which was about as bizarre an event as I ever attended. To this point, my experience with “anniversaries” had been upbeat and celebratory. And while this had a hint of that — people embracing and rejoicing at seeing one a other — it was downright macabre as folks like Alan Canfora, shot in the right wrist, and Thomas Grace, wounded in the left ankle, compared their May 4, 1970 wounds! And then Dean Kahler, who was shot in the back and paralyzed that day, rolled up in his wheelchair and reminded his former Kent State classmates that the first letter he’d opened after he came out of an induced coma on Friday, May 8, 1970, read: Dear communist hippie radical, I hope by the time you read this, you are dead.
I hadn’t just lost my breath, I’d lost my bearings. So much resentment, so much pain. And it sure seemed as if nothing had changed in 40 years. I did not want to be part of the closing event for the commemoration. I wanted to get as far away from Kent State as I could.
And then I remembered my own experience of graduating from U.S. Army Basic Training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, just two days after President Nixon had ordered the invasion of Cambodia and worrying that as a soldier I would be summoned to a college campus to aim a rifle at my fellow countrymen. It was a real fear, a legitimate possibility…
But it never happened.
Vietnam did, and strangely there was more talk of the My Lai massacre, The Pentagon Papers, and none of us “being the last GI killed in Vietnam” during my tour in 1970–71 than there was of Kent State. Maybe because we were all living with the same dread?
Hugo, Joe, and I made our presentation at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 4, 2010, to a large, engaged, and heavily veteran audience. Even the battle weary Country Joe rose to the occasion as we gave the absorbed audience a sense of how vital music was to the men and women who served in Vietnam — and after they came home. Hugo and I played excerpts from a number of those memorable songs: “These Boots Are Made for Walkin,’” Fortunate Son,” “Detroit City,” “What’s Going On,” and others while Joe strummed a few of his own tunes, including “Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin-to-Die-Rag.” The response was heartwarming. One of the vets who came up to me later, a VVAW (Vietnam Veterans Against the War) insignia on his old fatigues, thanked me and remarked, “Glad you didn’t play ‘Ohio,’” he smiled. “ We couldn’t have handled that tonight.”
All I knew then, what I felt that day ten years ago, and what I feel strongly today in the throes of this COVID pandemic, is that language matters, words matter. And they can wound as much as bullets. The rhetoric of Nixon and his Vice President Spiro Agnew and Ohio Governor Rhodes and others, saying that the students at Kent State — even some of us who were in overseas in Vietnam — were “bums, the worst element in our society, worse than the communists, the knight riders and the vigilantes…” and “crybabies” after we came home from the war.
The hate speech of that time is the vitriolic, hate speech of today. Those words do have consequences. Just ask the students at Kent State.
“And I wonder,” pondered John Fogerty of CCR, “still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain?”
About the Author: Doug Bradley has written extensively about his Vietnam, and post-Vietnam, experiences. Drafted into the U.S. Army in March 1970, he served as an information specialist (journalist) for the U.S. Army Republic of Vietnam headquarters at Long Binh, South Vietnam, from November 1970 to November 1971. Doug relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1974 where he helped establish Vets House, a storefront, community-based service center for Vietnam-era veterans.
He is the author of DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle and co-author, with Craig Werner, of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (UMass Press, 2015), which was named BEST MUSIC BOOK of 2015 by Rolling Stone. His most recent book is Who’ll Stop the Rain: Respect, Remembrance, and Reconciliation in Post-Vietnam America.
