Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  DEAN KAHLER

  I went up to the front campus gate because I heard there was a gathering there. So I got up there, and people were sitting in the street, even though they were told, “You’re not allowed to sit in the street,” with bullhorns. Then finally someone came on and said, “The president and the mayor will be here in a half an hour to speak to you.” And I said, “Okay, that’s cool.” Within a half an hour, the only thing that was there was more National Guard troops, and there were now two helicopters flying over us, with their spotlights shining down on us.

  BEN POST

  Tension was high among the students and the police and guard units and it built throughout the evening. There might have been fifty to seventy-five students sitting in the intersection. As the standoff dragged on I noticed a group of guardsmen starting to move behind the students. I was standing next to a guardsman. He was holding an M-1 rifle balanced on his hip. Then he did something that should have registered with me since I had been in the army, but it didn’t. I don’t know if it would have made any difference if I reported on this in the paper, or if I told my editors, but it’s stayed with me all this time.

  In the military, when you put in a magazine, you lock and you load it. You put in your clip and then you pull back the lever and you’re ready to go. I saw a guardsman put a clip of live ammunition into his M-1. It didn’t register at all. Here I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to be a great observer. On the day of the shooting I felt that if only I had written something about them loading real bullets, and published it in the paper. Events were rushing so fast, maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. But it made a difference to me, because I should have at least recognized that and reported it and I didn’t.

  This was Sunday night close to 9:30 or 10 P.M., and there were some other words exchanged with the group by the National Guard, and suddenly they just moved in. They had bayonets, and they moved into the crowd, and the crowd got up. Some yelled, “betrayed,” and some said, “liars,” because they thought they were going to be allowed to leave on their own. Suddenly tear gas started being thrown. And because the guard had semicircled them, there was only one way for them to run, and they ran up the street.

  But as they ran, there were several students who were bayoneted. I had to testify at a hearing on this about four months later, because they didn’t believe that we had seen these kids bayoneted, but they were. John Hayes, another reporter, and I both saw it. I mean, they were jabbed. And we saw one kid get stabbed, and he ran up the street and he ran into a house. We followed him into the house to see what was going on with him, and he was on the floor in the kitchen. These other students were yelling at us to get out. We asked how he was doing and who he was, and they said, “Get out, get out, we don’t want you here.”

  Then we heard a commotion outside, so we left and followed the guard up the street, and the students—it was dark by then—and the students started to fade into the darkness on the campus. The guards made a left turn and moved onto the campus. There was a little knot of journalists that I had attached myself to, because there is safety in numbers—there were about six of us. So we started this trek across the campus. It’s dark, and I remember this vividly: There are lines of guardsmen with their weapons held up and balanced on their hips. And they’re in semidarkness with the glow of these lights outlining them. Every once in a while you would hear one of them say, “We’re going to get you.” Because they probably thought we were students. Well, some of us were. Or, “You’re dead.” Just threatening comments that came out of this darkness.

  DEAN KAHLER

  The next thing you know, all hell broke loose, because there was tear gas. They locked all the dorms up, and people inside were opening the doors and letting people in. Finally I got in, and it was chaos inside. People were everywhere roaming the hallways, and opening their windows, and setting their big, huge speakers, and blasting noise out of the windows, and people were filling up book bags with water, and taking them up to the top floor, and dropping them ten stories. Ten stories, it almost reaches terminal velocity, right? It makes a hell of a sound when it hits the ground. So that was going on, and the National Guard was roaming around in their armored personnel carriers and their jeeps. It just was nuts.

  JOE LEWIS

  Some of the most frightening memories I have of that weekend involved three helicopters circling overhead on Sunday night with searchlights, low over the campus. The guardsmen were doing a sweep of the campus to get any students who were out and about into buildings. So, while the tear gas clouds were sprayed all over the campus, and these helicopters hovered overhead with searchlights, guardsmen, shoulder to shoulder, with bayonets fixed and put down in front of them, were herding students into buildings. And my RA [residential assistant] at the time told me later that he was holding the door open and encouraging anyone out there to come in, even if you didn’t live there, and as he ushered the last student in and slammed the door closed, a guardsman with a bayonet lunged, and the knife of the bayonet was closed in the door.

  LAUREL KRAUSE

  It was war on that campus on Sunday night. My sister ran because she had to. They were running the students on the campus, in the middle of the night, teargassing them, helicopters, and she had been running with the crowd, to a dormitory way out, Tri-Towers, that was not near her dorm. They were shutting all the doors and not allowing the students in, and the bayoneted National Guard were coming at them. Someone opened one of the back doors, and Allison managed to get in, but she didn’t get in with her boyfriend Barry. So, she made them open up the door and let Barry in. They had to. She was a force. So they spent the night, her last night, on the floor of the dormitory.

  MONDAY, MAY 4, 1970

  DEAN KAHLER

  Monday morning I woke up, shook off the cobwebs, and went downstairs, had breakfast, and looked around outside, and there were still National Guard troops everywhere. It was a beautiful day that day, and the sun was shining. I decided not to go to my morning classes.

  JOE LEWIS

  On Monday I attended class with a girlfriend, and some of the professors were saying, “This is what democracy looks like. This is how you participate. You get involved, and you protest, and speak your mind.” And others were saying, “This is a horrible threat to your safety, and you should not be going outside.” Being eighteen, I wanted to see what was going on. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. After we went to class, there was a rally scheduled at noon. The Victory Bell, which was in the commons, rang, as it often did to gather assemblies. Myself and a thousand other people gathered around the Victory Bell. Across the commons, facing us—protecting the ashes of the burned-out ROTC building, it seemed—were a hundred and fifty or so National Guardsmen in full battle gear. Some people chanted antiwar slogans: you know, “Pigs off campus,” “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your f-ing war.” I don’t go for that. I like to think for myself. I don’t like to repeat slogans others are saying.

  For a long time, there was a standoff. Some campus policemen in a jeep came out to literally read us the riot act. I won’t forget that—another auditory memory for me is the bullhorn and I think his name was Sergeant Rice from the campus police. He said, “Students of Kent State, this is an illegal assembly. Return to your dormitories.” His jeep came by three times, with the same message. And each time the message was responded to by catcalls, threats, and a lot of raised middle fingers. Finally, a rock was thrown that hit the wheel of the jeep, and then, from the line of guardsmen, some nine or so people advanced with modified grenade launchers and fired tear gas canisters at the crowd.

  A point I’d like to make, though, is that in spite of this activity, it didn’t feel like there was a sense of impending disaster, or doom. It was a fairly nice spring day in Ohio, and with these tear gas canisters it became, like, a bizarre tennis match, where they would fire the tear gas towards the students. It wasn’t really effective because of the wind. Students would cover their faces and thro
w the tear gas canisters back. When the guardsmen fired the tear gas, there would be a “boo,” and when the student returned the tear gas canister, there would be a cheer.

  Credit 19.2

  Governor James Rhodes called in eight hundred Ohio National Guard soldiers to police the Kent State campus after students burned down the ROTC building (forefront of photo) in reaction to President Nixon’s announcement that American troops had invaded Cambodia.

  JOHN FILO

  It’s noon when all the classes changed. So whether you were for the war or against the war, it didn’t make any difference. You were going to go watch what was going on. Or you had to cross that way to go to the student union to get lunch, or go back to your dorm. So, the protest starts, and all of a sudden a jeep comes out, and in it is a guardsman and state police, saying this is an illegal assembly, and of course, there were answers by the antiwar group, but then there were also answers by the students like “No, this is our university—we’re paying to go here, we’re not the people that burnt the ROTC building.”

  There was a tear gas barrage, back and forth, and I’ve been reading my Robert Capa books, the great Magnum photographer, and remember being told by my friend the AP war photographer Eddie Adams, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Here I am trying to get down, and the guardsmen are on this end, and I’m running back to the students and then the guardsmen around the burnt-out ROTC structure are arcing tear gas canisters, and the wind comes up and blows it away. And then they run out of tear gas. So someone says, “Let’s mount up and chase the students.” I’m going, Wow, now is my chance. There are guardsmen with sheathed bayonets and batons, and maybe forty state policemen in riot gear are just standing there watching this all transpire. This is all happening outside of a building where I work, Taylor Hall. The guardsmen divide around Taylor Hall. The larger contingent going to the right and a smaller group to the left, who appeared to be after someone. I followed the left group to no avail for a close-contact photo of students and guardsmen.

  DEAN KAHLER

  I went around Taylor Hall, down the hill, across the Prentice Hall parking lot, across Midway Drive, got into a gravel parking lot, and pulled out a wet handkerchief that I had in my pocket. It was in a plastic bag. Then I grabbed a handful of gravel from the ground and flung it underhand in the direction of the National Guard who were about a hundred yards away from me. I actually hit some students in front of me. They turned around and screamed at me and gave me the finger. So it was like, Okay, I’m sorry, I’m just frustrated here, and I called the National Guard to lower their weapons that they were pointing at the students who were in the parking lot area. Students continued to throw stones from there. I saw some National Guard pick up tear gas canisters to throw at the students.

  BEN POST

  Suddenly the guard line said, “We are going to clear this area.” So the guard line started moving towards Taylor Hall and up the hill. And as they moved, they tossed tear gas. And all of the guardsmen, or most of them at the time, had gas masks on. And I know from my experience that that’s very claustrophobic. And when you’re tense, I’m sure they were frightened, in certain ways. There’s the uncertainty and you’re wearing this rubber thing on your face with these little portholes for eyes. And you’re seeing a very limited vision, and so you’re tense. In front of you, what you see from that little rubber mask is people throwing stuff at you, people yelling at you. So if you’re a young kid and you’re about the same age as the students, the emotional level heightens.

  JOE LEWIS

  After a few minutes of the teargassing not being very effective, the guardsmen moved out and began approaching the students with fixed bayonets. The students, of course, got out of the way, and streamed between two buildings—Taylor Hall and Johnson Hall—up to the hill between the buildings in advance of the advancing guardsmen. And most of the guardsmen followed that path. I went that way, between Taylor Hall and Johnson Hall. And then, as I went there, I veered to the right, to the Johnson Hall side, and watched the guardsmen pass between these two groups of students. They passed over the top of the hill, and then down the other side, across a little road to what was the practice football field.

  When they got down there, they made the announcement, “Students of Kent State”—over the bullhorn again—“we have you surrounded.” There was actually a chuckle, because they had the fence on two sides of them, and then, opposite the road, was this group of students—a thousand or twelve hundred students, looking down on them. If anyone was surrounded, they were. But it still didn’t take on the tone of seriousness that it deserved until a group of them kneeled down and aimed their rifles. They aimed their rifles towards the Prentice Hall parking lot, where the most vocal students were. Among them was Alan Canfora, my friend, who held a black flag. He was protesting the death of his neighbor, who had been killed in Vietnam about ten days before that. They didn’t know that. They thought he was being defiant.

  JOHN FILO

  I was on the parking lot, which is elevated maybe eight feet above the practice football field. I saw a student with a black flag, and I go, “Oh, this is my picture.” This student waving a black flag is running onto this big practice football field. There’s a squad of guardsmen on one knee pointing their rifles at him, and he’s waving this flag, and so I’m like, “Oh, let me get this shot, because I can frame it.” This is it, this is what I set out to do today; student protest in America is being met by this helmeted, armed force. A lone student waving one flag, and seventy-five, eighty guardsmen in the background with a squad in a rifle line pointing their rifles at him. I go, “Oh man, this is the best picture I’m ever taking. This is it.” I was elated. It was a good picture. The guardsmen regrouped and marched back over the ground they had just covered, walking back toward their starting point at the burnt ROTC building.

  Credit 19.3

  John Filo took this photograph of Kent State University student Alan Canfora (age twenty) boldly waving a black flag at National Guardsmen who aim their guns at him. Minutes later, seventy-six members of Troop G marched up the hill, turned around, and twenty-eight guardsmen fired between sixty-one and sixty-seven shots at the students from approximately three hundred feet away. Canfora was shot in the right wrist, eight other students were also wounded (one was paralyzed for life), and four students were killed.

  DEAN KAHLER

  I started following along behind the guard when they formed up their line and started marching uphill, and I thought, Oh, they’re just going to go to the top of the hill to shoot tear gas. I’ll just follow along. By then it was almost twelve thirty. I looked at my watch and thought, Why don’t I go get a cup of coffee? I walked up a little bit towards the student union, which was right across the street from my next class.

  So that was what was in my head when I was following along behind the National Guard, and I was on the practice football field when they turned, and lowered their weapons. I thought, Oh my God, they’re going to shoot. Because I’m a farm boy and I’ve carried a rifle and a shotgun, and when somebody makes a deliberate motion like that, and lowers their weapons, pointing directly at you, that’s a sign that they’re ready to shoot because I’ve done that many a time when I’d been rabbit hunting, or pheasant hunting as a kid, and it was very frightening. I looked around, and there was no place to hide. I jumped to the ground, and I could hear bullets hitting the ground around me. Why are they shooting at me? And then I thought, Oh my God, I hope I don’t get hit. And then, at about that time, I got hit, and it felt like a bee sting. It wasn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t roll over five or six times, flail in the ground, and freak out. It was just like a bee sting.

  JOE LEWIS

  I watched the guard pass in front of me and march to the crest of the hill. There were probably seventy-five men, and most of them crested the hill and looked like they were going to keep on going. When they got to the corner of the railing in front of Taylor Hall, as if by design, about a dozen
of them wheeled and leveled their rifles back at the direction of the parking lot, which happened to be behind me. They leveled their rifles in my direction, as they had leveled their rifles on the practice football field, before, when they knelt and aimed. Being eighteen and frustrated, I responded with my middle finger upraised on my right hand. They held that position for just a second, until they began firing.

  I was convinced that these guns were not loaded with live ammo—I thought, How ridiculous would that be? Until I saw the ground in front of me churn up, and I realized, at that moment, that they were live bullets. I was also shot at that point, through the middle of my body, which sent me sailing like a Disney cartoon character through the air, and I landed on my back on the ground. I had been shot through my right abdomen, with the bullet exiting my left jean pocket—it was a small entry wound, and a large exit wound.

  LAUREL KRAUSE

  The guard all turned in unison, and they all shoot in unison. Sixty-one to sixty-seven bullets at unarmed students. My sister was three hundred and forty-three feet away from her shooters. Everyone that was killed was at least a football field away. The excuse that the guard gave was that the students were attacking them, they feared for their lives, and had to respond to sniper fire in the crowd. The part that you don’t hear is that my sister bled to death, for forty-five minutes, before an ambulance came, yet ambulances were available over the hill, reserved for guard and authority injuries only.