Book Excerpt
From Thirteen Seconds: Confrontation at Kent State, by Joe Eszterhas and Michael D. Roberts
Joe Eszterhas and Michael D. Roberts reported on the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. They immediately began working on this book. Thirteen Seconds was originally published just months later, in fall 1970. Impressively, it still stands as one of the best narrative accounts of those tragic events.
Nearly 50 years later, in a preface to a paperback edition, Joe Eszterhas wrote, “Nearly a half century after its publication, I’m still proud of the fact that Thirteen Seconds dared to speak the unspeakable: That Richard Nixon, allied with Ohio Governor James Rhodes and Ohio National Guard Director Sylvester Del Corso, helped cause the deaths of four innocent young people.” Michael D. Roberts wrote, “Over the years, that fateful day has been revisited in seminars, articles, memorials, investigations, and government inquiries. In that time, no major revelation has come to light that would alter the facts in this book.”
This excerpt recounts in detail the events of May 4, 1970 …
Guardsmen stirred at their posts, their forms drab and bulky in the early morning mist. Dew stretched white on the Commons, awaiting the sun. On the practice football field, guardsmen sleeping under tents awoke to see the first students of the day: the dishwashers and board jobbers who worked in the university dining halls. They trudged by with hardly a glance at the young soldiers.
“Think we’ll get out of here today?” a soldier asked his sergeant.
“Man,” the sergeant said, “I hope so.” The collar of his fatigue jacket was turned up against the chill.
By 8 a.m. the campus was alive and the wet grass on the Commons was criss-crossed with the trails of students hurrying to their first classes. Mrs. Charles Lavicka, a French teacher, was walking to her class, watching for a clue that might indicate the mood of the day. It was quiet and she felt the worst was over.
Joseph Carter, a graduate student, was sipping coffee in his off-campus apartment. The radio told him U.S. forces in Cambodia had captured a sixty-ton Viet Cong rice cache.
The weather for the Kent area would be mostly sunny and mild, with variable winds and temperatures in the seventies.
When the newscaster started talking about Kent State, Carter’s attention was sharpened. He was told Governor Rhodes had banned all assemblies on campus. The announcement seemed odd to him in light of the fact that classes were to be held as usual.
The news that interested him, though, was the noon rally that was said to be scheduled that day. He made up his mind he would go. Carter thought the university administration had been strangely silent during the weekend disturbances. Maybe they would explain.
Major John Simons, chaplain of the 107th Armored Cavalry and an Episcopal minister from Cleveland, arrived on campus around 9 a.m. He was wearing the new black subdued insignia that the Guard had recently adopted. It annoyed him that he was not readily identified as a clergyman because of the blackened symbols on his helmet. He saw the tired troops standing at their posts. That bothered him, too. “The only thing I saw among the guys was fatigue and nerves,” he said.
Donald Schwartzmiller, chief of campus police, was in and out of the Guard’s command post on the second floor of the administration building above his headquarters. He was a mere observer with the Guard in control. He, too, thought the Guard was jumpy. “There were all sorts of reports of snipers that morning, totally unverified reports,” he said. “There were rumors of caches of explosives.”
On campus the word was out. “See you on the Commons at noon,” students called to each other as they trekked to class. Chaplain Simons watched them, talked with some, and noticed an atmosphere of peaceful togetherness. Every now and then a student who passed him would flash the peace sign.
Lou Cusella, who lived off campus, climbed out of bed and heard about the rally on the radio. He decided to go. “I thought I was going to be smart for a change. I was going to dress for this rally. I wore a pair of dress slacks and a button-down shirt and a tie. I wanted to look as much like a Jaycee as I could.” Sunday night, dressed in bell bottoms and a denim jacket, he had narrowly escaped arrest.
A friend told Michael Erwin about the rally the night before. He was going to go. There were two reasons for his decision. He wanted to protest the Cambodian invasion and the presence of the Guard on his campus. Erwin picked up his gas mask. “I did not intend to cause trouble.” He knew about the ban on gathering and because of this the chances of being gassed were, he felt, “fairly high.”
At the fire station a few blocks from campus, the authorities were gathering: Guard commander General Canterbury, a State Patrol representative, Mayor Satrom, Chief Thompson, and university president Robert White. They were there to discuss rumors and plans, specifically plans about the noon rally. It was a moody meeting.
President White felt intimidated. The general and the mayor insisted the Ohio National Guard was in complete command. “It was hammered at me from all sides that the Guard was in complete command,” White said. “They told me the noon rally was illegal and they’d break it up.”
It was Mayor Satrom’s impression that Robert White was being very “cocky” during the meeting. “He sat there doodling on a pad and nodding his head,” the mayor said. “I think he felt above the rest of us. He didn’t say much.”
Oddly, the Guard report pertaining to the meeting said, “The President of the University informed those present that a rally was scheduled for noon on the Commons. He said it would be dangerous and should not be permitted. It was agreed that the rally would not be permitted.”
Dressed in what he considered an unobtrusive uniform, Lou Cusella made his way across the campus and watched two long-haired, denim-clad students spoofing with guardsmen perched on an armored personnel carrier. They were ducking behind trees and shouting to the soldiers. Cusella thought, Where do these idiots think they’re playing their war games, in the jungle? Twenty minutes later he saw the same two longhairs handing out leaflets advertising the noon rally. “They gave each other the brotherhood handshake and with about fifty people they trooped out to the Commons. They seemed real happy.”
When the Guard took over the campus it insisted that all newsmen arriving on campus carry a special Ohio National Guard press pass. Greg Sbaraglia, a reporter for the Canton Repository, was on his way to get one when he saw one of the sportswriters from his newspaper. The writer had been called up for duty with the Guard. “What the hell have you been doing here, loafing as usual?” Sbaraglia called. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” replied the part-time soldier. “We had some action last night and I really nailed some kid’s head with a rifle butt. That’ll teach those damn hippies to run faster.” He showed Sbaraglia the rifle’s steel butt plate and it had dried blood on it. Sbaraglia walked away.
Alan Canfora, a junior, made his way to the Commons with a black flag on which the word “Kent” was spray-painted in red. “I did this to signify the sad turn of events in the city and on our campus. I was sad and angry.”
Chaplain Simons was in the command post when General Canterbury returned from the meeting at the fire station. The general seemed in a hurry and announced there would be no rally on the Commons. Then he said he needed troops. The burned-out shell of the ROTC building was cordoned off by guardsmen, but there were no men in reserve. Reinforcements were due shortly, but there was no time to wait. Already students were gathering. Chaplain Simons made a suggestion. “Let’s collect together a bunch of guys, some drivers, and wake some guys up at the gym and we could use them for the rally.”
“That’s a great idea, John,” Canterbury said.
The troops had been on twelve-hour shifts since arriving from Akron. They were tired and anxious. Sergeant Russell Repp, a tile and floor installer, had not had a chance to go to the bathroom. He had not slept in two nights and he was hungry.
Lunch had been prepared for the Guard but tension and fatigue stunted appetites. There was chow mein and fruit salad for 250 men. About ten stopped to eat.
A number of photographers were getting ready to cover the rally and Jerry Stoklas, a photojournalism student, thought if he could get on the roof of Taylor Hall he would have a good vantage point and might be able to get some exclusive pictures. A journalism professor thought it was a fine idea and escorted him to the roof. “I figured I’d screw all those other paparazzi,” Stoklas said.
After returning from his disappointing meeting with Mayor Satrom and General Canterbury, Robert White took his vice presidents, Ronald Roskens and Robert Matson, for a quick lunch at a restaurant a mile or so from campus. Before leaving he instructed his secretary to call if anything important happened. It was 11:15 a.m.
Groups of students continued to gather on the Commons near the victory bell. Someone started to ring it and the clang could be heard across the campus. There were no announcements that all of this was illegal, Joseph Carter noticed.
Meanwhile, Chaplain Simons had finished helping to gather a force of nearly a hundred men to be used in dispersing the crowd from the Commons. As General Canterbury was leaving the command post, Simons asked if he might go along. “He turned to me and said, ‘Sure John, come on,’ ” Simons said. “ ‘Del Corso and I had a great time throwing rocks at those kids the other night.’ ”
Five or six students were huddled around the victory bell, ringing it with force. A professor emerged from Taylor Hall and scrambled down the hill. “Please stop ringing that bell,” he called. The students gathered around him. One shouted, “Get away, old man.”
By now the west side of Blanket Hill was filled with people and from across the Commons it looked like a gallery at a sporting event. “It had a surrealistic, an unreal-like quality,” said Michael Stein, a graduate student. “It struck me as sort of distant. Even though I was there, it was sort of like watching it on a screen instead of being physically part of it.”
By a few minutes before noon nearly fifteen hundred students had gathered around the bell. Another two thousand to three thousand students were assembled on the opposite side of the Commons behind the National Guard lines. Another two thousand were on the northern edge of the Commons near the tennis courts.
Not all of the students had come to participate in the rally. The noon hour at Kent caught many between classes and the central location of the Commons made it necessary for most to pass by on the way to lunch or their next class. “There were people who were just curious,” said Yvonne Mitchell, one of the passers-by. “There weren’t just kids messing with the National Guard, or radical kids or conservative kids. There was just an integration of everybody.”
Bill Montgomery, a twenty-three-year-old Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, watched and saw what he said were clean-cut fraternity types. “Really, I saw few you would call radicals there,” he said. “There were a lot of kids there who had just come back from the weekend and didn’t know what was coming off.”
When he looked over the crowd, Michael Erwin felt the same way. “The crowd was made up of the Greeks, athletes, and the largest segment of the group were, like me, anti-war moderates.” Student Buzz Terhune described the crowd this way: “You had super-straight Joe Fraternity and ultra-radical Joe Freak out there.”
Guard sergeant Mike Delaney looked out at them from the other side of the Commons and said he felt sympathy with the students. “I don’t think I should change what I think because I’m wearing a uniform.”
The crowd was growing and milling. The anti-war chants with obscene stanzas began to roll over the Commons and fall upon the ears of the authorities. Among the crowd, people began to call out a telephone number where students could get legal help if anything happened. Lou Cusella wrote it down. Jeffrey Miller, a sophomore, wrote it down. Hundreds of others did the same.
“Pigs go home,” the crowd chanted.
“Guard off campus.”
“Peace now. Peace now.”
In the midst of the protestors Alan Canfora waved his black flag. He was angry at the stories of Guard harassment the night before.
Standing near the remaining ROTC buildings on the Commons was Captain Don Peters, an Army instructor assigned to the officers’ training course. He was a combat veteran of Vietnam. Peters thought the beginning of the demonstration had the merry atmosphere of a mudfight.
A campus policeman armed with a bullhorn stood near the ROTC building and shouted out to the students to disperse. The wind and noise drowned his call. He yelled again. The other side of the Commons was too far away and no one heard his command. The noise swallowed it.
“Yell your head off,” Chaplain Simons called. “Get a jeep and drive out there.”
A guardsman pulled a jeep over and the policeman climbed awkwardly in the back. In the front seat was Major Harry Jones, a forty-three-year-old native of Tennessee who served full time in the Guard as the 145th Infantry’s training officer. He wore a baseball fatigue cap and was unarmed except for a baton he carried.
The jeep drove slowly across the Commons, the bullhorn calling its message to the crowd that stood on the hillside.
“This assembly is unlawful. The crowd must disperse at this time. This is an order!” The jeers increased as the jeep neared the hill. It swung within a hundred feet of the crowd. Lou Cusella had the impression that the man with the bullhorn was not ordering, but begging. “There was all kinds of pathos in his voice. He looked like a high-school band director.”
“We just shouted him down,” said Steve Tarr, a freshman. The chants taunting the Guard continued to come over the green.
Then a rock arched out of the crowd, bounced on the ground, and hit the jeep. Several more followed. The chanting of the crowd increased in tempo:
“Off the pigs, off the pigs.”
“One-two-three-four, we don’t want your fucking war.”
“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.”
“Two-four-six-eight, we don’t want your fascist state.”
Paul Schlemmer, a university sports information publicist, looked at his watch and noted that the time was eleven fifty-eight.
The jeep was pelted by more rocks. Kathy Berry, student government vice president, saw two rocks “hit the jeep’s hood with a ping.” Al Thompson, a reporter from the Cleveland Press, saw a “rock bounce off the jeep.”
Quickly the driver swerved from the crowd and raced across the Commons to General Canterbury and his composite force of cooks, drivers, messengers and sleep-hungry guardsmen. The general was dressed in a business suit.
Some of the guardsmen standing by recall the moment: “If I wouldn’t have been in uniform, I would have been on the other side of the line, but I wouldn’t have thrown rocks,” said Sergeant Mike Delaney. “This guy would have been throwing rocks and wrenches,” said Staff Sergeant Jim Thomas.
Earel Neikirk, a reporter from the Elyria Chronicle and Telegram, himself a Kent State graduate, was near Canterbury when Jones returned from the jeep ride across the Commons. The two officers huddled. Seconds later, guardsmen were ordered into a skirmish line, Neikirk said.
“I heard an officer say, ‘Fix bayonets, gas masks, load,’” the reporter said. “I could not believe it. What were these guys going to do, mount a charge against a bunch of kids who weren’t harming anything or anybody?”
The students were nearly a hundred yards away when the order went out to launch tear gas. Men armed with M-79 grenade launchers stepped forward and fired their gas rounds. The grenades fluttered through the air and the mass of students parted as the missiles, streaming trails of smoke, dropped near their front ranks.
The tear gas was necessary, a Guard report said, because “the size of the crowd was increasing rapidly by the minute and it became apparent that the order to disperse would not be heeded.”
The wind, which had been shifting from time to time, was blowing toward the Guard when the gas rounds were launched. It carried the fumes away from the students. Several rushed forward, grabbed the smoking canisters, and hurled them back toward the Guard, far out of throwing range.
Donald Schwartzmiller watched the Guard skirmish line move toward the demonstrators. He “felt there would be trouble” when the students refused to disperse and such a small contingent of Guard went after them.
More tear gas was fired. As the canisters tumbled on the ground students made an attempt to throw them back. The Guard noted “members of the crowd quickly donned gas masks and put gloves on—these people picked up gas grenades and threw them back.”
Applause and cheers broke out for those who pitched the steaming missiles back. “I saw one student throw back a tear-gas canister,” said Michael Stein. “He was applauded by his fellow students as a kind of folk hero. Tear gas was very ineffective since the wind was blowing toward the National Guard.”
Robert Roepke, a graduate student who was standing on one end of the Commons, said, “People thought it was a game, a circus.” Sergeant Mike Delaney, on the other end, also described it as a game: “A serious game of Frisbee.”
“I picked up a canister and threw it back, but I stuck my face in the damn stuff,” said Ben Parsons, a twenty-two-year-old drama student. “It almost got to be a joke because the guardsmen were laughing. It was just a game.”
Michael Erwin, who had put on his gas mask, threw “four or five canisters of gas” back at the advancing troops. “I was winded,” he said. “I thought that I was out of range of the gas but the wind shifted and blew gas into my face as I took the mask off.”
Captain Don Peters, the ROTC adviser, thought “a lot of guys were throwing those canisters back for heroics. The broads loved it.”
Staff Sergeant Jim Thomas looked at the carnival atmosphere and wished he had a popcorn stand. “I could have made a thousand dollars.”
All the while, the victory bell clanged its challenge.
Major Harry Jones advanced with the troops he commanded. “Some of these kooks had to be on dope,” he said. “I bet they’ve got needle marks on their arms.” The troops moved forward, firing gas and stepping with an even pace.
A ripple of panic passed through the crowd. Some students began to run. “People were yelling to walk, not run,” said Alan Chesler, a teaching fellow.
Bayonets fixed and before them, the Guard stepped forward, scattering straggling students. “This is mad,” thought Steve Smith, a freshman. “These guys are chasing kids all over this area. They don’t have a chance to catch them. This could go on forever.”
By now the entire Commons was covered with a shifting haze of gas. Students ripped up shirts and rags to protect their faces from the sting. Jim Nichols, a student, was in Taylor Hall at the top of the hill and saw teachers and staff members tearing up cloth, toweling, and pieces of girls’ skirts. “They were dousing them in water fountains and in the restrooms and handing them to kids.”
Outside, John P. Hayes, a journalism student, saw one student run toward a soldier and throw a tear-gas canister at him. “Three soldiers began chasing the student up Taylor Hill. One soldier caught the student and began hitting him with a billy club while others pointed their rifles at him.” Dennis Taruben saw the same student being clubbed. “One of the guardsmen fired tear gas at him point blank.” Screaming, the student ran off.
“I saw one student who was a little slow in leaving the hill behind Taylor Hall,” said Michael Stein. “The National Guard advanced up the hill and they managed to reach him. He was beaten rather severely and fell to the ground and someone pulled him into Taylor Hall.”
Private Paul Naujoks was coming up the hill with the Guard, breathing heavily because of the equipment he carried. “The rock throwing was just occasional,” he said. “The guy beside me got hit in the shoulder. I never got hit. It seemed like we were trying to drive the bad guys out of there. I still remember this one guy with an Apache headband with a flag. I thought to myself, these guys are crazy. You never knew who was a spectator and who was a rioter.”
As the Guard force began to climb the hill it broke into two elements, one going to the left side of the hill so Taylor Hall was flanked on both sides.
Joseph Carter, who had once served in the Guard, said, “I presumed the entire line of guardsmen would move up the hill and divide into two units, one driving the crowd away from the front of Taylor and the other dispersing kids around the side.” Carter thought it strange that “only a platoon of men came over the crest of the hill and marched directly into the practice football field where there was no one to be dispersed.”
Lieutenant Roy W. Drew, a guardsman, thought it odd that the right flank pushed onward. “When they got to the edge of the building, on top of the hill, they should have stopped. They didn’t have enough men to go over the hill.”
Bill Montgomery, the Marine Corps Vietnam veteran, was equally amazed. “They maneuvered themselves into a stupid position. They walked right down into the field against the fence and the kids surrounded them.”
Chaplain John Simons thought, “That silly Canterbury; they’re supposed to disperse the crowd, the crowd is dispersed, where in the hell is he leading those men?” The general was in the practice football field with the men.
“The students began to realize that the National Guard had maneuvered themselves into a partially enclosed area and were, in a sense, encircled,” said Joseph Carter.
Harold Froehlich, a student, saw the Guard move onto the field. There was a fence in front of them with only a small gate. There were fences to the right of them and to the left. “They couldn’t pursue and they couldn’t contain,” Froehlich said. “The students started gaining the upper hand for the first time. And they knew it.”
Specialist Fourth Class Karry Werny, a twenty-three-year-old guardsman, was standing in the practice football field. He was scared stiff. “It’s only a natural reaction, I guess,” he said.
Joseph Carter said he saw about fifteen students throw rocks at the boxed-in Guard. “Most of the students were standing between 80 and 125 feet away from the guardsmen.” A small board was flung, missing the troops. A protestor jumped up and down waving the black flag of anarchy in front of the students. He was shouting. Carter saw three or four students picking up stones in the parking lot about two hundred feet from the practice field.
Alan Canfora was in front of the students waving his black flag. He noticed the rocks being thrown were falling short of the Guard. “I did not see one rock hit a single soldier,” he said. “At least once I saw a soldier throw rocks back.”
Sergeant Russell Repp said he was hit ten times by stones. “They were just having a good time. They thought we were a bunch of nobodies. A good-sized kid kept coming up behind me and stoning me from behind, then laying down about five yards away. I picked up a rock and threw it back.”
Sarah Terhune, a student, saw a piece of wood, “a dead branch,” thrown from the crowd. Michael Erwin saw students in the parking lot gathering stones. The lot was unpaved and it provided rocks “about the size of golf balls.” He estimated that twenty-five to thirty people were throwing rocks. “Most were falling short by fifteen to twenty feet,” he said. “One soldier staggered. I don’t know if he was hit with a rock or if he just tripped.” John Barilla, another student, saw four or five people throwing rocks.
“A half of a brick almost knocked me down,” said Major Harry Jones. “Some [men] were knocked down with rocks but scrambled up,” said General Canterbury.
Joseph Carter saw no guardsmen go down from a stone. “It was too far to heave a rock with any accuracy or force. A couple of the troops picked up stones and threw them back,” he said.
Jim Minard, a student, said, “I was really mad. And we were throwing stones and we were yelling at them to get off campus. Some students had kidded me about my good arm because I had thrown a lot of tear-gas canisters back.”
Michael W. Hill, a senior, saw a guardsman get hit in the foot. “They were all fired up and it’s sort of easy to tell when somebody gets hit because you sort of move out of formation and jump back.”
Suddenly, some of the guardsmen in the practice field dropped back, took a kneeling position, and pointed their M-1 rifles at the demonstrators. Greg Benedetti, a campus radio newsman, watched the Guard back off. “The protestors would retreat, then charge, throwing things and shouting,” he said. “The Guard kept moving back and the protestors kept coming forward.”
Students began to yell, “Shoot, Shoot, Shoot.”
John Filo, a student photographer, saw a stone the size of a golf ball bounce off a guardsman’s helmet.
“The tear gas wasn’t doing any good,” said Sergeant Russell Repp. “We didn’t run out. I still had eight canisters on a bandolier.”
“We exhausted every tear gas round,” said Canterbury.
From his vantage point atop Taylor Hall, Jerry Stoklas looked down on the practice field and saw a guardsman with a .45 pistol fire in the air. He appeared as “a guy who looked like an officer.” Richard Schreiber, a journalism professor, saw the same thing. “He aimed over the rock throwers and fired at least one round over their heads,” he said.
“Those guardsmen who had not assumed the kneeling position seemed to be milling around in no particular formation and began to take a few steps toward Taylor Hall,” said Joseph Carter. “Some interpreted it as a withdrawal.”
The Guard assembled in a formation and started toward Blanket Hill, away from the crowd. “They walked at a pretty fast pace,” said Ben Parsons. “Then they started running. Everybody started screaming because it was like we’d won.”
James Dawson saw students throwing rocks and bottles more heavily as the Guard left the practice field. “It seemed to almost panic the guardsmen,” he said. “They almost seemed to start running. Which I thought did nothing but give more impetus to the students and the students started to move quickly toward them.”
The troops were ordered to return to their original position at the bottom of the Commons. “The behavior of an estimated seventy-five to one hundred members of the crowd was illogical, they appeared to be frenzied and frantic during the period when the troops were being attacked when returning to the original positions,” a Guard report said.
Sergeant Dale Antram said, “We were walking up the hill but we were thinking behind us. We were always glancing over our shoulders and guys were saying, ‘Back there, watch it, here comes a rock.’ I couldn’t wear my glasses because of the gas mask.”
“It was hard to see through the plastic,” said Private Paul Zimmerman. “To look behind you, you’d have to turn your head all the way around. I was hot and sweaty.”
“Those people were closing in on three sides,” General Canterbury said.
The Guard’s withdrawal up Blanket Hill drew cheers and hoots from the students. Jim Minard described the scene, “People were just going everywhere, going crazy.” Jerry Stoklas watched the Guard climb the hill and saw a “bunch of kids further back in the parking lot, throwing stones at them over the others’ heads.”
“There were some kids coming up the hill who had been down at the bottom before and there was a lot of yelling,” said Cheryl Birkner, a student. “People were yelling and screaming.”
Jim Minard was moving up the hill behind the Guard when he began what he called an “eye and verbal” battle with an officer. “I was yelling at him to get off the campus. And actually, maybe three or four times, he pulled his .45 out of his holster and pointed it at me. And one time he did that and said, ‘Come on, come on.’ ”
Watching from a window on the second floor of Taylor Hall, Donald Ross, a janitor, said he saw “this guardsman with a .45 behind the rest of them pointing his pistol at a couple of the kids.”
General Canterbury said, “Every guardsman up there was hit by rocks.”
Bruno Speco, a junior, saw a two-foot-long stick thrown. Steve Tarr said students were right behind the Guard throwing stones, “hitting them because they were at close range.”
“I heard the students yell, ‘Kill the pigs!’ ” said Bill Resch, president of the Graduate Student Council. “The intensity of the yell surprised me.”
“The situation was extremely dangerous,” said General Canterbury. “I felt I could have been killed.”
“I didn’t feel danger and I was right in the middle of it,” said Captain Raymond Srp.
“There were only two ways out of there,” said Private Paul Naujoks. “To run down the hill or shoot and turn them back.” The guardsmen now were a few steps over the crest of the hill.
“Suddenly a small group of students raced within close range of the Guard,” said Al Thompson, the reporter. “They were throwing more rocks.”
“I could see a kid run close behind the Guard,” said Donald MacKenzie, a senior. “He had a rock and he threw.”
A reporter from the Akron Beacon Journal saw “a civilian with a large rock run up behind the Guard.” There were more students behind him. “I saw this one in front throw the rock.”
“I saw the guardsmen stop and turn,” said Alan Canfora. “I had my flag in my hand. They were aiming their guns into the crowd. I turned and started to run.”
“They turned toward us,” said Barbara Neff, a sophomore. “We were expecting tear gas. We knew they were going to fire. We knew they were going to fire something.”
“One of the guardsmen turned and fired and then I heard the volley,” said Donald MacKenzie. As the Guardsmen turned, they rushed a few steps back up the knoll, firing, led by a guardsman with a .45 pistol.
“One guardsman with a pistol shot first,” said Rick Levinger, a freshman, “and then the others opened up.”
“All of a sudden,” said Bill Reymond, a senior, “everything just blew up.”
“I heard a single shot precede the volley,” said General Canterbury. “I did not identify the kind of weapon. It was a split second before the volley.”
“Everything happened so fast,” said Private Paul Naujoks, “it was like a car wreck.”
“I heard no single shot,” said Jackie Stewart, a university secretary. “They turned together. They just started shooting. I stood there.”
It was a long, irregular volley that snapped and crackled, partially obscuring the men on the firing fine in a cloud of smoke and dust.
“It sounded just like the Fourth of July,” said Jim Nichols, a junior.
Those being fired at could not comprehend the hail of bullets. “I thought,” said Mike Erwin, “that only blank rounds were being fired and I thought that until the bullets started kicking up dust at my feet.” When he heard the volley, Chaplain Simons “knew better, but I thought they were blanks.” Cleveland Press reporter Al Thompson thought, They must be firing blanks, those can’t be real bullets.
“Everyone was up tight,” said Sergeant Russell Repp. “No one was thinking of firing. Then I heard small-arms fire, three shots, it might have been an echo, and the guys returned the fire.”
“One guardsman was raking the area,” a student said. “He wasn’t aiming. Others had their guns in the air. The guy I was watching was cutting an arc with his rifle.”
“I thought I heard the command to fire,” a guardsman said. “I was approximately in the center of the line formation. The students were throwing rocks and were too close for the safety of the men.”
“I was laughing,” said Walter Zimny, a junior. “I thought, Those jerks are firing a machine-gun over everyone’s heads.”
“Others in my unit fired,” said Private Duane Raber, “and I tried to fire but I couldn’t. I extracted the first round and then fired three rounds over their heads as warning.”
“I was watching the firing line,” said Ben Parsons, a sophomore. “I saw at least a couple spin, lock the butts of their rifles against their hips, and fire straight into the air, and I saw some spin and fire without looking.”
“I heard the first shot,” said a guardsman. “I had my rifle at my shoulder, not sighting, just at my shoulder. I had my finger on the trigger and fired when the others did. I just didn’t think about it. It just happened. How can you think at a time like that? Right after the first shot, it sounded like everyone squeezed off one round, like at the range, drawn out. I fired once. I just closed my eyes and shot. I didn’t aim at anyone in particular. I just shot at shoulder level toward the crowd.”
“A few guardsmen just didn’t let up,” said freshman Steve Tarr. “They just emptied their rifles.”
“I heard the men fire,” said Private Lonnie Hinton. “So I fired one .30-caliber round straight into the air. The reason was they were all around us and I thought it the most suitable thing to do at the time.”
“I turned, and when I saw all those guys falling in front I knew we were safe,” said Private Paul Naujoks. “They wouldn’t keep coming. It was a relief. I felt it was our only way out.”
“Each man made a judgment on his own that his own life was in danger,” said General Canterbury.
“I didn’t feel threatened,” said a guardsman. “I didn’t feel trapped. I didn’t think they’d try to take our rifles, not while we could use the bayonets and the butts.”
Major Harry Jones said he gave no order. He had a baton in his hands and he brought the stick down so hard after the firing began that he broke it. Some students, confused in their timing, thought the stick came down before the firing and constituted an order.
“I had my stick in my right hand,” Jones said, “and I started beating the men over their helmets. I had to run out in front of the line, in front of the fire. If I wouldn’t have, they never would have stopped. And I yelled, ‘Cease fire! Cease fire! Cease fire!’ And General Canterbury was yelling too at the other end of the line.”
One Guard official said some of the soldiers may have misunderstood the “Cease fire!” order, thinking the order was to “Fire!”
Private David Rogers was struck by Major Jones’ stick. “The major hit me so hard it made my ears ring. I could see the kids fall. I saw this one. I don’t know if it was a boy or girl. It didn’t bother me at first, either. I’ve been with my brother’s wrecking truck out on accidents and things. The major was out there waving like crazy.”
Twenty feet to his left reporter Al Thompson saw a student, long hair flying, pirouette as he was hit in the chest. Blood flowed through his shirt. As he twisted, head bowed, one shoulder wrenched high in the air, the student had a look of “utter disbelief” on his face.
Robert Stamps, a sophomore, was standing seven hundred feet away. He had a pretzel in one hand and a notebook in the other. He heard the shots. “Something hit me in the ass. I thought it was a rock, and then I put my hand back there and felt the blood.” If another bullet hits me, he thought, I’m going to die. He leaped down on top of two girls in the parking lot. “As soon as it stopped, I jumped up and started running again.” He ran into another student, threw his arms around him, and said, “Brother, I’ve been shot, help me.”
On top of Taylor Hall, photographer Jerry Stoklas saw a boy “jerk like a puppet,” then twist and fall, “like he got broken into pieces.”
In the parking lot, photographer John Filo was looking through his viewfinder and saw the guardsmen point their rifles directly at him. He heard a bullet bang through a metal sculpture near him. He dropped his camera and fell flat on his face.
Sophomore Douglas Wrentmore, a conscientious objector, heard the noise, took a few steps, and found he couldn’t walk any more. “I was on the ground. I crawled behind a car. Bullets hit the side of the car. I tried to get up and walk. I had to hop.”
Greg Benedetti was running toward Taylor Hall. As he ran he looked down and saw blood on his hands. Five feet from him a student had been hit. “The wound sprayed blood over the area.”
Four or five seconds elapsed in terrible stillness after the shooting stopped.
Then junior John Dienert got up and yelled: “MURDERERS!”
Freshman Danny Herman got up and pointed to a wounded student. “Look what you did!” he yelled.
Michael Erwin saw a boy holding a rag over a girl’s throat, “only there wasn’t much of her throat left.”
Robert Dyal, a philosophy professor, couldn’t hear any voices “except screams.”
Earel Neikirk, the Elyria reporter, thought, I have seen this all before, in the service, during the war, on a beach in the South Pacific. Now I have to see it again? Here? At my alma mater?
Graduate student Joseph Carter thought, Where am I? Is this a battlefield? Is this a nightmare? Is this a campus? Is this America? Is this a war? Who is fighting? Who is the enemy? Who won?
Greg Sbaraglia, the reporter, looked around and couldn’t comprehend it. He thought, Campus radicals have used animal blood to give the impression of injury. This is guerrilla theater, a bad joke.
Bobbi Moran, a freshman coed, saw the blood and couldn’t “fathom” it. She thought it was fingerpaint.
Jerry Geiger, twenty-four, a junior and a Vietnam combat veteran, thought, There is a helicopter up there and there are people bleeding all around. I’m back in Vietnam.
The Guard contingent that had fired from Blanket Hill withdrew. Twenty-six men had fired fifty-nine shots.
“We felt we had accomplished our purpose,” General Canterbury said. “The crowd was dispersed at that point.”
The guardsmen went cautiously down the hill. Junior Jim Nichols noticed how each guardsman covered a different angle with his rifle. As they neared the bottom of the hill, they broke into a dead run to reach the Guard compound by the ROTC building.
“We didn’t know anything was seriously wrong,” said Sergeant Mike Delaney, who was on the Commons, “until we saw the guys coming over the hill and the officers yelling for help.”
Chaplain Simons ran toward the men as they came off the hill. They didn’t want to talk to him. “They were already withdrawing,” Simons said.
When Sergeant Dale Antram got to the bottom of the hill, he felt like crying. “I couldn’t believe it. My first thought was, I’m getting out of the Guard, I’m a conscientious objector, baby.”
When the guardsmen left the hill, the students were clumped around the dead and wounded.
Michael Stein, watching from Blanket Hill, saw a coed run toward the guardsmen on the Commons with her hands over her head to make sure she wouldn’t be shot. She was Pam Holland, a sophomore. An ambulance stood next to the guardsmen.
“As I ran down,” Pam said, “I was screaming obscenities. I wasn’t in any way to be talked to.” She screamed, “People are dying, get the ambulance up there!” One of the guardsmen came up to her, shoved her, and said, “Where’s your identification?” She kept screaming, “Get a doctor!” They finally sent the ambulance up.
As the guardsmen stood on the Commons near the ROTC building, General Canterbury asked Chaplain Simons to talk to the men who had been on the firing line. “He wanted to know whether they fired up or down,” Simons said.
The first guardsman Simons talked to said, “I fired right down the gulley.” The chaplain noted “there was hate on the guy’s face” and he thought, You just can’t get away from it. This guy placed one exactly where he wanted to.
Simons talked to another guardsman who said, “I didn’t realize the guys were shooting at the kids until I saw this kid’s chest break into blood.” The guardsman said he had fired into the air.
Joseph Carter was inside Prentice Hall, the dormitory behind the parking lot. “The lounge was a scene of terrible shock and confusion.” Coeds screamed in hysteria.
In the parking lot Dan Smith, a photographer for the Kent Record Courier, heard a coed scream, “Get mattresses, the pigs shot them, help us.” The wounded were carried from the parking lot. He saw a girl, her face waxen, her clothes and those of the students carrying her bloodstained. He saw a boy whose headband had slipped below his eyes. It was soaked with his tears.
In the administration building Leona Wright, the university’s chief telephone operator, saw the Centrex system go dead. She thought of one thing: Dallas.
A wild rumor spread among the students that the Guard had ordered the phone line closed down so nobody would find out what had happened.
A group of guardsmen who had stood between Taylor and Prentice Halls at the time of the shooting moved toward the parking lot to look at the wounded and the dead. They were led by Captain Ron Snyder, an investigator for the Summit County coroner’s office.
Freshman Steve Tarr saw a girl approach one of the guardsmen and yell, “You killed him!” and “Fuck you!” The guardsman got about six feet from a body and turned around and went back.
“I saw a boy in the road,” said Captain Snyder. “I tried to make a recovery of him. They were calling us goddamned murderers.” He made the decision to “forget the bodies” and moved his men from the parking lot toward Blanket Hill.
When the new contingent of guardsmen were on the hill, Snyder saw “a kid was yelling trying to get another crowd together.” He threw a tear gas canister at him. The student ran away. It was the last canister fired that day. Those clumped around the bodies couldn’t believe it. “Here was all this blood,” said Steve Tarr, “and they were still shooting tear gas.”
Dan Smith, the photographer, was numb. He walked inside Prentice Hall. He wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come. He saw that a window screen had been removed from the lounge’s big front window. Two of the injured were brought through the opening carefully on couches. He saw a tall, dark-haired girl strip the mattress from her bed and, despite its bulkiness, throw it through the corridor outside.
Greg Sbaraglia walked around the parking lot and saw rocks, bricks, and cartridge shells on the ground near the fallen students.
Dan Smith, back in the parking lot, was still waiting for the ambulances. Students were screaming for help. The only ones quiet, he noted, were the wounded and those in shock. When the first of the red-and-white Kent ambulances got there, a crowd gathered around it. They began yelling at the ambulance attendants. “You goddamn pigs!” they yelled. Seconds later, Smith saw, students were helping the attendants with the wounded.
Steve Tarr watched in the parking lot as a faculty member checked the pulse of a student who’d been hit. “He had no coloring on his lips. His face was completely pale. I knew he was in shock then because he said, ‘I have to take a piss bad.’ We unbuckled his pants and he started to kick his legs aloft and I held both legs down.”
As the ambulances were picking up the dead and wounded, a helicopter hovered overhead and a voice from a loudspeaker ordered everyone back to the dormitories. Junior Scott Varner thought, It sounds like a voice from heaven.
Dan Smith, standing next to an ambulance, was loading his camera. Why should I shoot? he wondered. Almost subconsciously he threaded the film. He shot through the ambulance window at the wounded. He was half ashamed of what he was doing but he was too shocked not to do it.
Gene Pekarik, a sophomore, saw a student in a sport coat running around near Blanket Hill “like a wildman.” The student had a gun. “He looked like he was going to shoot somebody.” He was three feet from Pekarik. He was pointing the gun at him. “He was so close to me I could see the gold bullets in the chamber.” Pekarik thought, I am going to die.
The student was junior Terry Norman, a sometime undercover photographer for the campus police department. “I was up on the hill after the shooting and I stopped to help one of the students who’d been hit and some of them surrounded me and yelled, ‘Get the pig! Get the pig!’ They took my camera away and beat me. I heard someone yell ‘Stick the pig!’ ” Norman said he saw a student reach for a knife. “I pulled my gun and scared him off.”
Chaplain Simons saw Norman race down the hill toward the Commons chased by two or three people. Norman ran to a guardsman.
Sergeant Mike Delaney took the pistol from Norman. He had issued press credentials to him earlier. A campus policeman told him Norman would be taking pictures of the demonstration for the FBI. Delaney gave the gun, a .38, to campus police detective Tom Kelley. Kelley examined it and determined that it had not been fired. Campus police chief Schwartzmiller said Norman “definitely” was not on assignment for his department that day.
In Lowry Hall, not far from Blanket Hill, a girl with a pony tail ran screaming to Mrs. Darlene Mack, a secretary. The girl screamed, “I killed him, I killed him.” She blamed herself for the boy’s death because, she said, she had taken part in the demonstration. Mrs. Mack tried to comfort her. “She told me to please leave her alone.”
In the parking lot a student tied a bloodied white cloth onto his purple anti-war flag and walked away.
Another student, eyes glazed in hysteria, dipped a black flag into a pool of blood, staining it red. “Here, here,” the student cried wildly, whirling the bloody flag in the air.
Dan Smith inspected his dusty ’61 Volkswagen, which had been parked in the lot behind Taylor Hall. The back window was completely shattered. The same bullet hit an adjoining car, shattering a side window and ripping through the driver’s window. “At that moment I felt very close to that oil-burning heap of mine,” Smith said. “I photographed its wounds.”
Captain Ron Snyder saw a student ringing the victory bell again. He went over to the student. “I flailed him a few times with a big stick.”
On the Commons, Guard private Richard Parker, a Wooster patrolman, saw some of the men who had been on Blanket Hill “throw down their weapons and start to bawl.” Private Mike Chizmadia noticed that “no one wanted to talk about it.”
General Canterbury told Chaplain Simons to tell every man not to fire again unless an officer “tapped him on the shoulder and told him to fire.” Simons tried to console the men. Should I go up there to help the dying and the wounded? he thought. “It sounds awful crass to say let them bury their own dead.”
In the emergency room at Robinson Memorial Hospital, wounded Doug Wrentmore watched as “the kids came in, stretchers and stuff. Most of them were a lot worse off than I was. It is really something when you see a girl lying on a stretcher, her face is all contorted and swollen and then, you know, they pick up this sheet and slowly lay it over her.”
President White, eating lunch with university vice presidents Matson and Roskens, got a phone call telling him of the shooting. Matson and Roskens raced to their offices. White rushed to his home, on campus, overlooking the Commons. He saw that two or three thousand students had massed again on the Commons and made an immediate decision to close the school.
Around Blanket Hill and on the Commons the mood had turned from shock to fury. “Everything really turned ugly,” said student Dick Woods, an ex-Marine. “I really wanted to hit one of those clowns. We started shouting and screaming.
Gene Pekarik also noted the wild anger of the students. “There were a couple thousand kids milling on the Commons and the hill, not going past the victory bell. The guardsmen stood around the ROTC building.” To Pekarik, it looked like two camps, two sides grouping before a big battle. He thought, God, again? Is it going to happen again?
Standing with the guardsmen by the ROTC building, sensing the building fury in the crowd, Chaplain Simons heard one of the soldiers say, “Gee, if they come down again, we’ve got no alternative except to shoot.”
General Canterbury said, “If they come down again, we’ll give them the Commons.”
Simons was afraid. He foresaw horrible possibilities.
Geology professor Dr. Glenn Frank, voted the university’s outstanding professor the previous year, went to Canterbury. “Don’t do anything; give us time to get the students away,” Frank said.
Canterbury told him, “You’ve got five minutes.”
Frank was desperate. He began to cry. He ran back to the students on the Commons and begged them to disperse.
As Frank walked away, Captain Ron Snyder heard Canterbury say, “They’re going to have to find out what law and order is all about.”
With tears streaming down his cheeks Frank stood in front of the crowd and begged, “Please, we can’t do anything here. They’re going to shoot us again. We’re going to get slaughtered. They’ve got guns and the guns are at our throats. People died here, but please, because of their martyrdom, let’s not have any more martyrs. I beg you, let’s move.”
As Frank spoke, General Canterbury got the reinforcements he was waiting for. “He got all cranked up to clear the area again,” Chaplain Simons said. “He wanted to start the sweep again.”
Simons thought, No. No. No.
Canterbury was picking up the bullhorn, ready to tell the crowd to disperse. Simons went up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Come on,” the chaplain said, “you told him five minutes.”
“Oh, all right,” Canterbury said. He shrugged his shoulders.
The crowd on the Commons began moving.
“Almost beyond reality,” Frank said, “they started to leave the Commons. I could barely walk I was so weak. I could hardly see because of the tears in my eyes. They moved up the hill overlooking the Commons and sat down.”
Dr. Seymour Baron, chairman of the psychology department, went down to the Commons to speak to Canterbury. The two had a long conversation. Baron told Canterbury he was involved in a situation of mutual escalation.
“The general had no comprehension of the idea,” Baron said. “He did not want to lose his advantage.”
Baron asked for a gesture.
“If you could put your guns down,” he said, “the kids would see that and listen to me.”
Baron looked at the guardsmen around him. “They were a bunch of young men with dry mouths whose fists were clenched up so tight to their rifles that their knuckles were white. They were benumbed.”
He kept talking to Canterbury.
“He kept telling me he had his job to do, which was to clear the kids away. He did not want me to tell him how to do his job.”
Baron asked that the guardsmen’s rifles be placed behind a truck.
“Canterbury was unimpressed. I kept on talking.”
He begged that the rifles be put down at parade rest.
“Canterbury thought about it, finally he said, ‘Oh, all right.’ ”
Baron went back to the crowd sitting on the hill. He was scared to death. He had spent his life studying psychology. If you know anything at all about it, he thought, now is the time to show it.
He yelled, straining to be heard:
“Listen,” he said, “if there’s one thing those guys are taught, it’s not to take their hands off their weapons. So for crying out loud, I’ve got them now, they’ve got their guns at parade rest. Look, in the meantime, there’s one thing that we can do, we can sit. It’s a nice sunny day. I’ll be glad to join you. Let’s talk about the issues, let’s talk about the problems, and for God’s sake let’s not charge them, they’ve got live ammo. Now listen, has anybody done the smartest thing yet, go to see if we can get some sandwiches? Who’s got a bottle of beer? I don’t think it’s a bad thing to ask about food when guys have got killed. I say there are three ways I know of to settle a man’s stomach—women, whiskey, and food.”
A coed interrupted him. “How about rationality instead of women?”
“Okay,” Baron said, “rationality too if it helps anybody. Now listen to me, if you go down toward them, they’ll kill you. Now the reason they’ll kill you is because they’re scared to death. They’re a bunch of summertime soldiers. They have no idea about what soldiering is or what war is about. Those guys are scared kids. Now I’m telling you, you can yell all kinds of things at me, but I just want you to stay alive. I don’t want you going after them. Some of you guys feel that you have to be heroes, well, you can be heroes, but remember, the girls and people here don’t want to get shot and that includes me.”
A student leaped up and tried to take the bullhorn from Baron. Another student told him to stop. “Let him speak,” the crowd yelled.
“He says not to take it away from me,” Baron said, “and I surely, surely am not going to stop anybody from making any kind of speech. I have no authority of any sort, whatever. I just want to say this: Please don’t, don’t let anybody start you going across this Commons again. We’ve had bloodshed and it’s a terrible thing what happened here today. This campus will never forget it. Don’t, don’t, don’t start chasing across this field again. I’m a faculty member. I want you to understand that the faculty is with you in regards to this stinking war.”
The crowd cheered.
Red-faced, at the top of his lungs, Baron yelled, “We’re with you, we’re with you, we’re with you and I mean it, we’re with you all the way!”
After twenty minutes the students began breaking up and headed for their dormitories. A sound truck blared that the university had been closed.
Seymour Baron dripped with sweat. When the crowd broke up, Glenn Frank threw his arm around him and, helping each other, the two professors climbed Blanket Hill and disappeared over the rise.
General Canterbury sat on a jeep and watched.
Earel Neikirk, the middle-aged Elyria reporter, walked around the ROTC building. He saw a guardsman huddled in a jeep. The soldier pushed his helmet down over his face to cover his tears.
“My God,” the guardsman said, “they were just lads.”
Yeah, Neikirk thought, and you, you too, you’re just a kid too.
General Canterbury walked across the Commons. A newsman stopped him.
“General, how can you be so calm?”
“You can’t see the inside of my stomach,” the general said.
Captain Don Peters watched from the hulk of the burned-out ROTC building and thought, It is just like another Kennedy has been shot.
“Even if you are directly involved in such a horror,” Chaplain Simons said, “life has a weird way of going on, as if nothing happened.”
By five o’clock most of the campus was deserted.
At Johnson Hall near Blanket Hill, dangling from the windows, were several bedsheets that had been tied together. One word was scrawled there, in big red letters:
WHY?
