Chapter 12

MAY 4

Scot walked briskly along E Main St.  He needed a new rain jacket, preferably with a removable lining, to deal with the temperature swings typical for this time of year.  He had an 8 o’clock class this quarter and needed attire to deal with the early morning cold then late morning warming.  He chose the Kent city street rather than the more direct but circuitous and hilly route across the university campus which now had several barricades erected around areas where fires had burned several buildings over the weekend.  Main St. would be quicker in the long run, he convinced himself.
The weather was typical for early May.  The sky was clear.  There was a brisk breeze magnifying the chill in the air.  Then Scot detected a strange, acrid smell in the air.  The unusual aroma was faintly familiar.  Tears began welling up in his eyes.  Must be that wind blowing in his face, he decided.  Then he remembered.  It reminded him of tear gas.  He had been exposed to tear gas as part of his basic training in the Air Force.  He discovered from that experience that he was more sensitive to the gas than most people were.  The slightest contact resulted in profuse tearing in his eyes and nearly unbearable burning.  The training prepared him for an attack by an enemy of the United States.
Scot also heard an unusual, low rumble.  It seemed to be coming from the center of the campus.  Over the weekend there had been confrontations between students protesting  the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and Kent city police and Ohio National Guardsmen.  Protests took place on campus and in the city of Kent.  Surely students wouldn’t continue those protests into the school week, Scot thought to himself.  His curiosity overcame his determination to adhere to his schedule.  He turned south and walked in the direction of the rumbling noises.
Even diluted by a significant distance, Scots eyes reacted to the tear gas.  As he got closer to the center of campus, he began to make out ghostly figures behaving unusually even for a university campus.  There was a lot of screaming and chanting.  Underneath that anarchic cacophony was the quieter, deliberate cadence that resembled military marching commands.  There was no doubt now that the student and law enforcement confrontations had resumed.
By now Scot’s tears were so profuse he barely could see where he was going, couldn’t identify the buildings he had visited hundreds of times and certainly couldn’t distinguish what the human actors were doing.  He tried to detect the wind direction and get downwind or behind the wind, or better yet, into a building.  He was completely disoriented by now, but his curiosity drove him to witness the disruptions.  If he could get inside a building, he could determine his location.
Scot needed to be on the other side of the confrontation based on the wind direction.  The protestors and guardsmen were directly between him and his dormitory by his calculated guess.  He put his handkerchief over his face and crept slowly in a giant half circle trying to get around the offensive people and their barbaric, provocative antics.  
“Our soldiers had enough to do fighting in godforsaken hellholes around the world and risking their lives to preserve and share the noble ideals of this great country,” Scot mumbled to himself.  “Why did they have to put up with abuse at home also?  What’s wrong with these people?”
After what seemed like an eternity, Scot felt the wind blowing on his back.  The tear gas clouds began floating away from him.  The wind, blowing at about 15-20 mph, had helped torture him.  Now the wind was his friend.
He stopped and took deep breaths.  It was several more minutes before he could see adequately to find out where he was and what was happening around him.  He noticed shadowy figures, dressed uniformly, moving quietly across the top of the rise of the hill he had just circled.  He recognized soldiers in full riot gear, gas masks covering their faces making them look like alien creatures with giant, protruding eyes, moving slowly across the top on one of the many small hills and knolls on which the campus was located.  They were armed mainly with M-1 Carbines.  That was the same weapon Scot had used to qualify on the firing range during basic training.
One squad of about 10 soldiers halted, turned clockwise in unison 90% and shouldered their weapons into firing position.  A few seconds later, the soldiers started firing in unison obviously obeying some command Scot had not heard or seen.
The shooting seemed to go on forever.  Other ghostly figures spread out in the target area began acting strangely.  Some seemed to be overdramatic actors in some comic movie scene.  Others collapsed to the ground and lay still.  Then blackbirds began falling from the air in similar clownish charades.  The most bizarre were those which held one wing still while the other did all the flapping.   This created a comic corkscrew slow dive spiral downward as if it intended to drill itself into the ground to escape the barrage of bullets.  Others just plummeted straight down like a free falling rock.  Others flapped their wings, stopped entirely then resumed weak desperate flapping again as they came dangerously close to the ground only to crash into the dirt, take a short bounce then come to a rest.
Then Scot recalled the artist’s drawing of the Haymarket Massacre that took place in 1886 that was detailed in his U.S. History book.   Chicago Police gunned down workers and protesters who were demanding an eight-hour workday and better working conditions.  The events playing out before his eyes seemed to be a reenactment of that event on this exact date 84 years earlier.
Scot was in a state of disbelief when he realized the guns of the Guardsmen were firing live rounds.  He had served on guard duty in Okinawa when the Chinese were saber rattling over some small islands off their eastern coast near Okinawa.  He and the other guards never were issued rounds of ammunition for their weapons even in that crisis situation.
“Why would lowly guardsmen, 'weekend warriors', have live rounds in their weapons inside the United States?” he wondered.  “Did U.S. leaders consider their own citizens, armed with rocks and sticks, to be more dangerous than a nation with whom the U.S. had a long history of hostile relations?”  He knew plenty of servicemen who never should have a lethal weapon in their hands.  It took only one in a situation like this to ignite a powder keg.  
They had to be firing blanks, he decided.  They were attempting to scare the protestors.  It seemed to be working because several protestors were ducking and falling to the ground.  They sure looked silly.  It was a good lesson for them.  They were finding out what brave soldiers had to endure to preserve the freedoms of people like these students and faculty who were too cowardly to go fight for their own rights and freedoms.
Some of the students on the ground were writhing and screaming in an exaggerated act to discredit the soldiers and the war.  “What theatrics won’t they resort to?”  Scot asked himself.  “Probably hoping a news camera is nearby.”  Over a dozen protestors were lying or leaning on the ground over a large stretch of what was known as “blanket hill.”  Blanket hill was an area on a long hill slope where students went in the warm evenings to engage in fondling and other affectionate behavior.  They brought blankets for privacy and to conceal their animal urges.
“There’s no media here,” Scot said to himself, although no one was within hearing range.  “You can stop overacting now.”
Like a gawker nearing a car accident, he was drawn irresistibly toward the scene.   The closer he got, the more carnage he witnessed.  He saw what appeared to be blood gushing from one young man who looked more like a student from a local high school than from the university.  The bullets were real, he suddenly realized.  Everywhere he looked there were young people on the ground surrounded by other young people in great distress.  Screams seemed to issue from every direction.
Suddenly, something clicked in Scot’s mind.  Phrases kept repeating in his head like a recording loop on a tape recorder.  “The rulers’ attitude toward ordinary people is like the farmer’s loyalty to his milk cows.  He will milk them for everything he can get out of them.  He will provide them with the minimum food, shelter and care as long as they produce more milk than the care costs.  When that ends, the farmer and his family will devour the cow for dinner.”
It was one of Fred’s refrains.  It was Fred’s dairy farmer analogy.  It certainly seemed true today.  Some of Fred’s blatherings were beginning to make sense.
“The rulers place no value on the lives of ordinary people,” Fred had asserted.
Scot wondered what was going through the minds of the soldiers.  Did they imagine a herd of cows or deer as they began shooting?  Did some of them see young people who were just like them?  Did they see people who had plans, appointments, loved ones?  Did some of them want trophies to prove their warrior skills?  Did they want to drag a dead protestor or two home like a hunter’s trophy?  Would they attempt to imitate the blackbird hunters and pick up their kills by the legs and wave them victoriously over their heads?
The soldiers had acted mechanically as years of training and drilling had taught then to do.  “Don’t question your superiors.  Just do what you are told,” was the message drummed into every member of the military.
It seemed as if everyone in the squad was firing his weapon.  Some may have fired wildly.  Obviously some had aimed at people.  Some of the victims had been walking nearby the fray, just minding their business going back and forth to classes or to some other appointment or personal mission just as Scot was doing.  Had some of the soldiers picked targets for annihilation just because they could?  Given unaccountable power, how many people will act as if they are a god and extinguish the life of a fellow human without remorse?  Fodor Dostoevsky was obsessed with that feeling as he described in his book Crime and Punishment.
Scot wondered what he would have done.  When he finished his regular service, the military made several attempts to lure him into further service in the Reserves.  He could have been one of those confronting the students that day.
The first time Scot saw protestors defying the government and threatening national cohesion, he felt like hitting them with a brick.  Could he have gone a step further and gunned then down cold-heartedly?  Mechanically?  In his psychology classes, he learned that studies done in the 1950s had shown that most individuals will subordinate their conscience to the group conscience.  The vast majority of people will submit to peer pressure even when they know their peers are doing unjust, immoral or criminal acts.  More importantly, the studies demonstrated most people will harm others if they are told to do something by an authority figure.  Given impunity, most people have no conscience or soul.  Does that mean moral behavior in the vast majority of people is nothing more than fear of punishment?  Why was Fred different?  He knew those things before he was a full adult.
Scot could never have done what the soldiers did that day, he assured himself, no matter what the studies of Solomon Ashe and his contemporaries concluded.  Ashe’s studies found that only 25% of people would oppose the mob or their peer group.  Scot assured himself he was in that exceptional quarter.
The campus was in chaos.  All daily routines were disrupted.  Commanders shouted orders marching their guardsmen away from the confrontation scene.  Horror and surprise was reflected in the contorted faces of all students in the area.  Scot knew there were many students who would approve of the lethal actions taken by the Guardsmen.  None of them seemed to be in the area, or at least were suppressing their approval.
Ronald Reagan, governor of California, had called for a bloodbath a couple months earlier, if necessary, to restore order on campuses and return students to the classrooms.  James Rhodes, governor of Ohio, had expressed similar sentiments just a day earlier.  Was this slaughter pre-meditated, directed from the highest political office in the land?  If so, the justice system would sort it all out, Scot assured himself.
Marty, Scots’s favorite professor, said Republicans are a close ranks, lock-step party.  No one acts independently.  If that’s the case, Scot realized, some person high up in the Republican Party must have made the decision to resort to force.
“Could President Nixon have notified all the far right governors that they should set an example if they had the opportunity?” Scot wondered.  Nixon’s decision to expand the war into Cambodia made Scot question whether Nixon was of sound mind.  He certainly did not have a moral mind.  He had a Quaker upbringing.  That would have exposed him to a regimen of pacifism and righteous living.  Yet he served in the military in WW II when his religion offered him an exemption.  Was his parents’ religion unable to  compete with the evil that thrived all around him, or did he just rebel against his religion as young people often are inclined to do.  His invasion of Cambodia proved he was a monster.  What would he have been like if he had not had the Quaker influences restraining him.  Just what are those diabolical influences that are so powerful?
If today’s campus confrontation was orchestrated and premeditated, Scot wondered, did the plan include the historically significant date of the Haymarket Massacre?  In that incident, Chicago police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of people who had attended a peaceful rally to hear speakers.   The rally had ended and people were leaving.  The mayor released the police and left.  The police didn’t depart.  A bomb exploded in the police ranks.  Not knowing the origin of the bomb, the police fired indiscriminately into the crowd.  That carnage was far greater than on the 1970 anniversary, but no one bothered to count the civilian victims.  In that case of blatant injustice, the victims were punished, four of them hanged, and the police perpetrators were honored and glorified.
While the public approved of the police actions at the Haymarket Massacre, most of the rest of the civilized world was horrified.  Democratic nations viewed Americans as barbarians.  In the long run, the incident backfired.  May Day, the most popular holiday in the Communist world, and a major holiday in many other nations, traced its origin back to that event.  It was viewed as an example of how little value capitalists place on the lives of ordinary people.  It reminded everyone every year that Americans are far from the civilized people they bragged they were.
Scot wondered if the Kent State incident would backfire also, or would it scare some or most students and anti-war activists into terminating their opposition to the war in fear for their lives.   “How will the public and world respond to this incident?” he wondered.  “Would the incident make the evening news that day then disappear as everyone returned to their normal routines and forgot about second-guessing their leaders’ actions?”
The Haymarket massacre, while erased from the memories of ordinary Americans, remained widely known and commemorated in most of the world.  In that incident, the Chicago police went berserk after the bomb exploded in their midst.  Police wounded and killed several of their fellow policemen in the subsequent melee of indiscriminate force and ferocity.   The police most likely were the source of all of the casualties not associated with the bomb.  The politicians and newspapers blamed anarchists for throwing the bomb.  However, there were Ronald Reagan and James Rhodes political equivalents then also.  Marshall Field, a Chicago businessman and newspaper owner, was the leader of that group.  He had advocated gunning down people who objected to the status quo.  He offered to buy Gatling guns for the police to mow down those exercising their First Amendment Right “. . . of the people peaceably to assemble.”
Some speculated that Marshall Field or one of the other industrialists who were the real rulers of Chicago, hired the bomber.  The agent provocateur theory has some basis.  The rally was held that day to protest and plan reactions to police killings at the McCormick Reaper plant the day before.  The May 4th protests were peaceful.  They consisted of several speakers using the bed of a milk wagon as their stage.  Most of the protesters and onlookers had gone home.  Only a few lingered behind.  That’s when the dynamite bomb exploded killing seven policemen.
The public rallied behind the police and refused to consider the evidence or a rational explanation of the events.  Police had died.  Public order was threatened.  Security was in jeopardy.  Revenge was mandatory in the minds of most people.  Innocence or guilt was not a consideration.  Eight men were convicted, most of whom had not attended the event.  Four were hanged.  One allegedly committed suicide in his jail cell.  The remaining three, including a minister, received long jail sentences.  Truth or fiction were not the highest priority.  An example must be set to prevent future bombings or rallies.
Bewildered by the Kent State events and the very similar historical precedent in Chicago, Scot resumed his walk to the dormitory.  He walked slowly and deliberately, the images of the slaughter racing through his head over and over.  He tried to tell himself what he had seen could not have happened.  But it did.  “Why!  Why!  Why!”
Arriving at his dormitory lobby, Scot debated whether he should go to his original destination, the cafeteria, or return to his room to sit and ponder.  He wished Fred was there to interpret the day’s events.  He opted for the cafeteria.  He needed to contemplate what he had witnessed and try to make sense of it.  Better yet, he hoped to find someone who could discuss the incident with him.
In a bewildered state, he got his tray beginning a routine he had exercised a thousand times before, selected his food and wandered toward the sparsest section of the cafeteria.
“Scot!  Scot!” a voice called out to him.
Scot looked in the direction of the voice and saw Kevin beckoning to him.  With all the protests at the center of the campus, Kevin was the last person he expected to see calmly sitting in a relatively safe location.  There was a faint odor of tear gas even in the cafeteria of the most remote dormitory complex on campus.  The freshmen dorm complex was east of the campus, so just about any wind blew in that direction.  Scot was experiencing both admiration and detestation for Kevin and his anti-war friends.  What he had just witnessed confirmed that Kevin was right, partially at least, about the potential brutality of his government.  Scot needed to rethink all of his views, sometime.  Now, he wasn’t thinking clearly at all.
Scot waved at Kevin and sat down at his table.  Still unable to talk, he resorted to gestures.  Let Kevin do the talking.
“Did you hear about the shootings?”
Scot nodded.
“They just gunned down those students in cold blood.  The students are nothing more than animals to our ruling class,” Kevin asserted.  He was visibly angry.  “I was on the hill opposite to the killing area.  They shot mostly down into the valley.  When I realized what was happening, I yelled for everyone to duck down and get out of there.  I was surprised when the shooting ended so abruptly.
Scot had never seen Kevin really emotional before.  Now his feelings erupted and spewed out of him like a volcano pouring its ashes over the countryside.  Was Kevin capable of some sort of retaliation.  Scot wanted to find out, but was sure nothing but unintelligible gibberish would come out of his mouth.  Fortunately, Kevin had a lot of opinions and was eager to share them with someone.
“This could spark the revolution against our barbaric leaders,” Kevin said with more emotion than Scot believed was possible from him.  “Finally, people will see that what our leaders are capable of doing to other nations, they will do to their own people.  They demonstrated today to America and the world just how cold-blooded, ruthless and uncaring they really are toward ordinary people.  They picked a college that caters to children of blue-collar workers.  Now, even the most dense and dim-witted people will see that there is class war in this nation.  The nobility will sacrifice the peasantry without a blink of the eye or tinge of remorse.  This will be the wake up call, you just wait and see.
“What do you think?” he said to Scot as if he thought he had been lecturing and suddenly realized he was in a one-on-one situation.
Kevin’s rant, oddly, had a calming effect on Scot.  He wasn’t convinced that this was a conspiracy hatched at the highest levels of government.  However, his previous observations of one National Guard squad acting independently and in perfect unison left him feeling fairly certain that the event was premeditated at some level.  He felt that the Ohio governor was capable of such acts, but was dubious about President Nixon being foolish enough to order it.  Then, maybe the sergeant in charge of the squad took the initiative himself.
Scot’s silence gave Kevin the opportunity to resume his rant.  “The determining factor will be the depth of fear in the American people.  They already fear the Communists.  If our politicians can vilify the students and convince people that provocateurs were among them, they just might get away with some flimsy excuse for the murders.”
“Why were all the blackbirds there?” Scot asked.  “I’ve never seen large flocks of birds around here before.”
Kevin looked at him as if he were deranged or trying to make some sick joke.  “What blackbirds?” Kevin asked in a condescending tone.  “I didn’t see any blackbirds there.”
“I saw dozens of them get shot by the Guardsmen,” Scot retorted a little uncertain of himself.
“There were no dead blackbirds anywhere and I saw none flying either,” Kevin said with certainty in his voice.
Scot thought about what he had witnessed.  His eyes were watering due to the tear gas and there were spots before his eyes, he recalled.  Then it hit him suddenly.  In the highly charged emotions of the moment, he must have been recalling the incident from his youth.  He tried to compare the two incidents to determine if the youthful event had come back from past memory.
He looked at Kevin who was looking back at him with a puzzled, concerned stare.  “I must have recalled an incident that had been suppressed in my youth,” Scot said timidly.  “It was very emotional and I must have tried to dismiss it from my mind.  The confrontation today dug it up.”
“What happened?” Kevin asked, curiosity and concern rising.
“The incident occurred when I was an elementary school student,” Scot began. “Standing in my yard, I noticed five high school boys, that lived in the neighborhood, carrying rifles and stealthily creeping slowly toward a large, noisy flock of blackbirds that was feeding in a field.  The farmer who owned the field had harvested corn the day before.  Using a mysterious communication system, the message about the unclaimed corn that had fallen on the ground had gone out to what seemed to be every blackbird in the tri-state area.
“One boy fired a shot into the air scaring the birds into flight.  Then all five wantonly and randomly fired a hail of bullets into the dark cloud of birds that rose into the air then scattered in a hundred directions.  It looked like the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion.  The unfortunate birds plummeted directly to the earth dead or dying.”
Then Scot went into the details of the various ways the birds died.  It had struck him as odd that birds killed the same way died so differently.  The students also were shot the same way and reacted so differently.
The flashback of the guardsmen shooting, then the boys shooting, blended, parted, then blended again.   Scot’s mind felt as if it were about to explode from the mixture of competing emotions.  Shouldn’t he care at least as much about the students as he did about the birds?  Did his government?
“When the unharmed birds had escaped beyond the range of the hail of 22 calibre rifle bullets, the boys gleefully and triumphantly raced to the crime scene and began collecting the dead, dying and wounded bodies of the remaining birds.  They held them by one leg to facilitate the collection of all their victims.  Apparently some bullets had taken more than one aviary life.
“At first I was incredulous.  How could anyone massacre living creatures for the fun of it?  I decided I had to tell my mother.  When I found her, my eyes were welled up with tears and my throat too choked up to do anything but babble.  I pointed toward the crime scene to no avail.  Frustrated, I ran out of the room and into the bedroom where I hoped to compose himself.
“It was several minutes later when I felt collected sufficiently to speak to my mother.  What good it would do, I wasn’t sure.
“After she heard the story, my mother was not as upset as I expected.  She was more concerned about bullets flying wildly around the neighborhood.   She explained there was nothing she could do.  There were no laws against killing animals singly or in masses.  In fact, the farmer might have requested they do it, or consented to them doing it.  There was a 25-cent bounty on crows.  Perhaps there was a similar incentive for exterminating blackbirds.  Otherwise, she could not explain the behavior of the teenagers.  I wondered why my feelings were different than those of the boys with the rifles, and those of my mother.
“From that time on, I viewed the boys as subhuman somehow.  I was the exception when it came to killing animals.  Most boys living in the area and their fathers hunted regularly and proudly regaled all who would listen with stories of their hunt and masculine prowess.  However, the wanton, mass slaughter of animals for no reason was rare.”
Scot was very confused.  He realized his mixed feelings were contradictory.  He began to think he might be a citizen of the most evil nation in the world.  He was embarrassed to acknowledge that he had been a willing participant in its cruel, inhumane deeds.  Kevin seemed to have been right all along.  Was he right about everything else?