Here is my take. What happened that day is the American system failed. I will explain.
First off, ponder, if you have not, why the National Guard was there in the first place, and why they were carrying loaded weapons (M-1’s with a place to fix a bayonet, which they did carry, and eventually fix). They were there because student terrorists (as I would argue) burned down the ROTC building, then the next night rioted in downtown Kent, to an extent far beyond the ability of local police to deal with.
They were there, in other words, because of student violence which went far, far beyond peaceful protest.
So go to May 4th. The National Guard was trying to disperse the student crowd, which like many other student groups that week was protesting the invasion of Cambodia (more on that in a minute). They tear gassed them, to no effect. They marched at them, but they just moved around. At one point they kneeled and pointed their guns at them, to no effect.
And all during this they were being insulted, kids were flipping them off (there is a picture of one of the dead students, Allison Krause, apparently flipping the soldiers the bird at very close range), rocks were being thrown at them, and I am quite sure they were getting more and more pissed.
Then they broke. The rage overflowed, one person fired, then everyone else who was also seething with rage also fired. It lasted 13 seconds.
When you look at where they were relative to those killed, they were in no danger. They did not fire in self defense. They fired, in my view, because they HATED those fucking students, and couldn’t take it any more. They were National Guard, not regular Army. They were not as disciplined as regular Army would have been.
Here is the thing, though: those kids attacked those soldiers as Baby Killers, and Murderers and whatnot, BECAUSE they felt safe around them, BECAUSE they assumed they had the discipline not to allow emotional agitation to cause them to react in normal ways to continual provocation.
Put another way, the kids attacked these soldiers because even though they were throwing every name in the book at them, they assumed they would be safe. They assumed, in other words, in a practical sense, that all the insults were empty, without having the self consciousness (Consciousness raising, in that era, consisted in the main in ingesting badly written and poorly performed lies) to see the contradiction.
They were rich white kids, and figured they could flip off anyone they wanted with impunity, because that had been their life experience. Radicalism, for them, was all fun and games, without any serious consequences. It was a posture one could adopt and discard according to mood and the weather.
Contrast this with, say, Martin Luther King Jr. Did they insult the cops facing them? Of course not. They were going to get beaten anyway, and there was no point in making it worse. They rightly feared the cops. They did not assume they could get up in their faces without getting clubbed, possibly to death.
In America, most of our cops, and most of our soldiers are honorable men and women. This was the core assumption at Kent State. They assumed they were safe, not because they were not rabble rousing violent assholes, but because The Man would keep his pigs on a leash, and they acted accordingly.
And throughout the 1960’s and early 1970’s, this belief was overwhelmingly accurate. In the few cases where the cops got “stick time” (and as someone who worked at the UC Berkeley Police Department I did talk with some old timers; that particular phrase came from an Alameda County Sheriff) it didn’t last long. James Rector was killed in Berkeley, but only because the asshole was trying to drop a manhole cover on the cops below from a 3 story building. I have that from someone who was there..
But by and large, the kids got away with everything. Only at Kent State did our system fail. Only at Kent State did the rational emotion of hatred create following behavior.
Those kids were not innocent. They were not a threat at the time they were shot. This is certainly true. There was not a riot in progress. This also is true. But they had rioted a night or two before, which is why the National Guard was there, and they were being as antagonizing as they could be.
As far as Cambodia, look at a fucking map. Look where Cambodia is in relation to South Vietnam. It was a supply route. Dealing with it was a military necessity. We probably should have gone in and stayed and cut the Ho Chi Minh trail completely. It might also have prevented the Khmer Rouge.
And here is the thing with Vietnam: it was a just war. We fought a just war, and by and large did it as honorably and legally as possible. One can argue that the plight of the South Vietnamese was not worth nearly 59,000 American lives. This is a tenable case, which has merits from both sides.
But one CANNOT argue that we were not helping the South Vietnamese–at whose side we very often fought, as hapless as they usually were (Marvelous Marvin the ARVN was one nickname, if memory serves)–or that the war was inherently immoral. One also cannot argue that we did not WIN that war. That is how Nixon got his peace: we won, and they lost. The entirety of South Vietnam was, to use the parlance of the time, pacified by 1972, which at times required heavy but eventually effective fighting. (Read A Better War, by Lewis Sorley, or for that matter one of the many books written by NVA commanders, particularly those who fell out of favor and had to leave the country).
The only reason there is that iconic photo of the last chopper leaving the American Embassy in 1975 is because the fucking Democrats in effect retreated, and sabotaged the South Vietnamese, after neutering Gerald Ford politically. Creighton Abrams converted Vietnam to a conventional conflict, and that is what we were then and still are now best at.
Abandoning Southeast Asia led directly to the Cambodia Genocide. It also led to mass executions in South Vietnam (one number I saw estimated it as high as 200,000 political executions, which does not sound that high when one considers some 4,000 people were executed in Hue during Tet in less than a week or so) , the kidnapping of at least tens of thousands of children from their parents to be brainwashed in psychological torture factories they called schools, husbands taken from wives to be placed in forced labor camps, the theft of all valuable private property anywhere that any Communist wanted, and an intellectual monoculture and dark cloud falling on everyone.
I post from time to time this article published by an ex-Vietcong: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/032981vietnam-mag.html
It is remarkable, but then not really, that the New York Times would publish it. You see, then as now, they were unable to connect the dots by means of which their propaganda, their willing and enthusiastic endorsements of Communist lies, led directly to the abandonment of South Vietnam, and all the genuine horrors which followed.
If I am honest–and I am rarely anything else here–I felt some vague satisfaction that at least some of the motherfuckers who vitiated all the work our soldiers and the South Vietnamese and our allies did over there got shot. It is only because Americans are good people, and our soldiers/veterans emotionally connected to the rule of law and their conception of the American Way, that more of these kids did not wind up in the morgue. Again, the accusations of being out of control murder freaks are invalidated by the actual behavior of the people they were insulting. Most of them came home, built good lives, and in general were more successful than people who did not fight over there. Read Stolen Valor for more data. Most of them, in fact, did much better than the hippies who were hating on them while preaching love.
In 1970, we were losing perhaps 50-100 soldiers a week. That’s a guess. It may be high or low, but it was a substantial number most likely significantly higher than four. These were young kids, by and large, the same age as the Kent dead. Nobody cries for them now. They were just soldiers, and they are dead. But the KENT STATE kids, whoa, that is something special. They were just standing there being good, exercising their First Amendment freedoms peacefully, then BAM BAM BAM they were shot down. Fuck that story.
I have said many times, and will continue to say, that until the Left comes to grips with the crime they committed in sabotaging the war in Vietnam, they will be FORCED to continue to lie about nearly everything, as indeed they do now.
I side with the 58,000 KIA and MIA, not the four dead in Ohio. I side with sanity and decency, not craven lies, self serving platitudes, and unwarranted and utterly disgusting moral grandstanding by amoral assholes.
That is, I will say, what I really think.