This was the exact view of the National Guard soldiers, as they fired on the students. There are groups of 6 posts down in the parking lot. Each of those represents one dead student. The sculpture on the left to this day has a clean bullet hole in it (with a plastic flower pushed through it).
None of this makes me happy. I am not that much of a beast. But I cannot look at all this and not feel anger at what a WASTE it was, of human life. Not just or particularly at Kent State, but in the conflict as a whole. Again, maybe it was worth the lives to demonstrate to our allies that we were a reliable partner relative to the Soviets–as many argued at the time, with the best argument being something along the lines of a global Domino Theory that I won’t articulate at greater length now–and maybe it wasn’t.
But it WAS worth protecting the peace once it was won. Most people don’t remember or care that we had a peace agreement in 1973, 2 years before the “last chopper out of Saigon”. Henry Kissinger and his counterpart won Nobel Prizes. How can ANY sane, reasonable, intelligent person say the war was unwinnable–as most believe now, and as is taught assiduously nearly everywhere–when we HAD A PEACE TREATY?
Why was it the war was eventually won by Soviet built tanks driving in from the North, when the war in the South was supposedly “unwinnable”? This whole thing reeks of bullshit.
Everyone wants to rewrite history, but the truth is that only major progress on the ground brought the North Vietnamese to the table at all, and their plan even then was to continue to use and fan domestic US anti-war sentiment to do in Congress and the halls of power what they were completely unable to do on the actual battlefield.
Our soldiers did the fucking work. And deluded fools, like those commemorated above, were used as useful idiots by cynical, evil people, to create mass death, destruction, and terror among many tens of millions of people, when all that was COMPLETELY unnecessary.
Oi, I’ll work myself back down, but this pisses me off severely every time I allow myself to think about it.