Four Dead In O-Hi-O

Post-traumatic stress from 13 seconds in 1970.

by Kenneth Lee Warner • April 24, 2024, Published in Rome Magazine.

Tear gas has become as ubiquitous as signs of protests in political discourse these days. (Shutterstock photo from LuizSouza))

The problem with living as long as I have is that history often repeats itself. I will be in 71 in just a couple of weeks on May 3rd.

The latest news of campus protests haunts me. My thoughts go back to May 4, 1970, when, a day after my 17th birthday, the headlines screamed that four students, peacefully protesting on the grounds of Kent State University, had been gunned down and killed by soldiers from the Ohio State National Guard.

I can’t help but compare the actions of those students protesting the Vietnam War to the current protests on campuses from New York’s Columbia University to Yale, to Harvard, and yes, even to Kent State in Ohio.

On that fourth day of May 1970, some 300 protesters gathered there to find they were facing twenty-eight National Guard soldiers. For a still unknown reason, those men fired 67 rounds from their M-1 rifles into the crowd of protesters.

Four students: Allison Krause, age 19; Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20; Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20; and Willian Knox Schroeder, age 19 were all killed.

It took just 13 seconds to snuff out these young lives.

Now, as I listen to the words of College presidents from these same institutions spout rhetoric about safety, protest, and the need to not have protesters disrupt the opportunity for education, I recoil in disbelief.

It was just this sort of callous disregard for basic American rights that led to the murder of those four Kent State students.

I’m not sure if any of these University leaders were alive in 1970 to experience the horror of those days. But, their calls for police intervention are frightening. Particularly in this age when random police shootings are in the news all too regularly.

Will history repeat itself once again?

My head now constantly fills with words from musicians Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young in their song Ohio released a year later,

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We’re finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been gone long ago
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

That May 4th was a turning point in my life. The Vietnam War was expanding into Cambodia. Nixon was clamping down on citizens in the name of national security, I was going to be 18 years old in just a year and eligible for the draft.

On the debate team (yeah, I was a nerd) we argued the premise of lowering the voting age to 18 … “If you’re old enough to die for your country, you’re old enough to vote.”

My high school years were transformative for me. Growing up in rural upstate New York, I was raised in a world that would later be viewed as “right-wing”. My father was a WWII veteran, and then a Master Sergeant in the New York National Guard. My brother was in the U.S. Army. As for me, I was twisting and turning in my understanding of the world around me.

I wasn’t sure what was going to happen in my future. I had been slowly morphing into someone I didn’t know. I was probably one of the first to smoke weed in my class, having experienced it on a summer trip to Texas to visit my cousins the year before. I started hanging around with some alternative-thinking kids. My guidance counselor wanted me to go to Cornell and become a lawyer. I thought I was going to be a policeman. And, the draft lottery loomed large in my future.

My adolescence was filled with what seemed like endless political assassinations. My father talked of Martin Luther King as a danger to America. There was Woodstock and lots of protest music. Everyone smoked Marlboro Reds.

The only things two things I was sure of were, that if there was a sexual revolution going on I wanted to know how to join, and that shooting down student protesters didn't seem to be something my government should be doing.

I suppose I was drifting toward a different view than my family for some time. A year later, I was volunteering on George McGovern’s campaign for President. My draft number was 283. 18-year-olds got the right to vote.

My world was changing and I was changing with it. I registered as a Democrat and my Mother told me not to tell my father.

I was never the same again.

So here we are more protests and calls for crackdowns. I’m not a particularly religious man, but I find myself praying for the protestors and cringing as I open my computer each morning to read the day's news, hoping that history won't repeat itself.

All the while the words echo on in my head.

Four dead in Ohio (four)
Four dead in Ohio (I said four, I said four)
Four dead in Ohio (how many more?)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (I wanna know why)
Four dead in Ohio (you better tell me why)
Four dead in Ohio (why?)
Four dead in Ohio (why did they die?)

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History often repeats itself. From time to time I come across videos that have a particular bearing on today’s world. As you think about President’s Day this year, think about this one. — klw

Writing is a passion of mine …

… And in one way or another, I’ve spent my life earning my daily bread by the written word. I’ve owned and edited newspapers, ghostwritten speeches, created advertising copy, composed press releases, and churned out blogs and columns, sometimes for my hometown daily newspaper and then for a couple of years for Politically Speaking an online publication where I was often the Top Political Writer.

… click here to read more