There's Something Happening Here
On May 4th, 1970, my first semester in the doctoral program at the University of Texas in Austin, I was so out of everything having to do with Vietnam, with the National Security Agency, with the protest movement. I was living in the moment, taking classes, meeting young women, growing my hair long, reading Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and poets like John Berryman, Richard Wilbur and, well, a whole new/old world was opening in front of me. And then on May 4th, the world of the past few years crashed back into me. The news rocketed around the campus…four students killed, nine wounded…Ohio National Guard…the students, some of them at least, protesting the Cambodian incursion. [See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]
I had not joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War though I had actually received a written invitation to become a charter member. All of us who had signed that petition that had appeared in the New York Time the previous semester, damn, I was already thinking in terms of semesters!, had received charter member invitations. I decided not to join. I was proud to have marched with GI’s United Against the War and was now a doctoral student, a path I had started down when I had been drafted four years earlier. I didn’t want to join any veterans groups, not VVA, not VFW, none of them. I was a student and that was enough.
But the day after the Kent State killings, and I do not really care who was at fault, the Guard should not have fired, I joined thousands of other students from the University of Texas and marched in Austin, Texas. We finally squatted on “The Drag,” Guadalupe Street in front of the University of Texas. Austin police had snipers on the tops of the building—it had not been that many months since Charles Whitman has killed people from the UT Tower, which we could see from the street. Now, another sniper was on top of the Tower. That was the only demonstration I ever marched in where I was tear-gassed.
That night, we gathered together again under the Tower for an all night sleep-in. Those of us who taught either canceled our classes the next day or had what we liked to call a “teach-in.” I used my class that day to introduce anti-war poems by Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. A few years later, I would have included Seigfried Sassoon, Wildred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg; several years later and I would have added Bruce Weigl, W. D. Ehrhart, and Yusef Komuyakaa. That night was beautiful: crisp, cool. I zipped my sleeping bag together with my then girlfriend’s, and someone in the tower played “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the great carillon. Hundreds of us sang the songs. The bell tones drifted out over Austin until someone in authority shut it down.
The next morning, we marched again. And then, things settled down. We went back to our classes, to our studies, to other things we were passionate about. Moments in time, memories. And yet four people even younger than I was then, four undergraduates, cannot look back on those days. And the Guardsmen who fired, I wonder if they can ever forget or even want to do so. Ten days later, two other students were killed, this time by the police, at Jackson State University. When I think of these things, I’m always reminded of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
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