On May 1, 1970, US ground forces crossed over from Vietnam into Cambodia in an operation announced by Nixon the previous evening on national television. They joined South Vietnamese (ARVN) forces that had begun the incursion two days before, mainly in the border regions known as the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook. The purpose was to disrupt communist safe havens and destroy weapons caches, and a primary goal of the mission was to locate and destroy the elusive communist headquarters. It was known that the red leaders kept the various elements of their command structure widely scattered and also moved them frequently. Their strategy proved effective since the HQ was never located. They also minimized their causalities by avoiding pitched battles against the massive firepower of the US/ARVN forces. The most successful outcome of the operation was the location of significant amounts of enemy weapons, ammunition, and food. Most of this was turned over to the Cambodian armed forces.

That morning was the only time we experienced incoming ordnance while I was at Plantation. Dayle and I awoke to the deep concussions that we knew so well from Lai Khe, but they were not near our area so we waited to see what might be coming next rather than dashing immediately for our safe but dank and most likely rat-infested concrete bunker. Nothing followed so we remained above ground, much to our relief. Apparently the rounds fired into our base were Charlie’s feeble attempt to retaliate for the Cambodian incursion, but the only point he succeeded in making was that our area had been so successfully pacified that all he could manage was a bit of harassing fire in the form of a few stray rockets or mortar rounds. It was quite a change from the massive Tet Offensive of a little over two years before.

Most of our reporters and photographers had gone along with US units over the international border so the hooch and office were far more quiet than usual. Frank Gottlieb had been assigned to shepherd two of our new men, Jim Rand and Dave Massey, who were no doubt finding themselves in a more intense situation than they had anticipated upon their recent arrival as reporters in the RVN. One part of me envied them the adventure but the truth was that I was just as glad that my job kept me on the base. It was also impossible to forget the danger my comrades might be exposed to because the level of resistance our forces would encounter was completely unknown. None of us could really relax until they returned. As painful as it was for me to admit that I agreed with Nixon on anything at all, I did feel that the gamble he was undertaking was worth the risk. That assessment was heavily influenced by my position as a soldier in the war zone and I was especially hoping for the success of our troops in locating large volumes of communist armaments. I had long believed the entire war to be a tragic mistake, but since we were there I saw it as unfair to our forces to allow the other side access to safe havens across the border.

There was no doubt that the operation was an escalation of the conflict, however, and that it was now clearly Nixon’s war rather than solely an unwelcome burden he had inherited from LBJ. Instead of providing the American public with a measured explanation of why he deemed this serious decision to be worth the potential risk inherent in any expansion of the war, or perhaps even portraying it as a means of further securing the military situation in preparation for a US withdrawal, the old red-baiter reverted to his classic paranoid fighting stance and raised the stakes significantly in his April 30 speech. He chose to portray the situation as one in which the very future of all free nations was under imminent threat from “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy.” He cast himself in the role of an embattled leader risking his political future rather than “be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power,” and standing firm during “an age of anarchy both abroad and at home. Great United States institutions are being systematically destroyed.”

It is worth noting that he had viewed the film Patton for the sixth time immediately before he made the decision to order the incursion because his absurd rhetorical overkill bore more than a passing similarity to some of George C. Scott’s memorable deliveries of the general’s inspiring but overwrought efforts to fire up his troops. No doubt Nixon found inspiration to continue and expand hostilities in the famous general’s declaration: “Americans have never lost and never will lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.” “Totalitarianism” referred to the president’s old archenemy, the forces of international communism, but it was clear that the reference to “anarchy” was directed at his enemies on the domestic front, the anti-war movement. The incursion would have been highly provocative to the resistance under any circumstances, but by throwing down the gauntlet by announcing the operation in such a bellicose style he was also deliberately escalating the war at home, and the ensuing crisis was immediate and explosive.

The level of frustration on the nations’ campuses was already high over the president’s apparent failure to honor his campaign pledge to begin to end the war, and tensions were further heightened in early May by the start of the Black Panther trials, the “New Haven Nine,” in Connecticut. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the reaction to the incursion was so rapid and wide-spread, but it is also notable that the most common activity at colleges and universities was not the boisterous demonstrations of earlier years but rather a “strike.” Administrators, faculty, and students were urged to refrain from “business as usual” by canceling or not attending classes and instead conducting meetings and teach-ins to discuss the situation and to formulate strategies for reacting to the crisis most effectively. Our own campus, as well as several others in the Twin Cities, joined hundreds of others across the nation participating in this method of responding to what many perceived as Nixon’s reckless escalation of a war that he had pledged to bring to an end. The strike movement eventually grew to include four million students at about 450 institutions.

But feelings were so raw over what seemed to be the stubborn and mindless prosecution of a war without end that violence did break out on a number of campuses. Thirty ROTC buildings were bombed or burned and demonstrations turned violent on twenty-six campuses. In sixteen states, officials responded by calling out units of the National Guard. Kent State University in Ohio was the site of some particularly violent incidents for the first three days of the month that had included clashes between protesters and police officers and National Guard soldiers. The trouble was expected to continue on Monday the 4th as a large anti-war rally was scheduled on the campus despite the best efforts of administrators to cancel it. The situation went from bad to worse as the day wore on and eventually the soldiers fixed bayonets and began advancing toward the students. The retreating protesters stopped several times to attempt to hold their ground, throwing rocks at the soldiers and hurling back tear-gas canisters that had been fired at them. Suddenly about thirty of the guardsmen began firing live ammunition with their M1s at the crowd. When the deadly volley was over a young man and woman lay dead and an additional eleven were seriously wounded. Two of the injured died later that day. All of those shot were students in good standing at the university and two of the dead had not even been involved in the protest; they had been walking to class and one of them was a member of the campus ROTC battalion. The average distance between the guardsmen and those shot was later determined to be 345 feet. Those killed were Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer.

Jeffrey Miller, age 20, died instantly from a bullet that entered his mouth and exited through the back of his head, and soon afterwards photojournalism student John Filo captured an image that eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. The young man’s lifeless body is sprawled face-down in the street. A stream of blood is running from his head and pooling up in the gutter next to the curb while frightened and bewildered onlookers stare and point in the direction of the soldiers. But what makes the photograph one for the ages is the woman: a fourteen-year-old runaway named Mary Ann Vecchio is kneeling over Jeffrey with her arms extended in a classic gesture of supplication and her face contorted in anguish. She is clearly screaming something, but what? John Filo could not remember but thought it might have been “Oh, my God!” Regardless of her exact words, this inadvertent photographic masterpiece immediately became the pieta epitomizing the agony of what our nation’s war with itself had become, and the overwhelming question on her lips was echoed in the minds of millions whose eyes fell upon John Filo’s photograph on front pages and newscasts throughout the country: Why?

Kent State was to the war at home what the Tet Offensive was to the one in Vietnam, although, like Tet, the lasting significance of what occurred that horrible day would only begin to assume clarity as time passed. They were both turning points, and John Filo’s photograph is the iconic image of the war at home just as Eddie Adams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong suspect with a pistol-shot to the head during the Tet Offensive is the most enduring single image of what would eventually become widely recognized as the crucial battle of the war in-country. Both illustrate the unmitigated brutality of modern warfare by recording for posterity the grisly spectacle of unarmed men being summarily executed like cattle on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse. Now the war at home had finally reached its nadir: American soldiers were killing their own countrymen on their native soil. Also like the war abroad, the one on the domestic front continued for years after the turning point of Kent State, and those four young lives were far from the last to be lost. Indeed, more killings on the home front were soon to follow. But many Americans could not easily dismiss the haunting sense of shame and sorrow that such a thing could happen in the heart of our own nation, and a consensus began to coalesce around the conviction that this madness somehow had to cease before the damage to the nation passed the point of no return.

 Six of our men from the 16th Public Information Detachment had accompanied the US forces into Cambodia and they all returned shortly after the middle of May with audio reports, photographs, and plenty of notes for written stories. A couple of them had been involved in a small fire fight, earning the top bragging rights in the eyes of most of the reporters, but they all had vivid stories to relate. What had impressed them most was the massive volume of communist arms and equipment our troops had located and captured at sites dubbed The City and Rock Island, including an X-ray machine from a field hospital. There were also tons and tons of rice. One of them had seen General Patton’s son riding on an APC sporting two pearl-handled pistols on his hips and brandishing a sword, perhaps imagining that he was somehow reprising his father’s famous armor drive through Nazi-occupied Europe. If that story was true, the fruit certainly did not fall far from the tree because he was indeed reliving his father’s role, a la Don Quixote, of the hopelessly deluded warrior imagining himself in the midst of some more noble conflict out of the distant past.

 Our Sergeant Major, Ernest Bradley, returned from a leave in Ohio at about the same time with emotions that contrasted sharply with those of our ebullient reporters. He had been back in The World for the massacre at Kent State, as well as the incidents of other domestic violence that followed it, and was deeply troubled by what he saw happening to America. Sarge was a thoughtful and methodical black man who was now nearing retirement after devoting his life to serving his country. Like Lieutenant Colonel Selby, he always stood behind his men and led through the example of his own dedication to duty rather than relying on his high rank to intimidate underlings like me. I always wondered how many of the “lifers” were becoming disturbed and demoralized at this relatively late stage of the war because of what it was doing to both the Army and the nation as a whole, but Sergeant Major Bradley was the only one I ever encountered who expressed these thoughts to men of lower rank. I did not feel that a reply would have been appropriate but I did sympathize because of my respect for him as an NCO and as a man. He was hurting and it must have been especially difficult to see so many things he believed in being challenged so drastically as the end of his long military career approached.

 The Army itself was certainly one of those threatened institutions because of the way our nation’s leaders had abused our military during the long course of the war by assigning it an impossible mission, often using US troops as bait to entice the communist forces into revealing their positions by ambushing our men, and discounting the tragedy of our losses by claiming through questionable "body count" figures that so many more of our "enemies" had perished.  One reflection of this strife was a cultural chasm between career men and draftees, a military generation gap. I remember an angry inscription scrawled on the wall of a latrine: “Fuck Lifers,” followed up by a reply in another hand: “Without lifers there would be no USA.” There was plenty of empty space remaining on the wall but nobody had seen fit to carry on the exchange. I considered adding “And never the twain shall meet,” but it hardly seemed worth the effort of reaching into my pocket for a pen.

These recollections are from Volume Two of my memoirs, In Liberating Strife: A Memoir of the Vietnam Years, published in 2017