50 Years Ago: May 1970 — Kent State University and the Vietnam War

May 4, 1970:

Anti-war leaders call for national university strike to protest the Vietnam War …

Ohio National Guardsmen kill 4 and wound 11 at Kent State University …

May 8, 1970:

My husband, Second Lieutenant Mitchell R. Miller, reports for active duty at Ft. Knox, Kentucky. (At the time I don’t connect that exactly 25 years earlier — May 8, 1945 — was Victory in Europe Day. A few months later, in September 1970 when my husband and I are stationed in Munich, Germany, on the front lines of the Cold War, I will begin to learn more about World War II.)

The Vietnam War — the sword of Damocles that hung over my head from my third date with Mitch, when he told me he was going to Vietnam. Ultimately he served on active duty for two years and one week without going to Vietnam, although that account is for another time and place.

(The account of the first nine weeks of my husband’s time on active duty is fictionalized in my Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist MRS. LIEUTENANT, which features the wives of the new officers training on tanks at Ft. Knox.)

For those of you too young to remember the Kent State shootings or the national turmoil over the Vietnam War, The New Yorker has an article that includes the titles of several books about the shooting and the anti-war protests. (See Jill Lepore’s article for the May 4, 2020, issue titled “Kent State and the War That Never Ended” )

The pain of that time never goes away for many people. Watching a scene in the film TOLKIEN in which a letter is received about someone who died in battle (WWI), I flashbacked to the summer of 1968. Mitch and I were dating and, while he was at R.O.T.C. summer camp at Ft. Riley, Kansas, I received his mail.

One envelope had stamped on the outside: DECEASED. RETURN TO SENDER. I knew it was the last letter Mitch had written to a close friend in Vietnam who had been killed there. I burned the returned letter and didn’t tell Mitch for years that his last letter to his friend hadn’t reached him in time.

A few months ago I was with my sister (7 1/2 years younger) on a beach in Mexico when she described to a stranger how much she and her husband had enjoyed their recent trip to Vietnam. I saw my own expression reflected in the stranger’s face — we could never visit Vietnam. And then he not unexpectedly told us he’d fought there.

According to Lepore’s May 4, 2020, New Yorker article, The New Yorker had declared this week of May 1970 “the most critical week this nation has endured in more than a century.”

May we all take a moment to remember the Kent State students who died on May 4, 1970, as well as the Americans stationed in Vietnam as reported in a National Geographic article of April 28, 2020:

An estimated 47,434 American soldiers were killed in battle during the Vietnam War, which spanned from 1964 to 1975. An additional 10,786 died in the theater of war, but out of battle, making a total of 58,220 deaths.