KENT, Ohio — There is a hole in the heart of America. It has been there for 30 years.
The hole pierces an iron sculpture on a campus in the midlands of the country. It's a neat hole. It was made by a bullet. It was one of at least 61 shots that were fired over 13 seconds, shortly after noon, on May 4, 1970.
This was the day the Vietnam War came home to America — made its bloody tracks into the heartland — through American blood, shed by American troops, on American soil. And that was the day, in the view of some experts, that the war began to end, even though it took five more years to die.
Here is what happened, what never had happened before, what has not happened since: National Guardsmen shot into an unruly but unarmed crowd of college students.
They killed four. They wounded nine. They stunned the nation.
The Guard had gone onto campuses before — but never with live ammunition and loaded guns, and shot to kill.
Kent State? How could it happen there?
The college generation was at the point of revolt that spring over the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, coming about a year after Richard Nixon became president on a promise of a "secret plan" to end the war. Their parents' — the World War II veterans generation — was primed to smack down those revolting, privileged children who were showing their flag-patched backsides to their country in time of crisis.
Weren't the Kent State students asking for . . . something?
On Saturday morning, they had rioted through downtown Kent, breaking windows. On Saturday night, somebody set fire to the ramshackle headquarters of the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps on campus. That Monday, May 4, a crowd of some 3,000 jeered at the Guard's orders to disperse. When the Guard fired tear gas, the crowd ran upwind. When the Guard fixed bayonets, students threw rocks at them.
And the Guard fired.
In the echoes, everybody ducked.
For 30 years the nation has flinched from what became known on the instant as "the Kent State massacre." No one — guardsman or student — has ever been convicted of culpability for the deaths that day. Although one student pleaded guilty to first-degree riot, charges were dismissed. Nobody directly involved then — president, governor, university official, student activist — has apologized.
There was a civil trial brought by the wounded students and the parents of the slain students against Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes, Kent State President Robert White and eight of the guardsmen — but the jury voted 9-3 "not liable."
Andrea Skatuloski, an international relations major from Buffalo, N.Y., says, "People back home always ask me, 'Don't you go to the school where those students were shot?' "
This is why Kent State president Carol Cartwright says, now, "We have no choice but to remember May 4, because society demands it."