'Four Dead in Ohio': Fifty years ago, National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University, sending shock waves across America.

• Author: Elder, Robert K.

Dean Kahler heard bullets hit the ground around him as he lay facedown on the grass, his hands covering his head. He was a student at Kent State University in Ohio, and the Ohio National Guard, recently summoned to the campus, was shooting at him.

It was May 4,1970. A few days earlier, guard troops had come to restore order after someone had set fire to the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (R.O.T.C.) building. Student activists were protesting the Vietnam War, spurred by President Richard Nixon's recent announcement that he was expanding the conflict into Cambodia.

Kahler, an Ohioan only days past his 20th birthday, was just a curious bystander that afternoon. He had walked over to the campus Commons to observe the protests after class when suddenly the National Guard soldiers fired their M-l rifles into a dispersing crowd of unarmed students.

"I could hear the bullets go zuuuuup! right into the ground. It was probably within inches of my ear," Kahler, now 69, remembers. "It wasn't just one or two shots, it was four or five shots--until I finally got hit."

Kahler knew almost instantly that he'd been shot in the spine, because he was in very little pain. The bullet, he said, felt like a bee sting as he lost all feeling below the waist.

In just 13 seconds, 28 guardsmen fired 67 shots, killing four students. Nine others, including Kahler, were wounded.

The Kent State shootings 50 years ago shocked Americans and revealed the deep divisions between those who supported the war in Vietnam and those who didn't. The trauma of seeing soldiers kill unarmed students further turned the tide of public opinion against the conflict.

The Vietnam Generation

U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a former French colony, had played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. After Vietnamese Communists defeated the French on the battlefield in 1954, Vietnam was partitioned into a Communist North and pro-Western South (see timeline, p. 20). The following year, the U.S. began sending military advisers to support South Vietnam in its fight against the North. The 17th parallel, which separated the divided country, became symbolic of the West's determination to halt the spread of Communism worldwide.

In 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson started sending combat troops into the region, a Gallup poll showed that 61 percent of Americans supported the war. At the time, military service was mandatory for men ages 18-26 if their draft number was called in a national lottery.

"[The war] touched almost everyone's life," says Mindy Farmer, director of the May 4 Visitors Center at Kent State University, which commemorates the shootings. "More than 58,000 Americans died in the war, so you almost certainly knew someone who died. You certainly knew someone who served."

The horrors of the war reached American living rooms via the nightly news (more than 3 million North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese died in the war, too). Public opinion on the war had begun to sour by the late 1960s. Student protests sprang up in and around college campuses, notably at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University, and Harvard University.

Students Taking a Stand

Students held demonstrations, in part, Farmer says, because they were being drafted but could not yet vote. At the time, the voting age was 21.

"You disagree with [the war], but you can't vote. What do you do?" says Farmer. " [Students] knew about the importance of the First Amendment because they knew that that was the one way, if they were under 21, that they could show their discontentment with the government."

Nixon had run in the 1968 election on a platform to end the Vietnam War. But after winning a contentious race, Nixon announced on television on April 30,1970, that he was expanding the war by bombing enemy supply lines in Cambodia. Many viewed that as a...