30 Kent State Tragedy (Cont.) Photo: ROTC Building After the Fire. Song: “Kind of a Drag”.

I woke up after dark on the same day that I was arrested after being jabbed in the kidney and electrocuted with a 25,000 volt electric billy club, and because I needed fresh air, and my current dorm room had no screen, I easily stepped outside under the overhang of the 12 floors above me, and stood in the dark among huge square concrete wide support columns. I was wrongly thinking that Martial Law wouldn’t prevent me from stepping onto the soft grass just to look up into the night sky before stepping back into my dorm room, because during my brief (seconds long) attempted reprieve from still reeling in the pain of my horrific experience, as I turned to go back inside, I noticed that the tops of the trees which were lit by the sidewalk lights on the edge of the nearby wooded area suddenly started swirling violently in the wind. Immediately, the night turned into bright day! A Huey helicopter slid across the tree tops, and parked itself in midair above one of the sidewalk path lights, and it remained hovering 30 feet in the air just 50 ft away from me with the barrel of a Gatling type machine-gun pointed directly at me, with a white helmeted soldier with a dark visor aiming it. Then, a loud amplified voice said, “Go back to your dormitory or you will be arrested!” I stepped back under the overhang, and into my dorm room. Still sore from being poked in the kidney with a 25,000 volt electric billy club, I lay in my bed exhausted from the events of the day, and as fast as the noise of that huge helicopter faded, I fell sound asleep, again.

I soon awakened from what seemed like a very bad dream, by the sound of what I thought were hundreds of drums, with none of them in any kind of rhythm. I bolted out of bed, poked my head out of my dorm room into a darkened, empty hallway, and ran to open the fire door at the end to look into the stairwell to discover that the booming sounds were from hundreds of students stampeding up, as well as down the stairwell all at the same time. I asked someone in the throng what was going on, and I was told that the ROTC building was on fire. I made my way up a few flights of stairs toward the higher floors to where I thought that I could see above the tops of the trees on the nearby hill, but only saw that the clouds in the night sky were lit up brilliantly from the reflection of what was obviously the blaze of the fire that the student had described, but I couldn’t see what was burning. While everyone was stampeding up the stairwell vying to get a higher vantage point to try to see the source of the bright light, everyone was also stomping down the stairs, and racing outside on their way to see this once in a lifetime spectacle, regardless of studying for finals, any curfew, threat of arrest, or even knowing that Martial Law had been declared. I couldn’t see any building on fire no matter how far up the stairs I climbed, but the night sky was so obviously lit up brilliantly from a fire, that the way the firelight reflected from off of the white clouds, made looking through the stairway windows, just like looking through the viewfinder of a giant 3-D color wheel when you’ve held the viewfinder up to a bright light.

As I made my way down the stairwell, I could see where all of the students were hurrying outside, and flocking to where I joined in with thousands who stood against a long chain-linked fence above the campus practice field watching the the ROTC building still ablaze. (See photos, below, from the internet showing what the ROTC building looked like before, and after the fire). Soldiers had already formed a circle around the burning building, as three columns of riot policemen clad in bright blue uniforms, clear plastic face guards, and riot shields which reflected brightly in the light from the huge blaze, marched on the practice field toward the building, to the jeers of the students shouting “Pigs off campus!”. The policemen’s accessories were shining exceedingly brighter the closer they got to the burning building, so that they were obviously getting extremely hot. Soon, even the police dispersed, then most of the students went back to their dorms where everyone wondered what would happen, Monday, when another on-campus student war-protest rally was planned for noon in front the Taylor Hall Administration Building. The next morning, Sunday, May 3rd, 1970, one of the professors was in my dorm rotunda giving his synopsis of the situation with everyone milling around talking about what it was going to be like living in a dorm while under martial law. Many were talking louder than necessary, almost as if making the point that they didn’t have to actually listen, as the professor explained that the government couldn’t continue martial law, and the loudness level continued with all the nervous commotion. Then, when the professor said, “We’re going to have to get serious about rationing the cafeteria’s food”, very suddenly the entire dormitory population milling around the dorm rotunda became absolutely silent, everyone froze in their tracks, and every single student turned their heads toward the professor, and stood poised listening intently, just to the professor.