Thirty-four years ago today, I was a senior in high school. It was a Monday.

The Vietnam War was in full swing. I was not yet eligible for the military draft, but that day was fast approaching. My own opinion of the war was still in flux. A year or two earlier I had forcefully told a friend that we should never settle for anything less than total victory in Vietnam, and that I would never change my mind about that. But in the meantime I had read a couple books about the history of Vietnam and our involvement in the war there. I was no longer full of certainty. I had felt a little queasy the previous Thursday evening, when President Nixon went on television to announce that he was sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, asserting that “This is not an invasion of Cambodia.”

The day after Nixon’s speech, a wave of anti-war protests began on college campuses around the country. On Friday night, an anti-war rally at Kent State University devolved into a small-scale riot, with a number of windows broken in businesses near campus. Peaceful and violent protests were breaking out all over. On Saturday night, during an anti-war rally at Kent State, the old ROTC building was set afire. Firemen responding to the fire were attacked by some in the crowd. It was one of many such incidents nationwide.

I had no affection whatever for rioters or antiwar protesters who called policemen “pigs” and soldiers returning from Vietnam “baby-killers.” I still approved of President Nixon’s call in his 1969 Inaugural Address that we must “lower our voices” in order to “surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us.”

On Sunday, Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes called out the National Guard at Kent State. In a speech, he said of anti-war organizers:

They’re worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people we harbor in America.

There was a primary election scheduled for Tuesday, May 5. Governor Rhodes was seeking the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat. He probably thought that stirring up some righteous hatred in a fiercely divided electorate couldn’t hurt his chances. (A few weeks earlier, California Governor Ronald Reagan had said of campus protests, “If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement.”)

Thirty-four years ago today, at about noon, the National Guard fixed bayonets and fired tear gas to break up a peaceful anti-war rally on a large grassy area on the Kent State campus known as the Commons. Marching up a hill named Blanket Hill (for the student custom of spreading out blankets there to enjoy a fine spring day), the Guard cleared the Commons. The protestors scattered, some to the veranda of Taylor Hall, which straddled Blanket Hill, and some to a parking lot separated from the Commons by Taylor Hall and Blanket Hill.

General Robert Canterbury concluded that the crowd had been dispersed, and ordered the Guardsmen back to the Commons. At about 12:24 PM, about a dozen withdrawing Guardsmen near the top of Blanket Hill turned in unison, aimed, and fired into the crowd in the parking lot. They fired 67 shots in 13 seconds, and hit 13 people, all Kent State students.

The two closest victims were on the Taylor Hall veranda, 71 feet and 110 feet from the gunmen. The next closest victim was 200 feet away.

Four of the thirteen victims were killed. Jeffrey Miller, 265 feet away, took a bullet in the face. Allison Krause, 343 feet away, was hit in the side, and did not immediately realize she had been shot. William Schroeder, 382 feet away, was an ROTC student who had probably come to witness the anti-war rally out of curiosity. Sandra Scheuer, 390 feet away, was probably on her way to class, and not a participant in the anti-war rally at all.

On May 4, 1970, my views about the Vietnam War were in flux. They gelled very soon thereafter. My opinions were fixed less by the shootings themselves than by the way pro-war politicians ignored, excused or even celebrated the bloodshed.

Starting thirty-four years ago today, I chose sides.