May 4, 1970: The Day the War Came Home

by Nick Spicer

Forty years ago, on May 4, 1970 soldiers opened fire on a student anti-war protest on the campus of Kent State University, nestled around the small, sleepy Ohio town of Kent.

Four students were killed, including Elaine Holstein's son, Jeffrey Miller

The number of dead - four students, two of them simply heading to class - does not compare to the number of American soldiers ultimately killed in Vietnam: some 57,000.

And the death toll cannot begin to compare to the number of Vietnamese civilians who lost their lives: between 700,000 and 2 million, according to estimates.

But those student deaths were momentous.

"May 4th represented the war coming home to America. And in many ways it was. It was soldiers firing at unarmed people," said Jerry M. Lewis, who was just a young professor at the time of the shootings, an eyewitness who is still troubled by what happened, four decades on.

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It would be nice if some small portion of society cared enough to protest current wars. Guess everyone is too busy. Tom