Brian VanDeMark

Well, when I reflect on the tragedy, I think that the three most fundamental points to convey here are poor leadership, poor training, and a volatile emotional atmosphere on both sides.

And a descending order of priority from first to last.

Leaders have, to me, a moral responsibility to be thoughtful and restrained in the words that come out of their mouth when it comes to dealing with highly volatile situations.

The military leadership of the National Guard at Kent State on May 4th under Assistant General Robert Kendery was abysmally inappropriate, unwise, and the consequences of that were horrific.

And the National Guardsmen themselves had almost no training whatsoever in dealing with student protests.

Just to make my point,

They were armed with tear gas and high velocity rifles with live bullets.

Nothing in between, nothing else.

And they had no experience dealing with student prisoners.

They hadn't been conditioned in terms of how to deescalate a situation, how to minimize the use of force.

In fact, I think quite frankly, a lot of them had joined the National Guard to avoid the draft.

And as a result of that, didn't want to be there to begin with.

Well, again, think about how they are trained or not trained at all and how they're equipped.

And as I said, it's so difficult and frankly often dangerous to generalize about this, but if you pressed me, I would say that the typical National Guardsman in Kent over that weekend before May 4th

was probably a working class guy whose parents could not afford to send him to college and at some level resented the fact that these quote-unquote privileged kids who had become radicals who were disrupting law and order

And they're operating in an increasingly emotional atmosphere too.

And I think that it's a dangerous mixture.

It's a volatile mixture.

But another irony of this is on that Sunday, May 3rd, during the day, the National Guardsmen had fraternized with the Kent State College students on campus.

There was actually a mood of concord and dialogue.