Kent State 40

Sitting here this morning listening to an NPR report on the Kent State shootings forty years ago. Forty years ago! How the hell does this much time pass this fast?

Those kids, thinking they were in just another anti-Vietnam protest, so typical of those days, and the National Guard troops, probably led by a high-school dropout, decide to fire live ammunition into the crowd. It's unbelievable to comprehend now, but it happened: a country so culturally divided that our soldiers murdered our own students. And why? Because they were protesting a war that everyone on the planet except the government and the army knew was an abortion.

Plotnik heard Admiral Zumwalt's son speaking the other night on TV. Zumwalt commanded American naval forces during Vietnam. His son was also a naval commander, operating in an area where America was defoliating Vietnamese crops with Agent Orange, an herbicide that destroyed foliage and everything else that was near it. Zumwalt Senior was the man who gave the OK to use Agent Orange in the first place.

It was a hideous poison. Of course, our government denied there would be any residual effects from it.

Then Zumwalt Junior contacted lymphoma, a cancer associated with Agent Orange, and died. After his death his father started to change his mind about what he had done. Now, the second son has written a book about Vietnam from the Vietnamese point of view. The book shows how impossible it was for anyone to defeat the Vietnamese defending their own country.

We all knew it then. Nobody wanted to listen. Kids protested. At Kent State they were shot down. Only forty years ago.

Now we're in Afghanistan, where everybody knows it is impossible to defeat Afghans defending their own country. The country is culturally divided still. Poor kids still go to fight, richer kids go to college. Nobody seems to notice.