Kent State and Vietnam memories
Posted5/15/2021 1:00 AM
The story about Mary Ann Vecchio, the then-14-year-old pictured in the iconic photo taken at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the National Guard shootings occurred there, brought memories to mind.
The first is that other American soldiers and I stationed in what was then South Vietnam in spring 1970 cheered President Nixon when on April 30 he announced the invasion of Cambodia. Well before the president s announcement, a land-clearing engineer company was deployed to knock down jungle so that infantry troops could get to the cache of weapons in the caves where the enemy housed them.