David Turcotte, Oral History

Recorded: May 7, 2000
Transcribed by Maggie Castellani

[David Turcotte]: My name is David Turcotte. I'm 49 and I'm a social studies teacher living in St. Petersburg, Florida. During the spring of 1970, I was a freshman at Southeastern Massachusetts University. And like so many of my peers, I hated the Vietnam War and especially the draft! To this day, I'm not sure whether or not I was merely dodging the draft or committing my time to higher education and awareness of social causes of the time. I attended the May 4, 2000 commemoration from mid-afternoon on May the 3rd until late afternoon on May the 4th. After a kind welcome at the Alumni and Visitor Center, I was told about the Oral Histories Project 2000. As a social studies teacher, I appreciate role play, debate, diaries, letters and oral histories as effective teaching methods. I was tired and rather grimy after driving 22 hours directly from Florida to Kent State. It was a last minute decision I'm glad to have made. But upon on arriving, I felt my mind wasn't focused and my words might be confusing. The real reason I didn't do an oral history then was I thought in remembering May 4, 1970, that I would cry.

The news of the shootings early in the afternoon of May 4 reached me through a person who heard the news on the radio. Although I was slightly stunned and bewildered, the message didn't hit home until I watched the 6:00 news on the Boston television stations. I was angry when I saw teargas being fired at students. Although I thought that they had some courage to face the National Guard and throw the canisters back, I watched the soldiers robotically advancing with rifles and gear intended for war. Seeing ambulances on campus though told me, "This is real. This is no joke." I thought, "How the hell can the Guard get away with doing this? How can men for a paltry little paycheck do this to their fellow citizens? Don't the Guardsmen hate the war? Don't they have feelings against all this continuing crippling and death?" My beliefs about the U.S. government -- its foreign and domestic policy, and the nature of human beings ---- seemed to all change. Sometimes I feel over the years my spirit went back towards the seed and not toward the flower. This I don't blame on May 4, the War, or the political climate. I only acknowledge that since then, I've never been the same.

I remember having a restless sleep the night of May 4. And I woke abruptly at 5 a.m., May 5, with such a feeling of emptiness. I felt so mentally and physically drained. And there was something painfully difficult for me watching the sunrise on May 5, 1970. I knew that less than 24 hours ago, four students, four kids my age, lost their lives. And they wouldn't see the light of this new day. A feeling of helplessness and frustration hung over me because I knew there wasn't a thing that I or anyone could do to reverse the events of May 4.

It wasn't until May, 1971, that the murders - and I've always felt that they were - that they assumed a personality for me. Seeing Jeff Miller's father interviewed on television just before the first anniversary tore my heart out. Here was a father who broke down and cried on national television over his son's death. I had grown up not seeing or believing men cried. James Michener's new book, at the time, gave life, it added personality and it seemed to lend a human dimension to the four faces that we as a nation were used to seeing for the past year. And you know, I think that hurt even more.

Looking back, I still have a hard time understanding May 4, 1970. And I can make little sense of it. I don't consider myself to be very spiritual. But when I look at films or pictures of the ROTC Building burning and collapsing that weekend, it's as if it were a part of hell, a portal that on that fateful weekend intersected in time and space a battlefield of ideology and desperate feelings of those involved. And all that could be associated with hell manifested itself near and fed upon some of the souls of the Guard, the students, the townspeople and the officials. And the terrible conclusion would not be denied.

May 4, 2000 reveals that there is a bridge of love that we've built across an eternity to express our feelings for Allison, Jeff, Sandy and Bill. Where was the love though on May 4, 1970? I wonder that if around Taylor Hall at 12:24, that the presence of perhaps just a small kernel of love for ourselves might have preserved those four lives. Thank God for the bullets that missed!

My thanks to Nancy Birk and Sandra Perlman Halem for their work on Oral History Project 2000 and for an opportunity to make this contribution.

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