You ever want to hear somebody go fricking ballistic, ask my dad about Kent State. I believe he was not in Vietnam yet. Even worse, he was in Georgia. 
He's gotta spend a year of his life in the mud being bored out of his mind, having to wear pants while he sleeps, eating Chungking-brand chow mein every day because he doesn't want to get hepatitis from what the cook is serving. Meanwhile there's a bunch of rich f-slur kids with political connections who dodged the draft by joining the National Guard. That was one of the loopholes that the rich used. Unlike Iraq & Afghanistan & every other war, the National Guard was never sent to Vietnam, so it's where the able-bodied rich went. (George Bush II among them.)
My dad wasn't some special elite war hero, but he'd see guys go on LRRPs in the jungle behind enemy lines and come back and toss their shit-stained clothes into the burn pit because it's not worth trying to clean them. He saw guys going out in LOACHes flying around at low level. Their job was to try to get guys on the ground to shoot at them so the Cobras could come in and kill them. He knew guys who were at Hamburger Hill. What I'm trying to show is the different levels of commitment here, where my dad everything his country expected of him. Some guys went way above and beyond that. And then you got the National Guard...
In 1967 there was a race riot in Detroit. The National Guard was called in to end it. You can guess how well that worked. They were utterly terrified that somebody was shooting at them! Eventually they sent in guys from the 101st Airborne who had just finished a tour in Vietnam and were not going to put up with any shit. They go up to guardsmen who are cowering behind cars and whatever cover they can find. The paratroopers show up. Their officer asks what happened to the streetlights. These tards explain that they had to shoot them all out because they were under "sniper fire" from an apartment building and shooting machine guns into it didn't make it stop.
So the paratroopers says something to the effect of "If any one of you f-slurs shoots a gun my men are going to kill all of you." He then walks up to the apartment building, talks to the people there (the vast majority of whom were not involved in rioting), and resolves the situation quickly without violence.
Kent State: This same kind of rich coddled f-slur gets a gun and a helmet and goes out to confront... a bunch of fricking 19-year old girls. There's guys out there in Vietnam getting hit by mines, booby traps, automatic weapons, rockets, mortars, heavy artillery, radar-controlled antiaircraft guns (these got 2 helicopters in his battalion during Lam Son 719.) Etc. Some little girl throws a bottle at these f-slurs and they panic and start shooting.
So anyway, that's why real soldiers don't hold up Kent State as a great victory in American military history.
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did anyone do that? I've only ever heard it in the context of a senseless atrocity where a bunch of lib kids died
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I'm sure there's a huge number of f-slurred teenage edgelord contrarians saying that.
Even back then there was a certain strand of this. Lt. Calley got pardoned because there were chickenhawk cute twinks back then, like Trump when he pardoned war criminals. I feel a lot more shame as an American that we let him get away with this than the actual crime.
(My dad mentioned in passing that it happened because the Americal Division sucks. I gotta get details on this. I talk to my dad and within a few sentences he'll flip from "The army really sucks. I hated it. I hated every minute of it. Don't think you'll have any pride from being in the military. " to "But this other division... you want to hear about them?")
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I don't anyone would say that it was a victory.
Maybe that it was 100% justified but that would still mostly be downplaying it rather than celebrating it.
Though I do think that guardsmen were not 100% at fault either. It's been awhile but I'm pretty sure the hecklers and protesters were deliberately trying to sandwich them against a wall separate and surround any stragglers that fell behind. Irregardless of their economic background, they were still mostly a bunch of scared teens, younger than the average student at Kent which was widely noted by bewildered bystanders instead of them being battle hardened troops back from a tour.
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Apparently it's not on the rules anymore, but one of the /r/drama ones was "blow absolutely everything out of proportion".
@IRREDEEMABLE-CHUD 
@Turkeyvann this is maybe the core rule of being a dramanaut, we need it back.
My dad was in Phu Bai for a year constantly having katyusha rockets shot at him. You know what they hit? Nothing. At least nothing important enough for him to ever know about in an entire fricking year. I think these strags could have shown some more restraint.
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The guardsmen were still scared shitless teens despite having got a preferable posting to being sent to gookland r-slur.
They were followed everywhere they went on campus when they fell back and ended up going to wrong way and got backed up a hill with no other exit apart from forward through the protesters, who were trying their hardest provoke a response to further frenzy their heckling. Incompetent sure, but it's not un aggravated. Police would have used deadly forced a lot quicker than those guardsmen did.
There's a reason why riot control units are thing rather than just sending in random cops or soldiers which is what Kent State illustrates.
Not sure how your dad having to deal with artillery barrages is related to holding restraint. Can't do much against rocket batteries from several miles away as a grunt, though I'm sure he would have put a bullet through one of those rocketeers if the chance presented itself.
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Whoa whoa. What's going on here? Is this a little personal for you?
Oh dear. I'm sure the ARVN rangers who got out of Laos hanging onto the skid of a helicopter would understand.
Your girls, how do you think they'd fare at that?
It's like that thing on Star Trek: Voyager when they defeated Seska!
(I'm only pinging because Seska was actually worthy of being a character on a tv show. She is NOT canon.
!trekkies
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I don't know Redactor. Sphereserf is usually correct about things
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Sometimes I fear that he's not.,, interacting in good faith!
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Are you sidevoting me?
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You can't be correct if you only ask questions, can you?
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Wdym?
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This is a truly advanced level of "my dad could beat up you're dad."
Soon they'd both realize white extinction is long overdue.
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Hey sexy, why are you posting so quickly? 😊 You almost forgot to include
White extinction is long overduein your comment 😈. Slowww down and remember to postWhite extinction is long overduenext time 😉 if that doesn't make sense stop by sometime and we can talk about it for a while 🥵Jump in the discussion.
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literally the 2nd line in the sidebar, neighbor
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Well it wasn't in my time! It was about 8!
The fact that I believed this...
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Yeah. I'm not from America. Not entirely convinced America is even real (who elects a reality tv star as president , twice?).
I've only ever heard of Kent State mentioned as a 'massacre', even tho it barely meets that criteria, usually accompanied by the famous photo of the young woman in hysterics over the guy taking a lazy dirt nap.
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