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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (May 1, 2005)
P A G E 14 BLOODY MONDAY BY MICHAEL McCUSKER One recent spring afternoon I stood on a battlefield of a war against a war. I leaned against a stone block that was oblique to where I stood more than three decades earlier with about a hundred others facing an attacking line of helmeted police who crashed upon us like a Civil War charge on a lovely day in May 1970. That same day was the 178th anniversary of Oregon's Day of Discovery’, when the Columbia River was first formally penetrated by white Euro/Americans in 1792. The battlefield was a college campus next to a series of urban park blocks that ran down the center of Portland’s southwest side. The ground had changed considerably in the 35 years since Portland police charged our flimsy line of antiwar resistance, and the students leaving their afternoon classes and flowing around me were children and possibly a few were grand children of the young student war protesters I linked arms with to hold the police back. The number of persons crowded into that space that warm spring afternoon outside Portland State University seemed a thousand at least, shouting, chanting and screaming as the police armed with long wood clubs charged the relatively few of us resisting them, no more than a hundred. Behind us rose the object of our resistance, a plasticized geodesic dome that had acted as an ersatz hospital for war protesters and street people for the week of our dissent. Barricades to block traffic from the streets on either side of the Park Blocks were built of found objects that included park benches, chicken wire and wood looted from a few nearby houses being deconstructed for an office building. The demonstration was part of a nationwide shutdown of colleges and universities in protest of the Vietnam War. The protest was dubbed ‘Woodstock Nation’ from the rock festival in upstate New York the previous August. A few days earlier four white students at Kent State in Ohio had been shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen, and a few days after that two black students, both women, were killed by police at Jackson State in Mississippi. I joined a group of medics at PSU, an adhoc squad of volunteers formed for the demonstration. Most of us were Vietnam veterans; a few had been combat medics. I had been a USMC reporter/photographer up around the DMZ with infantry and reconnaissance outfits, and in Vietnam we all went out and got our friends who were hurt.* The patch of grass where the ‘hospital tent’ had been erected provides no clue of that bloody afternoon of May 11, 1970 to the hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, street people and others who have walked over it or along the cement paths that now make part of a X-walkway across the park block, which replaces a street that had been there. I attempted to warp back to that afternoon we who are veterans of it have always since called “Bloody Monday." © © © $ © © Cops formed up outside a fenced parking lot. They had arrived in buses, at least a hundred of them. We stood across a street at a perimeter we had marked with makeshift barricades to block traffic. I saw several squadrons of blue helmeted regular cops, but I was looking for white helmets. I saw them, far in the rear, standing as a group. These were the Tactical Squad, the TACs as the striking students called them. They had a dual function. They were the city's motorcycle force and its riot control platoon, Portland’s version of SWAT. They had been formed to contain black insurrection, but this was the first time they had been ordered out; not against blacks but against predominantly white college students. The regular cops began to move as a flank. Behind them followed city sanitation workers with shovels and carts. The strikers moved back. I looked over the cops’ shoulders. The TAC Squad stayed in the background. The flank of blue helmeted cops halted at the first structure students had built on the grass of the Park Blocks across the street from the college. They had attempted to symbolically replicate street barricades after removing them from the street earlier in the day. The cops had orders to dismantle the replicas because they were on city property. The sanitation workers started taking the first one down. I stood in the street close to the cops. People gathered on the sidewalk in front of the college. The cops started moving again. The strikers backed up. The line stopped at the next pile of boards, benches and trashcans. Again the Department of Sanitation men took apart the ersatz remnant of a barricade, and the line moved on to the next one. The humor of what was happening affected both cops and students. Tensions relaxed. I was still in the street as a group of strikers began parading in PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE OREGONIAN “The TAC Squad — are you sure?” Her voice was anxious, uncertain that she was committing herself to violence and pain. I nodded and pointed to a mass of white helmets coming up behind the blue helmets. The Tactical Squad moved up to the line of regular police. “Now watch this,” I said. “These guys will turn outboard and split down the middle and the TACs will come through.” It happened just that way, as I had seen it often before; seeing it now was a collage of the other times. The two ranks of blue helmets marched off, half turning right, the other left. The white helmets pushed forward and stopped directly in front of us and formed a tactical V. A loud gasp rose from the crowd that surrounded us like an amphitheater audience, and a few men and women left us for safety. The rest linked arms and locked elbows. A police lieutenant stepped in front of the TACs. He shouted through a bullhorn. “Disperse or you will be arrested!" We began to shout back a mantra of the word “Peace! Peace! Peace!" front of the nearest cops, walking from curb to curb.The point of touching each curb made them pedestrians instead of marchers without a permit. Jokes and laughter started going both ways. The line moved again, and again the strikers backed up until the cops stopped. The “pedestrians” started their circular shuffle again, breaking into song. Once more the line moved after the sanitation men dumped the rubble of the barricade into their carts, and stopped at the entrance to a large plastic geodesic dome that we medics had set up as a hospital several days earlier. A police captain told the line to move on. “The hospital stays up,” he said with cheerful authority. A fat deputy chief waddled up to the captain. Police officials clustered in a knot around them, joined by college officials and strikers. I stayed in the street, glancing at the large crowd choking the sidewalk. A few minutes later the police captain emerged from the swelling discussion. “Is the hospital staying up?” I asked. “I don't know,” he said cheerlessly. “They’re talking about it now." “Why can’t you tell your cops to keep it up?" The TACs started moving toward us. I was scared. I looked at the woman next to me. She clenched her arm tighter against mine. Barely able to breathe I stared at the white helmets coming toward us. Each carried a long baton made of hickory wood. They moved in precision like a machine, left foot forward, right foot up, left foot forward, their long blonde clubs following the rhythm, jabbing at the air with each thrust of left feet. The TACs chanted a karate cry of “oose! oose! ooser which rushed forward like surf and crashed against our loud shouts of “Peace! Peace! Peace!" The cries compressed into a frenzied roar. I realized that I was yelling with the others. I looked around at the people who linked arms, all of us glancing nervously at each other and the approaching white helmets, our shouts louder at each step, while the machine chanted its robotic incantation until it was upon us. I watched the man who was going to have me as his target. He was straining forward, his shoulders hunched, his face determinedly blank except for his flapping mouth, his stick thrusting at me with each step. Suddenly I wanted out and panic ate through me like an acid. Then the cop was hitting me. “Goddamn you!" I yelled into his face, his eyes angry and also frightened like mine, his mouth still chanting, his stick punching me in the stomach. I leaned into him so that he was unable to hit me in the head. My mind was instantly clear but I was unable to defend myself because my arms were still linked to the women on either side of me. I pushed against my attacker. He cursed and slammed his elbow into my chest. He tried to club me on the back but my shoulders broke most of his swing as I struggled to stay immediately in front of him. The line quickly buckled under the impact of the charging police; we toppled enmasse still linked by our elbows. I landed on my back and rolled over, fists clenched, ready for fight or flight, preferring the latter. Then I saw the Japanese woman who had been next to me laying on the ground. She raised her head at the same time the man laying next to her raised his. “Keep your heads down," a cop growled and rapped both their skulls with his long baton as if he were tapping a xylophone. Some other people stumbled and fell over them. I pushed through the bodies laying in front of her, shouting her name, pulling people out of the way to get to her. Screams and shouts prickled my ears. I heard clubs crunching flesh and bone. I pulled her to me and put her head in my lap. I ducked a club as a cop ran past. She was crying, saying over and over again that she was all right. Blood streamed brightly through her dark hair. I pulled a compress from my jacket pocket and put it on the wound. I told her to keep it in place, clamped another compress, both of which were maxipads, on her lover’s scalp and moved on, wrapping kotex or slapping maxi-pads on the wounds of others who sat or lay on the ground moaning and crying or quietly stunned. I crawled from body to body as TACs ran amuck above; some times I sprinted, wrapping heads, arms, ribs, damming rivers of blood. “I can't,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not the boss here anymore." I looked at the big white dome that rose above the hundreds of heads. It stood next to an old leafy tree. I saw some of the medics carrying supplies outside. I thought it somewhat ironic that the carefully neutral medic squad might become the cause for trouble and that the likely fate of our hospital might make its existence necessary. A man with a bullhorn started talking to the strikers. “The police are going to take the hospital down," he said. “We have told them we protest their actions and will stand in front of the dome. The police say they will arrest anyone who obstructs them from taking it down. We have told them we will stand in front linking arms in symbolic protest and we will not resist arrest." People began to form a half circle in front of the white dome. A woman took the bullhorn. “The City Parks Department said we could keep the hospital up until tomorrow. Now they say we were not given permission for it to stay up. I’m pretty damned mad and I think we should protest their lies." I walked over to a blue helmeted sergeant. I pointed to the crowd milling around between the police and the gathering crescent of students at the dome. “Do you think any of these people will get hurt?” I asked. He looked at me distastefully past a large purple-veined nose. “I’m a medic," I said, punching him the nose with my white armband on which was scrawled a hand- painted red cross. “I want to know if you're going after them or just the people in front of the hospital." “Nobody gets hurt who stays out of our way,” he said. I walked over to the phalanx of protesters and stood in the front rank next to a Japanese woman who lived with the wildly bearded man standing on her left; her father had spent most of World War 2 in a desert internment camp.** The man with the bullhorn explained that our purpose was symbolic and cautioned us to not resist arrest. “I don’t think there will be any arrests," I said to the Japanese woman. “I think they’re going to unleash their dogs." storia Real Estate " Thinking of moving to the coast? Come in and check out the local market! 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