George Giusti, Oral History

 

Recorded: July 30, 2025 

Interviewed by: Liz Campion, May 4 Archivist

Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau

 

[Interviewer]: This is Liz Campion, May 4 Archivist, speaking on Wednesday, July 30, 2025, at the Kent State University Library as part of the Kent State University Shootings Oral History Project. [00:00:17] Could you please state your name for the recording?

 

[George Giusti]: My name is George Giusti.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you, George. I would like to begin with some brief information about your background so we can get to know you a little bit better. [00:00:30] Could you tell us where you were born, and where you grew up?

 

[George Giusti]: I was born in Akron, Ohio, on December 27, 1948, and I grew up, in my younger years in Cuyahoga Falls.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:00:49] When did you first decide to come to Kent State University?

 

[George Giusti]: I first decided to come to Kent State in 1966. I graduated from Cuyahoga Falls High School and had some various options. I got a couple partial scholarships. One was somewhere in West Virginia, but a lot of my friends were coming here, so I came here that year.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:21] And what initially brought you to Kent State?

 

[George Giusti]: It was less expensive because I didn’t have to pay for a dorm room, and also a lot of my friends were coming here.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:37] What was your major when you started as a student?

 

[George Giusti]: My major was fine arts.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:01:46] Where did you live as a student? Were you on-campus or off-campus?

 

[George Giusti]: Before or after? Well, before I went in the military I lived at home in Cuyahoga Falls. And when I went back to school after I got back from Vietnam, I lived in Cuyahoga Falls for a while, and other, I lived in Akron for most of the time because it was cheaper, and then I would drive to Kent every day. And then my very last quarter that I was here, I moved onto, across from the Sparkle Market. It’s not even there anymore, but, and I rented this attic there, and that was my final quarter. So, I was out here for one quarter, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:02:42] What were your first impressions when you arrived at Kent State?

 

[George Giusti]: I was kind of, you know, I didn’t know what to expect really, but at that time it was a different world here. And I saw a guy that I knew, and I don’t even remember what this means, but he told me I had to dink [00:03:15] or something. That I had to, or else I have to wash the steps with toothpaste or something. I said, “Nah man.” I don’t know if that was to get into their fraternity or something, but I didn’t want to do that. So, it was kind of nice. I mean it was a lot of people and, it was nice.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:03:39] What were your thoughts on the anti-war movement when you first arrived to Kent State?

 

[George Giusti]: When I first arrived at Kent State in 1966 and 1967, there wasn’t anything really on Kent State. But there was one thing that I did see, and that was the only thing I saw. There was a little demonstration, I’m thinking it might have been right outside this library, it was on the hill where they sled ride, over by there. And there was a little group of people with Haggar slacks and turtlenecks, and they were walking around. There was probably seven or eight of them, and I wasn’t thinking of Vietnam at the time. I mean I kind of knew there was something, but that was the first thing I’d seen. There wasn’t much discussion at that time. When I came back again, that’s a different story, so.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:04:34] What led you to enlist into the Vietnam War, or Vietnam? And what branch of military did you serve in?

 

[George Giusti]: Could you say that again?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:04:42] What led you to enlist into the military, and what branch of military did you serve?

 

[George Giusti]: First off, I didn’t enlist, I was drafted. And the way that happened was I did my first quarter here, and we have seven kids in my family, and we had other people in college, so I thought, well I’m going to take off a quarter and work, so my dad doesn’t have to pay for me. So, I took off and I got a job, and I ended up getting a good job at Goodrich, but I decided to come back. So, I came back for the third quarter. And, when I came back, I’d gotten a thing saying that I was 1-A, because of my birthday was December 27th and I was out of college at the time. I went to the draft board at a school or somebody, and I said, “Look, can I change this so I’m a student again?” And they go, “Nope. If you’re out and you become 1-A you’re 1-A.”

So, I knew I was going to be drafted. So, I did a lot of messing around on my third quarter there because I didn’t really care, you know. And it ended up hurting me because I had pretty good grades the first quarter, and then that one I was like playing euchre and golf and not hardly even going to class. And I ended up with a 1.0 average for that quarter. Then I got my draft notice while I was still in school. And my best friend, he also got one, but he was still in high school, and so when he got out of high school we went down to try and join everything else we could possibly join, besides the Army. And we couldn’t get into anything because we didn’t have the right daddy. And they kind of laughed at us, and this and that. Then we finally went to the Army, and he said, “Look, you can, we’ll make you a deal. You’re going to be drafted, and we’re going to sign you up here, but we’re going to give you the summer off. You don’t have to go in until October.” So, we both signed up for that, for the buddy system. And then we, with some other kids, it was like the end of the school year, one guy had a Studebaker Lark, and we all piled into it and followed the song, “Route 66,” we drove west until we hit 66 and then took it out to California. And I spent the summer of love out in San Francisco, so that was interesting. And then I came back in October, and that’s when I went in.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:07:45] What was your family’s reaction to you being drafted?

 

[George Giusti]: Again, they kind of—my mom had all of her brothers, there’s thirteen kids, and every one of her brothers served in World War II. They were Italian immigrants. My dad was an Italian immigrant, and he didn’t say, he had a good stone face for about everything, you know. And he didn’t really say much. They didn’t really say much. It was just something. My mom, she’d probably been through that with all her brothers, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:08:34) Can you share some of your training experience beginning in that October?

 

[George Giusti]: My training? Well, we went through basic training. Back then, I’d grown since I got into high school, and I was about six foot tall, I think. I think I’ve shrunk since then, but. But I weighed like 250, I was pretty big, and pretty, you know. And my buddy, too. And it was mostly physical stuff. I probably lost like forty, fifty pounds, and I felt good. But when I look back, what they basically do is what I call a Stockholm system. They kidnap all these people, and they make your head blank, and then they pour what they want into. But when we first left, we went up to, when we went to downtown Akron, we had to go up to Cleveland, we went to the bus station, and there was quite a few of us from Cuyahoga Falls, and the Cuyahoga Falls band was there at like 6:00 in the morning to play a little song for us. So, we go up there, and we’d shaved our heads, because we were stupid, you know. And everybody else didn’t know what we were, you know. So, everybody kind of avoided us. And there were a lot of black guys with afros, and guys with whatever.

 

And we had gotten a train. The first time I’d ever been on a train and took that through backyards down to Fort Knox. And when we got there, there was a lot of people. There was five, I think there was five buildings, they were each a company. And one thing that was interesting is when you first go in, you see all these guys from Cleveland, Detroit, these are big afros, and you got to line up, everybody gets a haircut, gets a uniform. And then all of a sudden, you all look the same. That’s a part of the Stockholm system, I think. So, we went down there, and they made us get a haircut, we didn’t have any hair, but they made us get one. Then we went into our building and lived in this, it was old, it was a World War, well, World War II wasn’t that old then, but it was a World War II barracks. Bunk beds lined up and toilets like just sitting next to each other so when you go to the toilet there’s like four or five people. But one guy had the crabs, so he had his own toilet, so we only had four toilets to use.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:11:35] So no privacy?

 

[George Giusti]: No, no privacy. And basically, they go through, you know, sucking everything out of your mind and your spirit. And then they start to build you back up the way they want you to be. And I did—I kind of did that. That was basic training. And that lasted until—they shortened it for Christmas. We got out at Christmas. And then, then I came back later for my—I was told before I went in there by a friend of mine, he said, “They’ll give you like these tests to see what they want you to be.” He said, “Anything that has to do with like fighting or guns or bullets or, you know, put the wrong answer in. That way you won’t get infantry.” So, I did that, and I ended up being sent to be a radio operator. That was like ridiculous, because they taught us Morse code, which we never ever used.

 

And then, when I was, I started being like everybody else. “I might go airborne,” you know. “I think I want to go,” you know. But the thing, at that time, that I could have gone to, because I did good on the Morse code, I could be a teletype operator. So, I put in for that. And that’s ridiculous. I mean, they didn’t have those over in Vietnam at all. They told me that I couldn’t go because I couldn’t get a clearance because some of my relatives in Italy were Communists. So, I couldn’t go to that, so I just stayed in radio school. And then, when radio school got over, I was one of the top people, whatever, so they were giving orders out to everybody— I’m going, “I hope I go to Germany or Korea or something,” you know. And they came up and asked me if I wanted to be a driver for the commanding officer. They had an opening, and they thought I looked like a good soldier, but I wasn’t really, but. I said, “Well I don’t know, can I see where I’m going to go first?” And they said, “No.” Said, “You either take it, or you don’t.” So I took it. So, I stayed there as a radio operator, and my buddy that I came in with, he went to radio repair school, and he stayed too. So, we stayed together all that time. And then I had my own room, and I drove this captain around and did what I had to do.

 

But I started not being a real good soldier because I was, I didn’t like this guy, he didn’t like me, so. [00:14:52] But, one thing weird, this is a side thing, is when I was taking him on the, it was on the Fort Knox property, and he was looking for something where they could go bivouac or go set up a camp or something, because there was a lot of land there, and when we’re driving back up there, there’s actually, at that time, were people living up there, like you see in Appalachia, you know, with no, yeah—there’s people living on the base. So anyhow, that was ’68, when Tet happened, and that’s when Johnson decided to send like a whole bunch of people. So, all of a sudden, and I know this guy didn’t like me but he—I got a letter saying that I had to go to Vietnam. And my buddy is laughing at me, you know, and a week later he got one too.

 

So that’s when I came home. And when I came home at that time, it was in maybe August, or I started July or something. We get thirty days off. But when I came home, there was riots in Akron. I came home on a bus and when I got to the bus stop, there’s like no cars on the street. And I called my dad, I said, “I’m up here at the bus station,” it was down there in downtown Akron. He goes, “Well I can’t come and get you because we’re not allowed on the street.” I said, “Well, I’m here.” My dad said, “Okay.” He’s like this short Italian, sitting low in this Cadillac, driving down the street to pick me up, so. So that’s what was going on when I got home. But all I was concerned with was partying and having a good time before I left, you know. And I wasn’t really thinking much, because like I said, they brainwash you, you know. And then they make you all look the same. So, if one of you gets killed, they just pop another one in there and it’s just like, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:17:11] Did you have any initial reactions when you saw those protests taking place, since you knew you were going to be heading to Vietnam?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, the protests, I didn’t see them because they were mostly on like Wooster Avenue and Arlington Street. And it was mostly Black. I don’t know if it was when Martin Luther King, or Bobby Kennedy or somebody, something happened, and it was—they had the streets, you know. That’s when America was great, I think, but I can’t remember. So, they had the streets all blocked off, down, I didn’t really see it, I didn’t even look at the news, I didn’t care. I had this thing in my head, you know. So, and I wasn’t, they make you not really—I wasn’t afraid or anything, you know. Like this is my next step, you know, this is what I got to do.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:18:11] When you got the notice that you were heading to Vietnam, was there an estimated time of period of how long you were going to be there? Did you have initial reactions to that notice?

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, it was a year. And one good thing was when I went, the time that I went, I would be getting out when I got back. You know a lot of the people, they did their year, then they still had like three or four months, and they’d station you somewhere. And a lot of those guys ended up in jail and stuff because they just couldn’t go. They didn’t really have anything for them to do. If you’re an infantry guy, what are you going to do, you know?

 

[Interviewer]: [00:18:59] Do you recall the travel experience to Vietnam? And did you have any thoughts about it?

 

[George Giusti]: I recall the somewhat of the preliminary before we left. My parents were going to Niagara Falls, and they left me home alone. And they asked me if I wanted to go and I’m thinking, Well, that’s pretty close to Canada, it actually is Canada. Nah, I stayed home, we just had a bunch of parties. And I think there was a footprint on the ceiling when they got back. So, we, yeah. When I finally, what I did, is because I’d been out there to San Francisco, my sister lived there. So, I left a week early, I was going to Seattle to leave from Fort Lewis. And I went to visit my sister in San Francisco for a week, and that was nice, because I’d been out there for, and so—they have you brainwashed really. And I just was hoping I got some gravy job, and I didn’t know what I was going to get. So, I went to San Francisco for a week and then I went to Vietnam.

 

And I landed in Cam Ranh Bay, which today it looks like Miami Beach, but back then it was like the main area where people would land. And it was like, when I was getting off the airplane, I forget if they had booze on the plane, I don’t remember, but everybody was having a good time. The flight was like twenty-some-hours or something, it was crazy. So, when we landed, you land out here and you got to walk in, and when I’m walking out, and the stewardess, we flew on Flying Tiger Airlines, that was a, I forget who owned that, somebody, some rich American. But, when we were getting off, and we were all like laughing and joking, and the stewardess is crying. And I go, Woah, that’s scary. I walked down, and it’s like boom, you get the heat. And the heat is real similar to what we’ve been having here the last two weeks, but it’s 24/7. You have no fans, no air conditioning, no radios. It’s just like that 24/7. So, it was like, you know. And again, being in a group, you kind of just follow everybody and do what you got to do. So then there’s steps, they don’t tell me where I’m going yet, I had to go here, and I actually did something interesting when I got there. They had this jungle training, they called it, some jungle training. And we did that and we had to—you take these rifles and we were walking through this jungle that they have set up there, this is to teach us how to, and we have blanks in our rifles. And we’re walking through there and we’re looking for, we don’t really know what we’re doing, and all of a sudden, people started shooting, and shooting, and shooting, and shooting, like Kent State. But that didn’t happen yet, but that’s what it sounded like, just all of a sudden shooting, shooting, shooting. And when we were done, the guy goes, “How many people do you think were shooting at you?” I don’t know, ten, twenty? He goes, “Look up in that tree, there’s one guy.” And I go, “Well that’s interesting.” And, actually, I got hit. The guy was behind me, if he would’ve had a bullet there, I would have been dead because the air from his—he shot me in the back of the head when he shot his rifle. So, it was interesting. And then you get separated from your group and then you go to another group and then you keep doing that.

 

So, I finally got up to An Khê, they told me I was going to be with the 1^st Cav, which I didn’t really know very much about, but I just figured, Whatever. So, I got up to there and they did some more training. One thing: one of the guys that was training me when I first got there, came up and talked to me, and he was a guy from Cuyahoga Falls I knew, so that was kind of good. But then we just kept going farther up north, and they started giving you these malaria pills and they cause you diarrhea. So, I get to An Khê, which is—Cam Ranh Bay seems like it’s safe, but there’s nowhere safe really, but it’s kind of safe. But then, An Khe, it’s like, well, this is different. It’s still a pretty—it’s a big base.

 

And the first night I was there, I had these pills, and I had diarrhea so I’m trying to find a place where they have a thing where you can go to the bathroom, and they started shooting out stuff. But I didn’t know what that was. I’m hearing these explosions. And my training was basically watching Combat! on TV, the show Combat! That’s how I learned what I was going to do when I got to war. So, I started running and I ran into this concertina wire, and I was getting cut. Then they stop and I realize that was outgoing. It was our artillery was shooting. So that was my first day there.

 

Eventually they sent me to my unit, which was 2^nd [battalion] to the 12^th Cavalry, and it was up by the DMZ, by where the Marines were. And it was way different. It’s a different kind of world up there. So when I got there, that’s when I got with my unit. That’s who I was with for the whole year. And while I was there, I actually, I was writing to my sister, and so was my buddy, but I didn’t know where he was. And I said, “Well, if you find out where he is, you let me know.” So, they sent me out on some missions, and I did mostly radio relays. They’d send me out with the infantry company, and I’d set up my radio, and stick my antennae up in the air so everyone knows I’m a radio operator, and then I’d come back. And when I came back, I got a letter from my sister, and she goes, “Well, it sounds like he's similar to where you’re at. He’s with the 2^nd or the 5^th.” And so I ask, and the 2^nd of the 5^th is on the same base as us. So, I go over to see him, and he’s got all this stuff on, he’s getting ready to go out to the jungle, which he was a radio repairman, he was never supposed to go out in the jungle, but they made him a sergeant when he got there. He got one—see, I was an E-2 when I went over there, and as soon as you get there they give you a stripe, so I was an E-3. Or no, I was E-1 and they made me an E-2. No, I was E-3, they made me an E-4. And they made him a sergeant. I said, he should’ve been a Spec-4, not a sergeant, but they ended up putting him in charge of—you know, one minute we’re at the Hungry Eye in Cuyahoga Falls and, a week later, you’re fighting in the jungle. So that’s where we were for a while. And that’s where I—and we were up there for a couple months. And then the whole 1^st Cavalry moved down south by Cambodia, it’s called the Parrot Beak. And that’s where I spent most of my time.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:27:42] What were your living quarters like? Or the environment around it?

 

[George Giusti]: Basically, there were different places. When I first got there, I don’t even think there were living [quarters] , so we kind of made, you could make a little place for yourself. But we didn’t know—we saw people making them, and then I think at that time we found one that was empty, and we just stayed in there. And it was interesting because right outside, when we were walking around, there were these plants growing there, so I didn’t know what they were and I checked them out, and they were tea. It must have been tea. They were tea plants. I picked a bunch of tea, and I put it in this plastic bag, our radio batteries came in a plastic bag, and I put it in my plastic baga nd, somehow, somebody turned me in because they thought that I had weed. They had this spy come to join our group, to hang with us, to see if I was selling dope, I don’t know what. But it was tea.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:29:02] You mention the heat and the jungle-like atmosphere, how was it adjusting to that overall culture shock from Cuyahoga Falls, Akron area, to Vietnam?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, because they empty your brain out, you kind of adjust. But it was, to me, it was like walking into National Geographic. When I was up north, up north is a little bit colder, and there’s mountains, and the people are different. They have people up there that are called Montagnards, and they’re the people that helped us. But I’m an observer, always, and I’m observing because I’m trying to learn. And they would have money, when you were there in Vietnam, you didn’t use your money, they’d give you military money.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:30:02] I’m going to pause this for a second.

 

[George Giusti]: All right.

 

Recording pauses and resumes

 

[Interviewer]: Okay. [00:30:07] So we were talking about—

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, so they have this, they call it MPC money. Well, the people that live around there, they’re poor, and they’re being attacked and loved, or whatever, by both sides. When we’re there, they like Americans, but when we leave, they’re going to be killed if they like, you know. So, they were, so all these people, they change the money every now and then, it’s called MPCs. So these people, there’s a lot of black market over there, or whatever. They sell stuff or whatever. A lot of these people got money that they can use, because it’s worth something. And then every now and then the government will say, everybody trade in your MPCs for new money. And they’re stuck with the old money. And it’s worth nothing. Unless they can, so they’re coming around our base with their hands like this, “Please, give me anything for this.” And I’m feeling sad for them. And this guy I was with, he took this woman’s money and started talking crap to her and she was, like I said, it was like out of the National Geographic, and she didn’t have a top on, and her breasts were hanging pretty low, and she squirted milk at him. And I found out later that’s a big—that’s about the worst thing they—. But I just felt really bad for them, and I was going to try and take them and get some money. But, I just—so that’s how we treated them. And they were our great allies. And we ended up leaving them after. When we left, when we got out of Vietnam, we just left them and most of them, a lot of them, were slaughtered, or whatever. So that was my introduction to the people. And they were different people.

 

And then we—I’d been up on this mountain, they sent me to this mountain for most of the time when I was up there. And they had an infantry unit up there, and then they dropped me in there. And the purpose of that was so I could set up a radio relay there. I spent about—probably almost a month out there. And they wouldn’t help us, these other guys. I mean, there are people. But I saw they made these hooches out of ammo boxes. So, we made ours, a little one. But when we first got there, they had this, there was like this big like cave where a lot of people were sleeping at night. So that’s where we slept at night at first. But I had to set up the radio, so we made this building out of ammo boxes and set the radio up, and we’d sleep in that cave. And then you’d be laying there, and rats would be crawling on you and it stunk and it was like, my one buddy, he came out one day and a rat was hanging on his shirt.

 

And they wouldn’t give us any food. So, I’m calling in, telling them we don’t have any food and they’re not giving us any food, the C-rations. So it was raining there, and we didn’t get any food for a couple days, and the only thing they gave us, they gave us a five-gallon can of coffee. And I didn’t know that you could die from drinking a five-gallon can of coffee. But we drank that because that’s pretty much all we had. And I think I did almost die, but it was like a weird high. So anyhow, they finally sent us [food] when they could. I told them, I said, “Look, these guys won’t give us any food.” So, the next thing I know, and they said, “Well, we’re sending you out a bunch of food.” Then they got yelled at, so they bring us food. All of a sudden, we’re all right, we got—we’re opening and eating. But then I found out later, they didn’t tell us when we were setting up, when I’m building my thing for my radio, I’m putting these, just like they did, ammo boxes. But they didn’t tell me you’re supposed to fill them with dirt, so they become your protection. Ours were just wood.

 

So that was my experience. But it was beautiful up there. It was, on one side was the DMZ, you could see that, and on the other side was the A Shau Valley. And that’s where they had, they built this place, it’s called a shitter. And you sit up there and it kind of looked like, I got there, I mean you could see forever. There was beauty, but it was hard. It was really a beautiful country, but it was hard to enjoy, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:35:17] What was the overall morale or demeanor as time went on? I mean, you’ve talked about the heat, the lack of food, I imagine that these factors probably added on to a wavering morale.

 

[George Giusti]: Well, it was. I have a group I go to, we’re all Vietnam veterans, and it was like, this weather that we’ve been having, that I can barely take for like ten minutes, and it really affects me mentally because it’s just like Vietnam. And we had that probably out of 365 days, we probably had 300 days of that, just heat. But then, the other times, we had like these typhoons and rain. And when I first got there, like I said, I didn’t know what I was doing, and they had a bunker you could get in, but it rained, and rained, and rained, you couldn’t even see the ground, and I couldn’t even see my hole I’m supposed to get into if we have to, you know. So, I’m laying out there all night, and in the morning, I woke up, and I look like a raisin. I was all shriveled up from it, my skin. They did have a medic that came out, and I was standing in line to see, I don’t know if maybe I’d be like this forever. By the time I got up to him, it had started to clear.

 

Another thing when we were up there, we had to get a shot. You know, now, military guys are saying, “We ain’t going to get COVID.” Well, you didn’t have any choice. When I first went in, they lined us up, and they had these guns, it looked like a Sears Automotive, you’d line up and you’d just go through and they’d shoot you in the arm with these guns, give you all your shots at once. And it's dripping and falling on the floor, they don’t wipe it off, they go to the next guy, that’s what they did. So, we get there, and they tell us we have to get this shot. We stand in line, get the shots. You see the guys take a couple steps and they’re puking and all this stuff. And they wouldn’t tell us what it was. I did find out later, it was plague, for the plague. Probably because of all those rats and stuff.

 

So anyhow, but morale was—they tell you when you get there not to be friends with anybody, because you’re going to lose friends. But you do, and you become closer than family with certain people. I had a guy, Al Molinaro, he was from New Jersey. And we did our time out together and we became great friends. And when I first met him, I was coming up to one of these different camps, being told where I was going, and somebody stole my camera. And I had pictures of San Francisco, my parents, and all this stuff. So, I’m pissed off, I’m looking, I couldn’t find it. When I get to my unit, out there in the boonies, or wherever, and I meet Al Molinaro. I look and he has my camera. I said, “Hey man, that’s my camera.” He goes, “I bought it from a guy at this other camp, so we’ll split it.” So that’s what we did. So yeah, he became my real— there’s a few guys that we were real close.

 

And one of them was, later on, Leonard Alvarado. He was Hispanic. And one thing I wanted to say about when I told you I was in basics and we had those five buildings, one whole building was Puerto Ricans. So, I mean, that’s a lot of percentage of Hispanics that were taken in. And they had their own thing, and they had their own sergeant. So, when I see Hispanics being persecuted here, I’m not happy about that. But anyhow, so I met Leonard Alvarado, and we did have a lot of Hispanics, and Blacks, and for some reason we had a lot of Italians in my unit. But Leonard Alvarado was from Bakersfield, California. And I’d been there, so we got to be friends. He was just young. He was tall for a Hispanic, and he—we just got to be friends. I kind of hung out with some of the Hispanics too. And he had just had a baby, and I’m not sure if he’d ever seen her, or if she was born after he got there. We’d talk and smoke weed and do whatever.

 

But to tell you about him, later on, the night that I told you that we got overrun, I was supposed to be getting out in a few days. And this one sergeant, he didn’t like me, and so he said he’s sending me out to this place out in the field. And I shouldn’t be going out there, I’m getting ready to go home. Alvarado, he came back a couple days before and he found me, because he always—he had weed and we just talked a lot. And so, he found me, but when I saw him, he was changed. You know Rambo, he looked like a pussy compared to this dude. I mean, he was carrying an M-60 and he was—he turned into this warrior, you know. And he told me that he loved it; he loved war. And he was good at it. But we spent the day together and I told him, “Yeah, I’m going home.” And he goes, “Well, I got like another six or seven months man, you get to go home before me.” So, he spent the day just doing this and that, and another thing I’m not going to say because I don’t—I’ll tell you when the thing isn’t on. But we did this or that and then we, he went out there.

 

And where he was at, they had gotten hit the day before, but he was out in the field. Then this sergeant’s sending me out there. And I’m supposed to be going home. He shouldn’t be sending me. So, I go out there, and it’s way far away, way high in the air, and the helicopter’s a great ride, feet hanging out and shit. And I’m praying, “God, if there’s anything you can do.” So, we land, and the chaplain’s there. He’s a Catholic priest. And I go, Father, “I got like three days left, they’re sending me out here.” “Ah, go back, and just tell them that I told you to go back.” So, like, “All right, my prayers are answered!” So, they sent me back, he puts me on guard duty, and actually, I probably would’ve been safer out there. We got overrun, and they came right over our bunker. But I was a radio operator also, so I heard that Alvarado was killed that night. He was out on patrol. And it broke my heart because I was going to get home, he was getting home before me.

 

But anyhow, to go back where I was before, I forget where I was, but when we moved down south, it was a whole different world. There was people, and they got these little motor bikes that they’re [revving], the whole family’s piled on. And during the day, it’s just like not much going on. And they even had them working on the bases. They’d come in and like do stuff—burn shit. I had to do that once and I actually poured the wrong stuff in. You’re supposed to put diesel fuel and I put oil, and it didn’t burn real good, so they never gave it to me again. So, they have them do different things there. And they had a little thing that was like an outhouse, it looked like an outhouse. And these three Vietnamese girls were in there, and they would do stuff: if you wanted a jacket made or if you wanted something sewn, or something like that. It was kind of an interesting war.

 

But anyhow, they had this place, it’s called LZ Grant, and that’s where—so I got sent out there. And we had to build that up. It had been a French base, but it hadn’t been an American base. So, we had to make it into an American base. And we had to build this thing called a TOC [editor’s note: acronym for Tactical Operations Center]. And that’s where the colonel would come, and it would be real safe, and that’s where he would—most colonels didn’t come out there, but he was going to, so we had to build this thing for him. And, me and my buddies, we’re putting all these sandbags, we got to fill them and then build them like in Moses, building this thing. So, we built this thing for him, and on the roof, we, a bunch of us, we’re putting, there was green and white sandbags, so we made a peace sign out of white on top. He didn’t like that, so we had to take that down.

 

I mean this place was bad, we were just there, working every day, and we had to dig a hole to sleep in at night, and we didn’t have anywhere to sleep. So, we’re working one day, and they got some, somehow they would—one thing about the 1^st Cav, we had a lot of helicopters. So, they could even bring warm food to us if they wanted to. Well, they brought out a bunch of those milk cartons, like a quart of chocolate milk, so we all went and got chocolate milk, and it was from Michigan, it said. So, we’re walking back, and this guy’s got a bulldozer and he's digging. And we’re about, from here, I’m about from here to the wall from it, and he hits a land mine. It’s this giant bulldozer and it totally flips it over like that. And I heard it killed him, but he didn’t know, you know. But I flew through the air like Superman. Holding on to my milk, me and buddy. And again, you get to the point where you try to help, but they got people helping him, and then you just go do your business. You never know what happened to people. So, we did that, but I didn’t understand at the time, I got traumatic brain injury from that. But it didn’t exist, they didn’t treat it, they didn’t give you a medal for it. You just went on and did your business. So, we’re digging this hole to sleep in. We dug it so we could both fit in and we find this skull. And Alex wanted to keep that. And I said, “Man, you shouldn’t keep that.” He did, I don’t know. So anyhow, we had that in there. And I don’t know about this part of the story, but anyhow we had some weed, but we didn’t have anything to smoke it in, and they gave us like a little Bible, and that wasn’t a good thing to do, but I rolled a joint with one of the pages from the—

 

[Interviewer]: [00:48:28] So you got creative?

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. But then I ended up getting really sick. They had this thing, they’d bring out water in this great big giant thing filled with water and then you’d fill up your canteens from it. And whoever would go to fill up the canteens, usually there’d be a cup, and you could drink all you wanted while you were there, so you didn’t mind going. So, I went to get the water, and I drank some of the water there. Actually, when I was there, I ran into a guy that was my locker partner at Saint V’s, when I went to Saint Vincent’s. Saw him for a minute, and he was there. So anyhow, apparently, I got sick from drinking out of that cup, I don’t know. But I just kept getting sicker and sicker. And then I told my buddy, I said, “I think I’m getting real sick.” And eventually I got real sick, so they called a chopper, and I got medevacked. But before that, when we were building our little hutch, little thing, we stole like a piece of metal for roofing. And this guy came over and started screaming at us and spitting on us. He was a sergeant, chewed gum all the time, and he’d been in Vietnam forever. And I was getting sick, and I hated this guy, I hated him. So, he took our shelter away from us. But anyhow, then I got medevacked from there, but we had—that got blown up, the guy on the bulldozer, and then also we had a Jeep that got blown up, and a guy got killed on that. And then I got medevacked, so I ended up going to Cu Chi, which is famous for its tunnels. And I’d actually been there before but, at this point in time, I was real sick. But when I was there before, when I was doing my radio relay from there, from somewhere around there, I’m on the radio at night and a Vietnamese guy gets on the radio and starts talking. He’s a Viet Cong. And me and him are having a conversation. And I don’t know, he’s probably just right under me. But I told him what I did to his mother last night and all this shit, and it was just like a weird situation. I mean, you’re a kid, we were kids, you know.

 

 But anyhow, I went to the hospital there, and when I finally got—I think they flew me somewhere else, but I think it was when I was there, and I was pretty much out of it, and they put me in the ice water, in the tub to get my fever down. And then I was just really sick, and so they had—and that was the first time I saw an American woman, nurse, and she came over and she’s comforting me and talking to me. But there’s all these other guys that are like, you know, their arm’s blown off, and bullet in their head, and all this stuff, and I’m sick. But I told her, I said, “You go talk to those guys.” She goes, “No, man, you’re really sick. You’re really sick.” So, she was real nice and talked to me.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:52:24] How long were you in the hospital for?

 

[George Giusti]: Actually, from there, I went to another hospital, and then they sent me to Cam Ranh Bay, and I was in there, totally for a month. It was during Tet. And they actually got rockets in Cam Ranh Bay that hit a building that—they had buildings not this big, but kind of, and they were a different wood, probably, I don’t know. And they had new recruits that just landed there, and they got hit by a rocket and killed. That’s supposed to be a safe area, but no, it wasn’t safe. But I was there for a month. And I was just ready to get out. But when I got there, luckily, I was there when I had this tooth that was coming in, way back, whatever they call them, I don’t know, wisdom teeth—

 

[Interviewer]: Wisdom teeth, yeah.

 

[George Giusti]: -and so I couldn’t shut my mouth, and I went to the dentist there, he was Italian, and we were talking, but he goes, “You already have a wisdom tooth, this is an extra one.” So, whatever, he pulled it, but I hadn’t been able to eat for like a couple days. He said, “Be careful about what you eat and wash your mouth out,” whatever. I’m starting to feel a little better. But they could never figure out what I had, really. So anyhow, when I got my tooth pulled, I went and got a hamburger or something, and I ate it, and I ended up getting something I never thought I’d get, that I’d read about in grade school, I got lock jaw. Yeah, so that kept me an extra week. But, while I was in there, they have Stars and Stripes, they had a newspaper that would come out, and I look at it, and the headline’s showing all my buddies at LZ Grant, they got overrun and all this—bunch of people got killed and wounded. And the colonel that we built that thing for, got killed. They, somehow they knew where he was and he’d gotten killed, and the guy that was his radio operator, which could’ve been me, but it was a guy that was one of my friends, he lost his legs in that thing. And I’m thinking, you know—so, I wanted to go, for some reason, I wanted to be back there. So that way, a couple days later I could fit an M&M in my mouth, I said, “I’m ready to go back.” So, I went back. Yeah, it was. They told me, they said, “We really can’t figure out what it is, but it’s something like mono.” That’s what it’s something like. And the guy told me, he said, “You’ll probably get this off and on for your whole life.” And I have been getting it, whatever it is.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:55:40] As you started approaching the end of your time in Vietnam, were you able to think about your next steps, your next plans when you got home? Or were you so, you were just so in the mindset where, I have to get home, period? If there was—

 

[George Giusti]: Well, at first—I actually found my—it’s called a short-timer’s calendar, and I found mine. And I did it for a while, then I didn’t even do it anymore. It was just like, all of sudden, you just, it wouldn’t matter if I was there forever, probably, because I, it just became my life there. And you do what you got to do to be accustomed to whatever you got to deal with. But when I was in the hospital, they had a little library, not like this one, but it was a little one. And I always loved libraries when I was a kid. So, I would go in there and read, but I was having trouble reading, but I could read, and I was reading about Ho Chi Minh. And then I realized that he was a George Washington, and we were the British stomping through the woods, and they were hiding behind trees and shooting us. And he just wanted—that’s their country. And we were supposed to give it back to them after World War II because they were our allies and they fought the Japanese. And Ho Chi Minh had lived in America, and actually, I think it’s in their constitution, is just like ours, or the bill of rights, or something, is exactly worded the same as ours. And he wanted us to be an ally, but we, you know, France went back in there and they weren’t supposed to. But that was like their Garden of Eden, and that’s where we stayed, a Michelin rubber plantation was there.

 

So, when they got thrown out of there, we should’ve just gave it back to the Vietnamese but we didn’t. And it probably would’ve been some type of democracy or something. But since we didn’t, and I don’t know why, they told us we were saving our country. And I realize, we’re not saving nothing, man, we’re just doing, and what we did to the people there is pitiful. We used agent orange, and at that time, I liked it because it would clear out an area so they couldn’t sneak up on you. But we also used it on their crops, and we weren’t supposed to. And the poor people there, man, they’re just trying to survive. When I was in the hospital, when I was laying there, and I see these people came up with like an ox cart or something and they’re all bloody and the kid’s bloody and they’re standing there waiting for a doctor, one of our doctors to help them, and I told the nurse, I said, “You can go take care of those people.” She goes, “Well, there’ll be a doctor, but we have to take care of you guys first.” It was like pitiful, man. And the people were nice. I mean, they were good people.

 

[Interviewer]: [00:59:17] Can you walk us through what it was like coming back to the United States after Vietnam?

 

[George Giusti]: When I first came back, I was looking forward to flying on a nice Flying Tiger or some kind of United or some kind of plane with a stewardess. But I ended up, when I, I was at LZ Grant, or I was at Quan Loi and they have a little airfield there. And we were still getting hit like every night, that was just a few nights after we got overrun. And one other thing about when we got overrun, the same sergeant that tried to send me out in the field, he tried to send me to sit at this radio, it’s an AM radio, which I’ve never seen it ever get a call the whole time I was in Vietnam, but he goes, “You gotta sit on that radio.” And it wasn’t safe to me, because there’s people with lights on in there. And I said, “I’m not doing this, no.” And I said, “And I’m getting ready to leave.” You know, he could’ve probably tried to—so, I walked down to where we were sleeping, we had bunk beds in this place, sandbags around, whatever, it was like a hooch, and all my buddies were in there. And this guy followed me there. He was a Black sergeant, he followed me in there. “You’re going to do it,” blah, blah, blah. And my one buddy, I won’t use his—Tony Brill, I can’t find him, so I don’t think anybody else could, he was Mexican, and the whole time he was there, he had a KA-BAR (? [01:01:06]) knife that he kept sharp that you could shave with. And this guy’s screaming at me, and Tony hopped down, pulled the knife on him. So, I said, “Look, man, I’m not going to—I don’t want nothing to happen. I’ll go back and sit on the radio, man. If you’re that stupid.”

 

So, I did. I went back and then this guy was like sweating. He didn’t say nothing to the people, but— So, I was up there about ten minutes, he goes, “Eh,” you know, they call me Gusty, “Hey Gusty, go ahead back.” All right, so that was interesting. But there was a lot of stuff like that happened. For most of the part of it was everybody had a rifle or gun or some kind of protection, so you didn’t see too many fist fights or anything like that. I know on Thanksgiving when I’d come back in and they had a meal for us, and everybody would use the MF word for every place, “MF this,” and, you know. And one guy goes, “How about we just don’t cuss and have a nice meal?” And this guy goes, “Fuck you, man.” And he got pissed off and left, and then when I left, later on, I heard this big boom, and they said that the dude came back here and threw a grenade in the lunchroom. But you never hear what happens. You never hear what happens, so, if people lived or died, I didn’t know.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:02:51] When you returned to the U.S., how were you received by people? Whether it was family, friends, general public?

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, when we landed in—we left, like I said, I was in this plane and it was a military Air Force plane, and all the seats were in the middle, you didn’t have a window or nothing. And then in the front, they had stacks of sick people that were being returned. It wasn’t too fun, you know. But I was happy to be leaving. But when I was leaving Quan Loi, because of the fighting that had been going on there, I thought it was just out where I was at, but they had gotten into—they even got into where our barracks was. And when I got back, thinking I had all the worst of everything, which I did, it was pretty bad, they had gotten all the way up there. The guy that got in, and he was from me to you, he didn’t have a gun, he was strapped with explosives. Or I’d be dead. I looked right at him, and I’m looking at him right now because, but I try to not to. But he was naked except for a loin cloth and had all this stuff strapped on him. And when I got back to my—there was a bunch of them that got inside, and they wanted to get—I don’t know what they were getting at, but. So, when I got back to my hooch, they’d got in fire fights with these guys coming in, and there was a concertina around the building, and in the wire of the concertina there was a hand with flies buzzing around it and then pieces of flesh all over the place because they blew themselves up. That was like maybe a week before I came home.

 

And so, we flew from there on that Air Force plane, and it was the first time I ever ate microwaved food. And then it was pretty terrible, because everything was microwaved. Anyhow, we stopped in Alaska, and that was kind of cool, because it was like midnight and it was still light out, it was pretty nice. And then we went to Seattle, and we were supposed to have a decompression or whatever you want to call it before you—I’m getting out of the service too. So we all had our—well, we had to do this one course, supposedly it was going to cure us of our—you know, there was no such thing as PTSD. But I was actually diagnosed when I was there with battle fatigue because I couldn’t sleep and there was like a whole bunch of us that were like that. But anyhow, when we got there, they said, “Well, you’re supposed to be here all day, but if you want to leave, well, just leave, man, you can go.” Everybody said, “Yeah, we want to leave.” And they give me my DD-214, and they spelled my name wrong. It’s G-I-U, they spelled it G-U-I. I said, “Hey man, you spelled my name wrong.” “Well, it’ll take another day, man.” I said, “Well, I’ll be gooey stewie,” or whatever. So, I left, and we went to the airport and we’re wearing our dress greens and people didn’t say anything, really, that I can remember. Except for we’re like, “All right,” you know. Well, I was going back down to San Francisco again. I didn’t tell anybody, I just, that’s what I wanted to do is go there first and then go home. So, I was going to San Francisco. We go, “Ah, let’s go get a beer.” We were going to get a drink or whatever. We go into the bar, and out of the whole group of us, there’s only one that they would serve. We were too young, they wouldn’t serve us. So, I didn’t get a drink there.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:07:02] Old enough to serve in the military but not to have a cocktail.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. So, I flew to San Francisco and everybody says that they were being spit on and stuff. I wasn’t spit on, but I wasn’t welcome. And as soon as I could, I went to my sister’s house. And I didn’t know she wasn’t there, she’s in Hawaii. And her husband was there, but they were kind of estranged. And he told me—well, the first night I was there, he told me I could sleep in his—you know, I was laying on the floor Fand he said, “No, you can sleep on my bed.” It’s a California king-size bed. And I haven’t been in a bed in a year. Said, “All right.” So, I didn’t really want to, but I did, and in the middle of the night he’s waking me up, shaking me, and I guess I was attacking him and I threw stuff. So, I went back out on the floor. And he told me to go down and get some clothes, so you don’t—but the only clothes I had with me were my Haggar slacks and my turtleneck. And I compare it to Rip Van Winkle that when I came, it’s like two years later. And the one thing he told me, he told me, he said, “When you,” he goes, “I’ve got you set up tonight with a girl.” He was leaving with his girlfriend going to Lake Tahoe or something. He goes, “I got you a date for tonight, man.” He said, “It’s a sure thing, sure thing, man. She’s going to pick you up and you’ll have a great time.”

 

And I’m really not feeling like I want to do anything. But I thought, well, whatever, that’d be cool. So, I went and got some clothes. And it was weird because I didn’t know what people were wearing. And I’m asking them, and they said, “Well, you can”—they were wearing these navy, like Levi’s, but I forget what they’re called. They’re bell bottoms. So, I bought some of those and some clothes, and said, “Where do you try them on?” “Oh, right here.” I didn’t know what size I wore. I’d only seen myself in a mirror once when I was in Vietnam. So, and I didn’t have any underwear on, but I look around, everybody’s—so I did it, bought some clothes. Later on, she came and picked me up, and she was nice enough. It was strange, I wasn’t ready for it, really. So, I got dressed and she goes, “Well, we’ll go out somewhere.” There’s a—the I think it’s a place called Arthur’s in San Francisco, and it was like the hip place. So, she takes me to Arthur’s. I really don’t want to go, I wanted to go, when I first went there, I liked Beatniks when I was little, and they have like coffee shops, and that’s what I wanted to do. But she goes, “No, we’ll go out and have a good time, dance, and music.”

 

So, she took me to this Arthur’s and I didn’t have a tie. And I’m like, Cool, so we can’t get in. She goes, “No, no, he’s going to get in. He’s going to,” blah, blah. And so, the next thing I know, she takes this ribbon off of her dress and ties—I looked like a clown, I got this thing on. “All right, you can go in.” And I just wasn’t comfortable at all. So I said, “Let’s go.” “Where?” I told her where I wanted to go: a coffee shop. So, we go there, and she’s—and we’re smoking weed and stuff on the way, and she tells me, “Did you kill babies, how many babies did you kill? What’d you do? What’d you do, how would you kill people over there? Tell me about it.” And I go, “No, I’m not going to tell you about what I did over there.” It was just like a weird—I said, “You know what, I think I want to go home.” Said, “All right, we’ll go home.” So, she takes me up there, and you know it’s a sure thing, and she says, “You want to go upstairs and ball?” Back then I knew what ball meant. And I said, “You just said that I was a baby—that I killed babies and people, and you want to have sex with me?” And I said, “Nah, nah, no thank you.” Which was stupid, but you know. So, I just went back in there.

 

And my brother-in-law was gone for like a week. He gave me the key to his Mercedes. And I hadn’t driven in two years. I started to try to go out there, but they drive crazy in San Francisco, so what I did the whole time I was there, after he left until he came back, I was taking care of his dog. But I’d get up in the morning and I’d walk. San Francisco’s the size of Akron. It was called Twin Peaks is where he lived. You can see all the—so, I would get up real early in the morning and I walked down to China Town, and I hung out there in the morning, and the people would be out washing their feet and sweeping their—and I felt at home. And I actually have some boxes I took out of their garbage that I put my stuff in, wooden boxes. So that’s pretty much what I did for the week.

 

And then, the bummer is, I talked to my mom, and she was expecting me home a week earlier. And when I got home, when I flew back to Ohio and my buddies came and picked me up, and I got home, and my mom had decorated our house with 1^st Cav pictures, and she’s like an artist and all this stuff. And it was all ruined from like rain and stuff. She was expecting me and then I went and did that for a week. And then my dad was in Italy at the time. And my mom had some depression. She was, you know. And I just felt really bad that I didn’t come right home. I couldn’t hardly even talk on the phone. It’s hard for me to talk on the phone.

 

And she had the room all set up for me. We had a nice house in Cuyahoga Falls, and she had a nice room set up for me. And I tried sleeping there and I couldn’t do it. So, I told her I got to—I went down to the basement and there was a coal cellar, which is a bunker. So, I set up a bed in there, I said, “I’m going to sleep here.” And there was actually rats in our house, too, at the time, sometimes they come from the Cuyahoga River. So, there I am. But my mom had been through it with her brothers, you know, and she just accepted it. And then my dad, he finally came back from Italy, and this is one thing that happened. We were eating breakfast, and we had a breakfast area where we ate, and it was me and my mom and dad. She’d made me food, and I look out the back window and there’s a dog taking a shit in the backyard. And I just said, “Look at that fucking dog back there, shitting in our yard.” And I go, “Whoops.” And my mom goes, “You want some more eggs?” She just acted like she didn’t hear it. She was great about it, you know. But I didn’t know how to act.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:15:37] When you returned, how had your thoughts on the anti-war movement changed when you returned from Vietnam?

 

[George Giusti]: My thoughts had changed a lot for the anti-war movement. But I still had friends over there. And I knew that they—like I said, I looked forward to—one of my, the best thing in my life I was looking forward to was my school here again, coming back to school.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:16:03] Which was my next question, what made you decide to go back to Kent State University? Was that always in the plans?

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, it became this—when it’s a dream where you’re living in this horrible, well it’s not really, you know—bugs, and rats, and snakes, and centipedes, and death. I just wanted something Leave-It-To Beaver-like lifestyle for a while. Not really, I wanted to—I didn’t know what things were going to be like. And it was a lot different than when I left.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:16:41] And what year did you come back to Kent State?

 

[George Giusti]: I got back from Vietnam in ‘69 but I went to Kent State in ‘70. The first quarter of 1970, which I was trying to think when quarters started, I don’t know.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:16:57] When you came back, how politically active were you? Or were you involved? Did you participate in any protests at that point?

 

[George Giusti]: No, I just got drunk and high trying to kill these memories. And all of a sudden, girls were like having sex with everybody. And so, I was trying to fit in, but I felt, really, like I needed instructions on how to act in this new country because it was totally different than when I left. And my mom—they’d bought a house for me that I could—a little house, and it was not far. And they said, “Well, you can buy this, then find your woman, get married, have kids.” But I wasn’t ready for that. But we lived in that house and we did—it became like the party place for the whole town. Acid and a lot of alcohol and a lot of marijuana became—that was my medication, really. And it was a good one, really. I mean, I guess in some ways. But in other ways it’s not because it’s, you know. So anyhow, that’s what I pretty much was doing until I decided to go back to start the—again, I can’t remember how the quarters were, but I wasn’t going in the fall quarter, I was going in the winter.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:18:29] When you returned back to Kent State, did you witness any protests? You mentioned at your first time at Kent State that there was little to no protests taking place or any that you had witnessed, when you came back after Vietnam, had you witnessed any more of those?

 

[George Giusti]: When it started getting to be spring, I saw these—and I like I said, when I left, it really wasn’t, the student body wasn’t real active. But I did—I knew there was a group called the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And so I went to that because I didn’t want my friends to die that were there. But I didn’t want them to think that I didn’t—that I was protesting them, you know. I didn’t like it, and I don’t really like—at that time, I didn’t like the guy in charge. He was an Air Force guy, and I just wasn’t ready for that. But they did, when, before May 4^th, there was some political stuff, and the art classes are usually on some weird part of the campus, or most of the time, a lot of them, I spent a lot of time downtown in my classes, and that was fun. But that was later. But when I was there, they had the SDS, and all this stuff, and I didn’t really understand what it was, or I didn’t know. And there was some stuff, I didn’t really pay attention. I had a nice girlfriend that I was going—when I get off school, I’d go hang with her, and we’d go to the park. I liked to walk and go in the woods and shit and I still do. But I did notice—and then they had a speech, like on Thursday or Friday before May 4^th, and I did see some of that. There was a guy from another campus, I don’t know his name. I can remember his voice. I don’t know if you remember?

 

[Chuck Ayers]: Jerry Rubin?

 

[George Giusti]: It could have, I don’t know. It was some guy, he had kind of a gravelly voice, and he was out on the—

 

[Chuck Ayers]: On the front campus.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. They had—what my memory is, before they protested the fact that Nixon was going into Cambodia, they planned the protest anyhow to protest some kind of, I don’t know, some people got beat up or shot or something at some kind of school somewhere, and they were setting up a protest for that. It might have even been Ohio State. But then, all of a sudden, when Cambodia happened, they said they were going to have this protest on this, and they were going to be there whenever, you know. And I heard some of that. But I knew that when we were in there, we already had been in Cambodia.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:21:50] Prior to the shootings, did you have a sense of how local Kent State community members perceived the Kent State students?

 

[George Giusti]: I kind of did, because I started going out to Kent when I was like fifteen. We’d go to a place called The Barn. They used to have a place that was dancing, they’d have dances. And at that time, we would go to the Venice Café, and they’re Italian guys that owned it, and you could get a beer, he didn’t check your ID. His name was Rich, and Johnny was a little short guy. So, I went out there a lot when I was in high school. Most of the people that went to that bar weren’t college kids, they were like the janitors and stuff, just people from town. I still, if I come out for stuff here, I stop here. And it’s still the Venice but it’s not the same without Johnny and Rich. But anyhow, I don’t think that most of the—well, they didn’t like the students anyhow, a lot of the people who live there. But they’re just town people acting like town people. But they worked there, they worked for, but they didn’t care for the students. But I’d say most of the people weren’t politically involved but there was a few. And it did get pretty—I wasn’t part of it, but there were people that were really and truly trying to stop the war. And I didn’t join any of that, and I didn’t plan to go to school that day, I called them and I asked them if they were having school, and they said yes. So, I went out there, and here I am. And that’s why I can’t believe you got that picture, because I wasn’t going to go out there.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:24:10] Can you walk us through your experiences from the lead up to the shootings and to that moment?

 

[George Giusti]: You know, again, this is amazing, this picture.

 

So, I wanted to go to my classes. And I had a class that I went to, I think, earlier, and when I got there, I’m thinking, this isn’t my dream I had when I was in Vietnam. I’ll come out here and there’s tanks and APCs and Jeeps and guns and people with rifles. And I’m just like confused, because I just came from, you know, I’m kind of confused about where do I fit in here. I’m still like that right now, I’m trying to figure that out. So, I didn’t know what to do. They told me I had to—the one class, it was a class on, it was supposed to be science for people that weren’t very scientific, but I was scientific but I didn’t know it, when I got blown up I couldn’t read, and then so. It was called Science without Formulas. And it was actually way harder without formulas. I actually just got a book with formulas in it. But the teacher was this guy with a bowtie and, apparently, he had an idea, he communicated to me that this was something serious. I’m just, anything that happens in the day I’m ready to deal with it, to me it wasn’t—.The army’s here, they followed me, you know. But so, he told us in the class, when we were leaving, he gave a speech, he goes, “You got to be careful, when you go out there, try not to get all crazy,” or whatever, I don’t remember his exact words except for the one thing he did. He goes, “There’s two sides to this. One side is Corn Flakes and the other side is Post Toasties, and they’re ready to kill each other because they think they’re each right. And they’re actually the same.” And I still use that because I thought that was really cool.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:26:56] Do you remember the professor’s name?

 

[George Giusti]: No, I don’t. But you could probably, I don’t—that was a strange class, but I was kind of struggling with my reading, I thought that would be easy, but it—well, it was because I just used the formulas. But after that, when I went out, it had changed, like two girls were gone. He said there was supposed to be—that guy that was there Friday, he was supposed to be back like at noon or something. I forget what time he said he was going to be at the [Victory]  Bell. And so, I can’t go to my other class, this might be after I went to that class. I can’t go to my class. That’s amazing, man, to me, seeing that, that’s like. So anyhow, yeah, I think I’ll stop for a second, because I just look at this—

 

[Interviewer]: Absolutely.

 

[Recording pauses and resumes]

 

[George Giusti]: So, apparently I walked with these two girls to try to go to my art class, and we were turned back, and I saw the burned up ROTC building, which they were junkie buildings anyhow. And they’re real similar to what I did my basic training in, but they’re way smaller. They’re like what would be on that as a separate building, the same type of building, the same time built.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:28:20] What was your reaction of seeing the ROTC building burnt down?

 

[George Giusti]: Probably happy. I didn’t like ROTC people. I liked some of them, but no, I didn’t really feel, I can’t think of, I was in a state of mind, and I think I told you what happens when you start seeing battle. But it didn’t happen yet, but my mind’s already becoming this, you become this receptacle or something like that, a stone face. And you become alert. And eventually, you also experience adrenaline later. And adrenaline, I didn’t realize at the time, is a high. And it’s an enjoyable high. And I did a lot of stuff when I came back to try and produce adrenaline, which is probably not a good idea. But to me, it’s just like, I’m whatever, I just got to figure out what side I’m on. I mean, I don’t, I kind of feel sorry for these guys [editor’s note: the National Guardsmen], but I don’t know. Again, I tried to get in [to the Guard] and I couldn’t get in. I didn’t know the right people. Didn’t have the right daddy.

 

So, when I found out I couldn’t go there, I think that’s when this started happening, it must have been around noon. And some people kind of gathered around there, but what am I supposed to do when I can’t go to my class? I got another two hours or whatever, if I have another class, I forget. I think I did, but there’s no way I was—and so when I went out there, they just started walking around. They didn’t say any—they probably said something, but I don’t remember them saying anything. They had no plan. In Vietnam, that’s kind of what, you know, you didn’t want to do that, you have to have some kind of plan. But I’m not seeing very good direction from the people in charge. They just start kind of marching around like they’re going to push us here and there, and they didn’t really look like they—when I finally did get into the, it probably shows here, I don’t know, I can’t, my fingers don’t work good. Look at that. {Editor’s note: the narrator is looking at photographs] Yeah, it kind of was like—it started—that’s where it was. I think that’s down by the [Victory] Bell. Is that where that’s at? Yeah. So, I went up there to see, because this guy said he was going to be there, this guy from Michigan or whatever he was. And he wasn’t there. And I thought, The piece of shit, he gets everybody here and then he don’t even show up. And then it just became like--when they started, they started like they were trying to move us, but they didn’t know where they were moving us to. They didn’t have any plan. And so, when they moved us, I think, I’m trying to put it in, do you have these in kind of order?

 

[Chuck Ayers]: Yeah.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. So, I think he’s probably saying stuff out there, I don’t know. I don’t remember what he said. And there I am again, like standing there like, oh, that’s at the bottom of that hill. That’s still by the, yeah. They might’ve said, “You got to get away, move,” or whatever. So, I did, and then that’s when I think I just kind of remembered being in this wave of people, and I was always on the edge, like kind of between. I’m kind of looking. I’m doing what I did in the military.

 

[Interviewer]: Observing. Yeah.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. And trying to figure out what they’re doing. They’re not telling us really anything to do. And I’d say eighty percent of these people aren’t political. But they didn’t have anywhere to go. And so, they pushed us, and I don’t remember, I think it was first when they pushed us, and that’s when that—the grenade went into Bowman Hall, or whatever that hall is there. And they weren’t making sense. What they were doing, they weren’t yelling, “Do this,” or, “Do that.” They just started walking around, like I said, like the Three Stooges. And then they go this way and that way.

 

Well then, they went over that hill, and I went over the hill too, so I was down there where the people got shot, and they were up on top of the hill. And they’re kind of just standing there. But I remember a fence being somewhere there. But, when they just started walking and walking, I’d seen a lady, which I know is not a hippie or political or anything, but she did pick up a rock and try and throw it. She got so pissed, she even said that. She was like, “Why are you here?” She started, and she threw this rock that didn’t hit anybody, it just went about ten feet, but that, just, you know. I’m still just not—I’m at this state of mind that I’d been since I’d come back. I still am kind of at that state of mind. And I can get to that state of mind real quick. But they just weren’t making any sense. And I saw what they were doing, so I went around and went back over the hill where there was still people down there. And they were still down there. But I wasn’t—I came back over the hill. And I think that’s when—I was down at the—there’s some other pictures you had in there where I was by this stop sign or something, I can’t remember the exact order. Yeah, so I was over here, but I’m not sure—well, this was before I went back over the hill, but, and that was when they first tear gassed. And I was trying to talk to them—they probably didn’t, I don’t know, but—

 

[Interviewer]: [01:35:19] When you say you were trying to talk to them, were you referring to the National Guard?

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. That’s when they first moved us, before they went over the hill, I think, I can’t remember the exact thing, but we were down there then, and so were they. So that had to been before they went over the hill. I don’t know. But anyhow, they tear gassed the dorm and people came running out, and then they started getting all excited. And they’re not soldiers, they’re weekend warriors trying to not have to go to Vietnam, which I would have done it, too. But they’re draft dodgers, that’s what they were. So anyhow, I went down to tell them that—because they’re getting all excited that these people are coming out, and I told them that—said the reason they’re coming out, man, is the tear gas went into the building, and so they’re running out. But they’re not going to attack you or nothing. And that other guy came over and said, “Click, click, what are you?” Like what am I going to, you know? And so I told him, “Hey man, I just come back from Vietnam, don’t lock and load that rifle, I’ll shove it up your ass.” Because I started getting mad, I guess.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:36:41] There was a belief that the guns were blank, did you—

 

[George Giusti]: That’s what I thought. That’s what I thought.

 

[Interviewer]: Okay, yeah. [01:36:50] And I imagine for you specifically, serving in Vietnam, it was probably a very jarring experience to see these Guardsmen tear gas people in very close quarters. And then, on your college campus—

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: —probably one of the least expected places, especially coming from a jungle—

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: —where you’re looking over your shoulder to a college campus, where the belief is that there is a safety and security component to it.

 

[George Giusti]: I mean, that just, I never expected that. I mean, it was, I don’t see how anybody ever, you know, Kent State, because Kent State wasn’t really a radical school. There were radicals that were there, but that’s their right. I wasn’t a radical. Not physically, but I knew what was going on. And I knew what was happening. That Governor Rhodes was wanting to run for Senate, and he calls out the National Guard because he wanted to pull a Trump. But that was— or Trump pulls a Rhodes, I guess. But he was trying to make himself look like a badass. You know, “We’re going to get control of this.” And it just got out of control. And I blame it on him. And I hate the person. And no matter where I was in my life, I’d always come back to vote against him if he was running for anything. And it pissed me off that they named a building after him in Akron. And he lost the Senate seat, I think, I don’t remember. But I knew what was going on and I knew what he was doing. And he was using us as pawns, which is, that’s what politicians do, but not to this extent.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:38:49] When you were walking around the area where the protesters and the Guardsmen were, did you get a sense that there were more observers than protesters? Or protesters versus observers, or kind of mixed?

 

[George Giusti]: It was definitely—no, there was definitely way more observers.

 

[Interviewer]: Observers.

 

[George Giusti]: Because I think some of the classes were closed already. I don’t know where they all were coming from. And I’ve talked to other people that were there, that were—they were just trying to go to their classes, too. And I didn’t, from the time I’d spent on there, I didn’t see the majority of the people being radical. And I know that some of them were, the SDS guys, but I didn’t know what that meant. I’m still trying to—my Rip Van Winkle thing is still—I’m trying to catch up. And that’s another thing, as far as the catch-up thing, when I came back from Vietnam, I felt like I left my soul over there. And I’m waiting for it to join me. I’m still waiting, and it’s still a little bit behind me.

 

But I think that most of the people were like me. I wasn’t—I’m not there to—I don’t know what they’re there for. What are you trying to do? What’s your purpose? Are you going to arrest people? Are you going to give a speech? But they just started walking around like pushing people, like you could probably do it like—I don’t know, like on Seinfeld when that guy is trying to push that Pac-Man thing across the street, he’s just going this and that way. It didn’t make any sense. And I wasn’t really—still, I didn’t know, when I heard the shots, and again, that’s, let’s see, this one there, heading up there. [Editor’s note: narrator is looking through the photographs]. Yeah, your car is famous, man. I knew his car because when I came back, I parked in this one parking lot and it was all muddy, and I don’t know if you even remember, but he did things for the paper. I didn’t know him at the time, but he did a great one of his VW Bug sinking into the quicksand or something.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:41:36] And for the sake of the recording, we are referring to Chuck Ayers’ Volkswagen vehicle that is heavily photographed throughout the events. So, when the guns fired, where were you located and what was your gut reaction?

 

[George Giusti]: This is where I was. I was over here, down here. But there weren’t—the soldiers weren’t up there yet. This is, I was down here, down here. [Editor’s note: narrator is referring to locations on a map of the campus]

 

[Chuck Ayers]: So, the Commons side of that.

 

[George Giusti]: It was close, I think, is that the dorm or whatever, the building?

 

[Chuck Ayers]: Yeah, Johnson Hall.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, Johnson Hall. I was just down there. There was a lot of the people down there. They weren’t on the hill, they were down there. And when they started coming up, man, there was way more of them than I thought, jeez. And I don’t know, it looks like I’m giving a Heil Hitler. Or giving I don’t know what. But what I did is I decided, in my mind, you see everybody going this way, and then this guy trying to grab this person, and I said, I’m done with this little ballet that they’re doing, and it’s not making any sense. There’s no, really, any end in sight.

 

So, I just started walking up the hill and then when I got about maybe ten or fifteen feet, I just stopped and I just said, “Hey, I’m not walking, man. I’m not leaving here. You cook me, or you’re not—” So, I just stopped. And when I stopped, they kept coming. And when the guy got to me, and I had heard the bullets and so, again, one of the guys in my group said, “Well, aren’t you supposed to like jump and hide when you hear bullets?” And I said, “No, we’re supposed to go. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”

 

And I’m not sure, again, I’m caught between these two cultures, but they’re really the same cultures, like Post Toasties and, yeah, but they finally got them to fight each other. And the dude put the rifle butt, they teach you this in basic training, you put the—and he had a bayonet, he put the bayonet out, I think. It might have just been the rifle. And then he hit me in the face like that with the rifle. He knocked me down. But I told him, I said, “I’m not moving, man.” So, I’m lucky I didn’t get shot, too. Because I got a briefcase probably. So anyhow, when they knocked me down, and then he told them to keep moving, and that’s when I got up and I talked to him, and I said, “Why don’t you try and talk to them?” And he looked at me with a smirk, and he just said, “They got what they deserved.” And that’s the thing I didn’t remember for a real long time. And I wish I would have. But that’s exactly what happened. And I didn’t know. Excuse me. Get a drink of water here for a second. Take a second break here, I guess.

 

[Recording pauses]

 

[George Giusti]: All right.

 

[Interviewer]: We’re good.

 

[George Giusti]: I forget where we were, but yeah, I was down at that part and, as you notice, I have a briefcase and I didn’t know until later that I was in a lot of photographs known as the “Man-with-a-briefcase.” My dad had given me that. My dad was an immigrant from Italy, but he went through school, got a degree and worked as an accountant for Goodyear, and he always had that briefcase. So, he gave me his briefcase. His name was Ennio George Giusti, but he went by E. George, so I just cut the E off, and I had the briefcase.

 

So, when they started—I heard the shots, and again, I, being just back from Vietnam, and spent a year in a war, when you hear shots, you try and respond. Again, because I’m caught between these two cultures and I’m not really sure which side I’m on. But when I hear bullets, I try to see if someone needs help. So I—when they came over the hill, which I see there’s quite a few of them, I didn’t realize there was that many, I start walking towards them. I look at myself like an idiot, because I was walking towards them. And I walked like about halfway up the hill and I stopped, and I just stood there. And I said, “I’m not moving, man.” I told them, I had my Vietnam field jacket on. I said, “I’m not moving.” I said I’d just come back from Vietnam. The guy put his bayonet or rifle in my chest and then hit me in the face and knocked me down. Then whoever was behind him told him to keep moving. And I got up and it was General Canterbury, is that right? And I said, “Why don’t you try and talk to them? You’re just moving around.” And he said, “They got what they deserve.”

 

So, they kept moving down the hill, and I was the only one on the other side of them. And I walked to the top of the hill, and I looked down and I’d seen a battle scene with more wounded and dead Americans than I ever saw over in Vietnam at one time. I saw a lot of Viet Cong being piled in dump trucks, dead Viet Cong, but never like Americans like this. So, I did, again, I just did what I was taught to do and that’s to go see if I could help. And I pretty much went around to every person that was laying around in my—as I walked down the hill, and there’s a lot of crying and then screaming, and I kind of blanked a lot of that out and I knew what dead people looked like. I’d walk up to people and see people trying to help them, and they were—I’d say, “They’re dead.” And the one that was, the main one that I went to, it was, I think it was a girl, and she was shot in the neck, I think. And they were trying to give her CPR and pumping on her and stuff. And I said, “Man, she’s dead, man. She’s dead.”

 

I just looked around, and I started walking towards the—trying to get off the campus. I started walking towards the street, because they were all being taken care of and there were sirens and I knew there was somebody who’d hopefully help them, but there was nothing I could do. And I just walked towards, I don’t know what this street is, Route 5, to get off the campus. Well, they had Guards at the exit there, in the entrance. But there were buses sitting out there. And so, I just walked towards the exit, and they stood there looking, but they never looked at me, and I just walked out. They didn’t try and stop me. And I got on one of the buses and there was nobody else on it, and he took me—I got off downtown and I called my girlfriend, and she came and picked me up.

 

So, when I came home that night, or that day, everyone was pretty upset. They were happy I was all right. But, again, my mom, she just is like this stone-faced person, you know, she could get pissed but, you know. But then my dad came home and my brothers. I asked them too, because I wanted help to remember what all happened. My dad, he loved America. He left Italy and came here to start a new life and he would only drive American cars and he spoke five, six different languages, and we all just spoke English, and he loved America. And he, when we were sitting down to supper, he just got angry, and he said, and he knew that they put a gun on me and hit me in the face, and he goes, “This is why I left Italy. This is why I left Italy.” And that was all he had to say.

 

So I went, later, I went to see my girlfriend, and we were walking down the street to get a—I think they had like a curfew everywhere, they thought there was going to be this giant whatever. We were walking down the street to get something, ice cream or something, and this cop car pulled in and there’s me and these two girls and he started, “Come here man, what are you doing?” I still look like, you know, what I look like. And I’m going, You know what, it’s enough of this shit. So, I went up and I was ready to get in the shit, and then I’d seen there was another officer in the car, he was this Italian dude that I knew my whole life, and I said, “Man, tell this dude to shut the fuck up. I had a bad day, man. I’m not doing nothing. We’re going to get ice cream.” So that was. I guess I looked like I should’ve been protesting, but I was—yeah. And then, after that, they closed the campus, I think.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:52:31] Yeah, I was going to ask, do you recall, after they closed [the campus], about your classes. How did they handle those? Were you submitting homework via US mail? Were you meeting professors, or what was kind of the option for you for some of your classes?

 

[George Giusti]: One thing that was kind of nice, is the art classes I was taking, I was taking a class from Ira Matteson, who’s a great artist and a great teacher, and a great person and he had us come out to his house. And I don’t remember where he lived, but it was really cool. I did some of my best drawings out there. And he was really a calming—I don’t know, do you know Ira Matteson?

 

[Chuck Ayers]: I didn’t know him.

 

[George Giusti]: Well, he actually has a—downtown Akron, in front of the federal building, I think, on High Street, there’s these like cutout people.

 

[Chuck Ayers]: That’s his? Okay.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, he did that. I think that’s what he did. He just was a—so I’d go out there for class, and then I had one other guy, but I can’t think of his name, and he was kind of an asshole as a teacher but then I got to be friends with him when we went to his house. It was a whole different thing. And then, some of the classes, I don’t know how I did them, the ones that weren’t art classes. Ans so, it was kind of nice, really, it was, to me. It was like—and Ira was incredible, and his wife, too. They were great people.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:54:23] Did Ira or any of your other professors acknowledge what happened, or kind of just focus on the schooling itself? Do you recall?

 

[George Giusti]: They acknowledged it in different ways. And the other guy, that I can’t think of his name, his girlfriend was Mary Maxwell, and she was a ceramic person and I kind of knew her.  But I can’t think of his name. But anyhow, she was—they acknowledged it, and we discussed it there somewhat. But for the most part, I can’t even remember how many people—all I remember is me. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only person. But that’s the way school should be, they bring you little sandwiches and some iced tea when you’re sitting out drawing out in the backyard.

 

[Interviewer]: Sounds nice.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:55:21] Do you think that your experience as a veteran affected how you interpreted the events from May 4?

 

[George Giusti]: Yes. It was stupid. It was stupid. And we keep doing it over and over. It shouldn’t have happened. And the people that were killed and wounded were—a horrible thing. But so was the fact that pretty much everyone that was there went through a horrible thing. And probably many, many of them, not even knowingly, because I have PTSD from Vietnam, and probably from that too. But a lot of the people probably have PTSD from even being there and going through that but they’ve never been treated. And I’m sure there’s quite a few that have—PTSD affects your life. And it affected mine. I had to change my life because I planned to be a—I was pretty good at school, and I kind of wanted to be a teacher. But, I wanted to be an artist, but then I, you know, I wanted to be whatever I wanted to be that I could be. But then after I came back, that was narrowed down. Art was a great thing to do. I had some pretty bad art teachers, that’s when I came back. The ones that I dealt with at the time, like I said, Ira and the other guy and Mary Maxwell, she was great. I was kind of, like I said—I lived the house that my mom bought for me. I had a bedroom there, but down the basement, those old houses all had coal cellars. And I was attracted to coal cellars because it was a bunker. And we would go down there, that’s where we’d go smoke weed. We didn’t have to, but I just felt comfortable.

 

But, yeah, it was—what happened after that was I had a girlfriend and she was pregnant, but she was pregnant when I met her. I liked her a lot, but I had to get out of there, and so I left and went out to California again. And ended up staying out there for years. And people that knew that I was at Kent State, every once in a while they’d hook me up with somebody else that was out there, because to me, it was as far as I could go to get away from everything. And I couldn’t wait to get to the ocean, on the Pacific Ocean, and turn my back and just have the whole world behind me, man. That’s what I wanted to do. And that’s what I did. So, I went out there, but I had trouble. It was hard for me to get a job, and people didn’t want to hire Vietnam veterans. And I didn’t get involved in anything political.

 

[Interviewer]: [01:58:58] I’m glad you mention moving to California because one of things I wanted to ask was, coming back from Vietnam, you weren’t able to escape the conversations or the reference or political movements regarding Vietnam. Kent State was really put on the map, unfortunately, because of the Kent State Shootings. Fortunately, over the years, there’s been very, lots of positive things, academics and beyond. But one of things you mentioned is, you get to California and they’re trying to find another Kent State person to talk. But one of the things I’m interested in is, once people found out you went to Kent State, is that the first thing that they brought up to you?

 

[George Giusti]: Not really. The people that knew I was there were the people that I was dealing with. I got another girlfriend when I went out there and some of her friends. And then one of them knew somebody that was at Kent State and I didn’t really want to see them. I didn’t want to discuss it.

 

[Interviewer]: Yeah. [02:00:19] How did witnessing the shootings affect your views on the war or the government as a whole?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, it made me realize that I was made a puppet in this war. And it made me look back on what really was going on over in Vietnam. And how these poor people over there, we raped their country, we raped their women. Maybe not physically raping, but you’d go into these villages and people would come out and the girls would sell their bodies not because they’re prostitutes, because they’re hungry. And I wanted it to be over with. But I didn’t want my friends to think that I’m protesting while they’re over there, that I’m protesting them. So, it angered me, as far as my country. I don’t know if I’ve ever forgiven my country yet for what they did to all these young people. We were kids, we were kids. We played war in the backyard because that was the thing to do after World War II.

 

So, I went for a long time without even watching any TV or reading any newspapers or anything. I didn’t want to—I just wanted to do what I, you know, what I do. I became an alcoholic and did any kind of drug I could get my hands on. But that’s kind of a, I had a sandwich with Vietnam and Kent State. Both of those were institutions I respected, and I believed, and I thought I could count on. And then I found out that they were fragile and they were not what they seemed to be. So, I didn’t really have any plans at the time, I didn’t know when I was going to go back to Kent State, but I did, sometimes for a little bit and then back, then I’d go back out. I found out I was doing this, I had this thing, a part of my life, where every three months: something different, I’d have to leave and do something different. And I did that with my girlfriend, I did that with my jobs. And I’d go out to California, then I’d tell my girlfriend at three months. I didn’t know I was doing it, consciously. But three months and I’d be gone, you know.

 

[Interviewer]: [02:03:27] Why do you think you kept coming back to Kent State? Was it a comfort because you had been there before?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, it was, I wanted to be an artist, and I did my own art. But I loved Kent State, I still do. I don’t hold it against them. I love my country, too, I just don’t like what’s going on. It’s not the country that’s bad, it’s the people that are doing it. But at Kent State, I know the people were mostly not even that concerned, but when you come and punch me in the face about it, you know, I’m going to react. So I wanted to—I actually, when I got back into art. I had a good friend, Karl Konigsberger [02:04:23], we were in different classes together and we got to be friends. And we were out of school and they were looking for something to put up there for the remembrance. They had a contest you could make some kind of, I forget what you call, what do they call that? They put—

 

[Chuck Ayers]: Memorials?

 

[George Giusti]: Memorial, yeah. So, me and Karl, he was there too. So, we made a memorial and sent it in, but it was rejected, like almost everything I ever put in for art or anything, always got rejected. It got rejected. But I think I could still get my hands on it, I’d like to see what it looked like. We spent a lot of time on it and doing that was kind of—had a little bit of curing some type of thing. It was making peace with— The thing they did do is—probably most people don’t even know it’s there, but they wouldn’t anyhow, whatever it was. And it’s fine, I guess, but I like mine.

 

[Interviewer]: [02:05:51] Over the years, have you been able to, or have you wanted to attend any of the annual commemorations?

 

[George Giusti]: No. Not until—

 

[Interviewer]: Not until Chuck put you up to it?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, what happened with that is like, I guess that would maybe be the next step, when I—I was still obsessed with it, and I’d get online and I’d look up all kinds of stuff. I have a lot of stuff too, on Kent State, a lot of books and stuff. I haven’t read them, but I got a lot of them. And so, I was looking at the photographs, and again, I was thinking in my mind that I don’t know if this was real or not anymore because, over time, your memories change, you know. And I look in there and I see that picture of me with those National Guardsmen, and I see Chuck’s name on the bottom. And I knew Chuck from, I didn’t know him personally, but I knew of him. And I liked his political stuff. And then I thought, I’d like to get in touch with him sometime. Well, I forget what I was doing, but I copied the picture and I’d seen he was doing a workshop for cartoons or something at the Akron art building, whatever it’s called there. And I thought, I’m going to go stop in there and see if I can talk to him for a minute. But I’m looking at that picture and I think, he’ll probably think I’m lying because that’s not me, I don’t look like that. So, people were in line, and then he’s talking to them, and he’s about cartoons and stuff. So, I walk up and I show him this picture and he just stopped, and I thought, Uh oh, he’s going to chase me away or something. He goes, “That’s you.” And that was it.

 

[Interviewer]: Man with the briefcase.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah, yeah.

 

[Interviewer]: [02:07:52] Well, here we are fifty-five years later. You’ve touched on it throughout our conversation today, but is there anything you want to share about how these experiences, whether it was in Vietnam or the events surrounding May 4, how they’ve impacted you over the years?

 

[George Giusti]: Well, they definitely impacted me. And it’s hard to tell, they all were just part of the same thing that, the impact on my life, they weren’t separate really because they’re both, they call them, I forget what you—you have to have something to prove that you’re—like when I tried to get disability for PTSD, you had to show that you had some kind of a, I forget what they call it, but something that caused that. This actual action caused that. And that’s what I have. My pictures from Vietnam, I don’t—me and my buddy, we shared them, but he kept the camera, and I never got to really see a lot of the pictures from Vietnam. And then he ended up getting murdered out there in New Jersey, which I didn’t know. But we kept in contact for a while until we had families. And he said, “We’ll get together later once our families are grown.” And I found out he’d been murdered.

 

But it definitely affected my life because I can see, probably, I see more so because I see other Vietnam veterans have it. We have a counselor, she’s a good counselors—the counselors, our PTSD group. And I see a lot of counselors, but I also see that I have, and in our family, there’s seven of us, seven kids. And I see that there’s a difference between me before I went to Vietnam and me after Vietnam. And I’ve done all right in my life, but I’ve done it despite what happened to me. And I did it a different way. I’m pretty comfortable, I’ve got properties and rental properties, but I wanted to be a teacher. And I did teach at Head Start for a while, because I tried to join the Peace Corps after I graduated. I graduated in 1974, in the summer. I was supposed to graduate at the beginning of the summer, but I had to go the summer. And I had a lot of credits, but they weren’t the right ones, so it was like, let’s make a deal, you do this and that. And I’d been in the Blossom Art program for two years, so they let me do that, and then I had to write a paper, that was what I had to do to graduate. And they crossed off whatever I needed, I think they wanted me out of there. So, I finally moved out to Kent, and that’s when I lived over across from the Sparkle Market, in the attic, with Steve Fishman, who was also there at the time. And the day I graduated, I wanted to graduate, I wanted to put my thing on and hat, and my parents, family, was going to come and watch. And I had a great time up there during the summer, it was great living in Kent in the summer. And the Blossom Art program, it was wonderful.

 

So, the day of my graduation, everybody’s out partying, I said, “I’m going to bed, make sure I make it to the—.” So, I get up the next morning and it’s late, I missed it. I woke up late. So, I’m running up there, actually running, because I used to actually run, and trying to get there. I’ve got my stuff with me. And when I get close to the hall, wherever it was, I forget which hall it was where we graduated, I hear doors bang open, a bunch of people run out, a bunch of people are running after them, and there’s yelling and screaming. And I’m—What’s going on? And I found out later, it was this—whoever spoke, I’m not sure if this is exactly what happened, but whoever spoke, or somebody was in, somehow, cahoots with the Shah of Iran, and these were Iran protesters at that thing. So, I’m all by myself, and I’m witnessing that, too, at my graduation. And I go in, and there’s no way I can get up there, so I just watch it. They didn’t call your names, I don’t think. My sister goes, “Yeah, I thought I saw you up there.” And I said, “No, that wasn’t me.” That was my graduation, 1974.

 

[Interviewer]: [02:13:34] It’s apparent that an average person is not going to witness a tragedy in their life, hopefully, and for you to come back from Vietnam and witness everything you did there, and to then come back to Kent State, witness the Kent State Shootings, and then to see kind of just this tumble effect of it’s incredible to see, here we are fifty-five years later talking about it, the impact, and unfortunately I don’t think that there was enough support, emotionally, mentally, etcetera. I think, hopefully, moving forward, a lot more people can come forward and express their need for help. And I appreciate you talking about some of the issues you’ve had over the years. I think it’s very important to discuss that. Is there anything else that I haven’t covered today that you’d like to address?

 

[George Giusti]: Not that I can think of right now. But I just hope that—I’m sure this affected a lot of people that don’t even know that that’s why they’re acting weird in their life. But they’re going to have PTSD from—not everybody gets it, but a lot of people do. And if you’re having, or if you had troubles like that in your life—it changed my life, I couldn’t be a normal person, you know. I tried, and I have a nice family, and I survived. My wife just passed away, Jeannie, and she was—I didn’t realize what a big part of me she was. And it was a tough marriage, we survived forty-six years of marriage.

 

[Interviewer]: Wow, that’s incredible.

 

[George Giusti]: Yeah. And she became kind of troubled and had issues in her life, later on. But my family would say, “You should get a divorce,” or whatever. After she passed away, I think, you know, she put up with me. And I’m sure it affects a lot of people’s lives, not just your—it’s always in your mind. Just like when I tried to put Vietnam out of my mind, and I’d tell you I see this guy that was strapped with explosives, and every day when I try to sleep I see him. So I drank, or I did smoke weed, or did whatever. And then, later on, I got some help so I can finally go to sleep without, I didn’t have to make myself go to sleep. When I talk about him, I see him, so I see him there now. And I’m sure people see that too. And it’s going to happen. And if it does, you need to relate it to what is actually causing it. And if you were at Kent State, it was a good—it’s probably the reason. It’s going to affect your whole life, you know, what you do. That’s all I can say. I still love Kent State. I graduated from here, I had a lot of fun later in my life here. Especially when we had the classes downtown, my art classes, they were fun. So, that’s my story.

 

[Interviewer]: [02:17:23] Well, George, I want to thank you so much for sharing an incredible story with us. Such a unique perspective, being a Vietnam veteran and then coming back to Kent State. Obviously, you have a close connection to the university. We appreciate your continued support. And again, I want to thank you for participating in the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project.

 

[George Giusti]: Well, thank you, too, for having me here. And, also, thanks to Chuck [Ayers] for helping to guide me. It’s been helpful. By him bringing me back up here and him—he’s been telling me to do this for years, and I’m happy to be here.

 

[Interviewer]: Thank you.

 

 

[End of recording]

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