Feeling curious, he stood off to the side near Johnson Hall and watched the rally for a while. About 20 minutes later, he says it appeared as if someone gave an order for the guardsmen to disperse the students that were protesting. Suddenly the armed guardsmen began to advance up the hill, and someone shot tear gas into the crowd. Because Cleary remained off to the side, he wasn't involved in the chaos and says the guardsmen ignored him and the other onlookers.

He took some photos and then decided to walk up the hill toward his class. It was at this point that the troops also headed back up the hill. Cleary waited for them to reach the top so he could take one last picture of the action. "Then, without any warning, they fired into the crowd, and I was directly in the line of fire," he says. "I got shot in the chest, and then I guess I lost consciousness. That's all I remember."

Cleary says the bullet hit him in the lung, and the doctors who treated him told him he was lucky that he wasn't killed.

After a summer spent recovering from his gunshot wound, Cleary returned to Kent State and concentrated on completing his degree, which he received in 1974.

Now, 25 years later, he lives with his wife, Kathy, and children, Andrew, 14 and Elizabeth, 10, in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Kathy is also a Kent State graduate, although she wasn't yet enrolled at the university the day the shootings took place.

Cleary, who now works as a project architect for the MacLachlin, Cornelius and Filoni architecture firm in Pittsburgh, says he made a decision early on to put the events of May 4 behind him.

"I decided that I was going to put it behind me and move on. I didn't want it to affect my goals," Cleary says. "I made a conscious effort to do this."

He also says he doesn't feel any hatred toward the National Guardsmen or the others involved in the events of that day.

"I don't really harbor any anger or resentment toward the guardsmen. I don't think what happened was a total accident, though. It was too organized," Cleary says. "I think somebody knows something they aren't saying, and they'll probably go to their grave with it."

Cleary returned to Kent State for the 20th anniversary of the May 4 shootings, and has visited at other times over the years. He has also visited with Tom Grace and Alan Canfora, who also were wounded that day. But Cleary says he hasn't really kept in touch with the others who were involved in the events of that day.

Although he hasn't yet decided whether to return to campus for the 25th anniversary commemoration, he says his children have visited with him in the past and are aware of what happened to their father.

Ironically, his son Andrew was born on May 4, 1980, and Cleary says this coincidence made him wonder if there was an underlying message or meaning to it.

"There's some real signifi-gance to it," he says. "What does all this mean, anyway?"

- Jill Farrell King is a junior newspaper journalism major. This is her second contribution to The Burr.