COVER PICTURE:

This is Corporal Feliciano of the National Guard, one of 2000 men called up by California Governor Ronald Reagan to bring a halt to the Battle of People's Park. The Guardsmen were used to herd the students from one end of the campus to the other, advancing with their bayonets before them. They put up barricades, manned them, flew over the area in helicopters, cleared the streets and assisted in makinp arrests. After six days of this, the Guardsmen beran to tire of the game. They are young men-many of whom are in the Guard because the prospect of serving more than six months in uniform is so distasteful. Feliciano and his squad were detailed to clear Telegraph. His associates hassled one student after another and finally Feliciano had seen enough. He threw down his helmet and his rifle and said he'd do no more. He wasn't about to put any more people through all this bullshit. He was arrested himself and taken away. The battle continues. meanwhile, with no light visible at the end of the tunnel.

The following reportage from the Berkeley campus of the University of California was done by John Burks, John Grissim Jr. and Langdon Winner.

BERKELEY- People's Park was just starting to amount to something when the war broke out. There were ten rock gardens, several swings, sand boxes, parallel bars, monkey bars for the kids. Over half was covered by new sod. There were three apple trees. The first seeds in the People's Revolutionary Corn Garden had sent down roots and had begun to sprout. The park was sanctified by a cross section of young Berkeley clergy, and architectural and environmental critic Alan Temko had called it "the most significant innovation in recreational design since the great public parks in the nineteenth and twentith centuries."

Street people and Berkeley students had built it - or were building it - they had lots of plans. But now the State, propelled by the will of a Governor who has vowed to put an end to demonstrations on California campuses by any means necessary, was going to take back People's Park. The University had posted notices saying they planned to take back what was theirs. The street people began circulating a "Proclamation by Madmen" which promised that five million dollars in damage would be done to the University if it reclaimed this one million dollar, block-sized plot of land.

There was a lot of brave talk and the battle lines were drawn. And the war began at 4:45 on the morning of May 15, when 300 police cleared the park and took up positions. At 6:00 A.M., with a smallish crowd of onlookers in attendance, a seven - man crew started at their work of.erecting an eight foot steel mesh fence around the University's "property." The crowd had grown - and the taunting had gotten heavy - by noon when the crew had finished.

Meanwhile, 2000 were holding a demonstration on Sproul Plaza to decide what to do about the park. One of the final speakers was the Rev. Richard York, who ministers to street people and students out of his Free Church. "The spirit," intoned York, ornately clad in his multi-color vestment, "which built the People's Park is stronger than tear gas and clubs." The final speaker, student body president-elect Dan Siege' (who has since turned himself in on charges of inciting to riot), shooted: "Let's go down and take the park!"

And shortly the battle was joined.

At this writing, over 256 people have been arrested, dozens have been admitted to hospitals and medical clinics, and one boy is dead.

The Alameda County Sheriff's deputies who arrived to bolster the Berkeley Police Department were armed with shotguns. According to ~ Sheriff Frank Madigan, they were given either Number 8 or Number 9 birdshot to use. This is a critical matter, because this birdshot is somewhat smaller than a BB, and while it can do damage, it is not generally considered lethal, except possibly at close range.

But the three slugs which were dug out of a dead man who had - according to eyewitnesses - been shot by a sheriff's officer were .00 buckshot. These are huge pellets, one-third of an inch in diameter, and they can blow a hole in the side of a car.

In the case of the late lames Rector, the man who was shot on a rooftop while he watched the action below on Telegraph Avenue, the buckshot did massive damage to his lower vital organs as it passed all the way up through his body to penetrate his heart. He had undergone surgery at Herrick Memorial Hospital to remove his spleen, a kidney and part of his pancreas. But the three marble-sized shot which tore all the way into his chest cavity killed him.

Iim Rector had been up to Berkeley a few times to help work on the People's Park. He lived in San lose, 50 miles to the south, but had friends in Berkeley. On Thursday, the day the sheriff's men started blasting away with their shotguns (leaving one onlooker very likely blinded for life and many others wounded-the San Francisco Chronicle carried a photo of an officer firing his shotgun at a young man who is running away with his back turned),
Rector, along with many others, had scrambled up to the rooftop to get out of the line of fire and the tear gas.

Someone on another rooftop, two buildings away, had thrown a brick. And all of a sudden, Rector told his mother at the hospital a few hours before his death, he saw an officer with a shotgun pointed at him. "Jim said," his mother recounts, "that he couldn't believe it was pointed at him. They hadn't done anything, thrown anything - there wasn't anything on the roof to throw. Then he said he heard a fusillade of bullets turned sideways, and got caught in the back with the slugs."

A friend grabbed him to keep him from falling off the slanted roof. For awhile, according to another person on the same roof, a girl who works as cashier at the Cinema, they were pinned down by tear gas, and unable to carry sheets and blankets out to the wounded man, who was, by this time, bleeding profusely.
Finally, after long minutes, police came up to the roof. They asked what Rector and his friend were doing there. His friend explained they'd just been watching, and that Rector was badly injured and in need of help. The cops departed without either giving any aid or sending for any. Recollections vary but it took something between 25 minutes and an hour for an ambulance to arrive. And it came from San Leandro, about 25 miles away. When the medics got to Rector he was at zero blood pressure.

The 25-year-old with the Zapata mustache lived through the weekend, recovered enough to talk, then died at 10:25 Monday evening.

At mid-afternoon on Thursday, Governor Ronald Reagan called in 2000 troops of the National Guard, and as police squad cars smoldered (having earlier been torched) and the cry of "We want the park! We want the park!" filled the air, they advanced in their flak suits to sweep the parks, bayonets fixed. The early evening stung with shots and shouts, sirens, shattering glass, and, against this rising crescendo, the cries of the injured, 25 police among them.

Everything was perfectly staged for violence and turmoil and there was plenty of it. There were random clubbings by police throughout Friday as the demonstrators regrouped. A bit of light comedy on Saturday when a dozen National Guardsmen began wandering around and acting funny. A Guard medic discovered all of them had accepted oranges or brownies or both from hippie chicks and deduced that they had been slipped some acid. Sunday was the occasion for a free-form march through the city - with a neat surrealistic touch: the marchers planted plants and flowers along the line of march and the cop, who followed along behind, pulled up the plants, confiscating them. For what use?

But Tuesday was, in some ways, the most frightening of all, at least in its implications. Three thousand pro-Park demonstrators held a memorial march for James Rector. At 2:00 in the afternoon of a clear, warm, bright Berkeley day, some 700 stragglers had been surrounded in a tight ring on Sproul Plaza by Guardsmen.

From the second-floor balcony of the Student Union came a garbled bullhorn message from a campus cop. "Chemical agents are about to be dropped. I request that you leave the plaza."

With that, all the cops and deputies and Guardsmen put on their gas masks. Then came the whack and whine and whir of a hulking brown Sikorsky helicopter carrying a bellyful of National Guard tear gas. It came low over the treetops, no more than 200 feet, laying down a veil of white, powdery vapor for 500 yards before it got to Sproul Plaza. Brigadier General Bernard Narre the field commander at the scene and who called in the helicopter attack later said "It was a Godsend that it was done at that time."

From three sides, the lawmen and Guardsmen pitched tear gas into the crowd of demonstrators, who ran in all directions, screaming and shouting, trying to escape the biting, nauseating fumes. But there was no way out. Guardsmen had encircled the immediate area, and prevented demonstrators from getting out with the threat of their bayonets.
The light wind whipped the tear gas all over the campus and surrounding neighborhood. Students rushed out of classrooms and housewives out of their homes in a radius far from Sproul Plaza. A school picnic in Strawberry Canyon, some 40 or SO kids enjoying the outdoors, tuming to squawling, parlicky chaos. The gas even seeped into Cowell Hospital, upsetting operations there, rendering nurses useless as patients gasped for breath and cried out. Said the manager of the hospital: "I protest that this is not what tear gas is for."

All tear gas is dangerous. There is no antidote to tear gas and there have been no studies that really explain how it works. The April issue of Today's Health, a widely respected medical journal, tells how even mild exposure to tear gas has destroyed human eyes - though law enforcement officials always ridicule these reports. Today's Health is very explicit about 13 different people who had a total of 14 eyes removed following tear gas deterioration.

Eyewitness account of a Berkeley shooting:
A group of four, five or six police in the middle of the block raised their guns to shoot. James Rector saw the policemen aiming at his face. He turned his back and began to run. He was too late. Myself and two other guys lifted his legs so the blood would flow to his head, we positioned him more comfortably and told him to breathe deeply and evenly. It was a near thing: according to the doctor when he reached the hospital, Rector's blood pressure was zero. Desperate, we shouted down at the Avenue: "There's a man shot up here! Get an ambulance!" the cop slowly climbed the stairs to the roof, looked at Rector . . .refused to lend Rector a gas mask, and left.

LEFT, the fatally wounded James Rector lies on rooftop

BELOW:

police take aim at the rooftop

And, while the National Guard maintains it was using only standard tear gas, there have been reports (unconfirmed) that both vomit gas and blister gas may have been employed. The Medical Committee for Human Rights held a Press conference at the Free Church to suggest this. They called it chemical warfare and said that besides regular tear gas and its tougher relative (CN), they had seen and heard of symptoms beyond these.

There had been reports, for one thing, of projectile vomiting, which, at its worst, can mean your stomach is ripped loose from it's moorings and vomitted up. It also causes severe and immediate diarhea, with the further danger of shitting out your intestines. And there is the added danger, with projectile vomiting of suffocating.

On the day of the attack from the sky, Governor Reagan chose to do some tough talking. He called the building of People's Park "a deliberate and planned attempt at confrontation," and defended the use of birdshot to repel it. He didn't say anything about buckshot but he did say that cops had to fight back against the "well-armed mass of people who had stockpiled all kinds of weapons and missiles." There was no mention of it in his speech, but four tanks out of the National Guard arsenal stand ready to do combat at the Berkeley Marina, where the troops he called out are quartered.

But this is no assurance there won't be any sniping. Defending the deputies' use of shotguns, Berkeley city councilman John DeBonis a reactionary of considerable repute locally, said: "If I had a gun and l was cornered, I'd use it." His is an argument some street people may find irresistible.

And so for days the helicopters have roared overhead, looking for trouble, leaning into endless turns, rotors thumping the spring air with a high whistle. By evening, Guardsmen cluster at streetcorners, reading, smoking, hefting rifles from shoulder to shoulder. It's impossible to find out the total number of enforcers - troops, cops, deputies, highway patrol. "We don't," chuckles Reagan's press aide Paul Beck, "want to give our troop strength away to the enemy."

Berkeley has always been the enemy to Reagan. He holds the opportunity to make it the first permanently occupied college town in the country and may prove loath to let it slip away from him.

Similarly, it's a round robin goose chase trying to find out who authorized the shooting. The police say it was up to the sheriff. Sheriffs office says they came in at the request of the cops. You ask a cop or a deputy who said they could shoot. "Ask at headquarters" At headquarters they tell you to check with the field commanders. Who in turn tell you to check with the guys at headquarters. You explain that you already have. "Well, then," says thc grinning deputy, his badge out of sight, "move on, pal, you better move on."

The administration at Berkeley has been all but silent throughout the battle, perhaps cowed by Reagan. There have been a couple of statements, and a few appearances. But all that it comes to can be summed up in a few words Vice Chancellor Earl Cheit told a TV interviewer: "If I'd known we were going to get into guns, we'd never have gotten into this."
Chancellor Roger Heyns issued a statement to the effect that the time had come (on Tuesday, the day of the helicopter attack) to reason together to find alternatives to violence. But he proposed none.

One justification used by the authorities was that People's Park had been a noisy bother to nearby residents. In the words of Charles Glasshausser, a Berkeley resident who lives less than a block from the Park

"I had seen the site grow from a vast mudhole parking lot into a place for people. Now I see it surrounded by a fence, by police using guns, by soldiers equipped for war. What possible justication can the University offer? It must hold itself responsible for the violent actions of previously nonviolent students. It must hold itself responsible for the conduct of policemen who fired into crowds of people."

Sorne 200 faculty members have agreed to stop teaching. But - sadly - there has been not a word from the Academic Senate. There seems to be a feeling that it's not worth protesting, it won't do any good and may just aggravate matters.

University Regent Fred Dutton, one of the pre-Reagan liberals on the board calls the Berkeley situation the "most fascistic" he has seen in this country including Chicago at the time of the Democratic Party convention. And Dutton, is no raving radical. Just a plain liberal. "Students," Dutton notes, "were planting flowers in the first place, and in the long run of history, I would have to say that flowers beat fences. And that young men beat old men every time."

How is it possible that a flower, a bush, a swing, a tree, a new park - no matter who owns it - could possibly damage anything or anybody? To build something on another man's land - can this be so vile an act that people must be gassed and shot and blinded and killed in consequence?

The deep thrum' of the helicopters, their whirring roar continues over the occupied city, driving everybody to the brink of . . . distraction . . . beyond . . . There is this temptation to shoot one down. You hear of the temptation from several people, from street people to straight businessmen who are joking, sort of.

"Why don't you just do it? Just get a .22 rifle and do it?'
"l'm not a violent man. I really don't believe in - you know."
"It's tempting, though."
"Well, it would take a thirty-ought-six to do the job anyway."

And the Daily Californian, the student newspaper, editorially toward tbe end of the week: "We will have that park. And we will have it or lose the University."