The Last National Guard Invasion

Thursday, June 12, 2025

It wasn’t the rows of Willys jeep, nor the khaki uniforms or helmets, the bandoliers of ammunition, so much. It was the machine guns mounted on the backs of the jeeps with gunners at the ready.

Not many American civilians have been in situations where the National Guard patrolled the streets of their town. LBJ mobilizing the Guard for Montgomery is the one that has made the news this week. The Rodney King riots in LA was another. But I was a student in Santa Barbara, living in the neighboring student community Isla Vista with a lot of other mostly white, mostly suburban undergraduates. It was February 1970 and a week filled with chaos in a chaotic year. Students were terrified to look through their mail for a notice from Selective Service, footage of carnage in Vietnam was on the nightly news, the Chicago 7 were being railroaded toward jail. The idyllic beach was covered with tar from a huge oil spill off a drilling rig the previous year. Popular anthropology professor Bill Allen (no relation) had just been inexplicably denied tenure. Friends in Berkeley were regularly confronting police.  A fierce address by anti-war activist William Kunstler got people fired up, and the Santa Barbara police arrived in full gear anticipating trouble. Rocks were thrown, fires started, and a huge crowd of students chased the police from Isla Vista. By the time the night ended the local Bank of America branch had been torched.  Two days later, Governor Ronald Reagan called in the troops.

By the time they arrived, much of the fury had dissipated. The Guard occupied a quiet student ghetto. Nothing much happened and they left after a couple of days. It was just the sight of those machine guns that stick with me half a century later. Would they have mowed down an angry crowd of students if they felt threatened?

The reprise was temporary. Nixon rebooted the mob by bombing Cambodia. The campus went on strike. One student was killed when a police rifle went off accidentally, but officials blamed it on non-existent lethal snipers among the protestors. More police arrived in Isla Vista with helmets, clubs, and shields. The chief of police was photographed with a medieval sword and mace tucked into his belt.

A full time curfew was announced and ignored. The peaceful sit-in of students protesting the curfew was hosed from Perfect Park by a giant tank of CS gas on the back of a police pickup truck. Rocks starting flying only after that. Then came the police riot, with armed cops chasing students down the streets and into their apartments. After good head bashings, the batons were turned on to furniture, record collections, toilets, kitchen items, and anything else they wanted to smash. 

I watched the bank burn from a wooden bench at Morning Glory Music across the street. I coughed my way out of Perfect Park after being hosed with teargas. I remember peeking out the shuttered windows of our apartment as police units patrolled the compound, their guns at the ready. It was decades before many of us who were involved in the events of that spring could believe that the police were public servants looking out for our best interests. And yet, this police riot was merely a glimmer of how folks in the projects are often treated. 

For Isla Vista, the National Guard invasion was a non event. For Ronald Reagan, it was one of his pivotal decisions that proved to voters how tough he was and led to his election as president. What toughness: he was willing to order the army to control an unarmed mass of suburban students.

Half a century later, and history has repeated itself, only now in downtown Los Angeles. The targets are now mostly immigrants simply seeking to create a good life for themselves in our country.  And this episode of political theatre is being orchestrated by another bad actor (in both senses of the term). Two generations have passed in an America where-- unless you are Black or poor-- armed troops in jeeps are never seen patrolling the streets of your neighborhood. The memory of 1970 has obviously never left me.  For those who engage in the moral work of protecting innocent people from being kidnapped by ICE now, maybe this memory of armed troops will stick with them for the next episode of government violence. After we’ve stopped this one.  

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