Protest

Senior highly commended

Hannah Ryan
Rice College, Ennis

November 20, 1969
THE unrelenting crush of limbs and sharp-edged wooden posts was like the deadliest undercurrent. She struggled for air against the sheer, bone-crushing force of so many hundreds of people. There was no fighting the crowd; to resist was to be brutally trampled beside the torn, discarded signs and other debris.
As she desperately strained to forge an escape route through the vicious throng of bodies, Amber’s mind darted back to that day, two months previously and the reason she was here.
The campus sprawled away from her in all directions, bright lawns of soft grass shaded by magnificent oak trees, clusters of low, brick buildings joined by winding, cobbled paths. The sky was a warm, deep blue and the afternoon sun bathed the scene in a gentle orange glow. Washington State University; Amber sighed in sheer ecstasy. Here it was, the starting line for the rest of her life. All she had to do was set one foot on the brochure-perfect grass and the race would begin.
It had been of paramount importance to Amber from the very beginning to firmly establish herself in college society. High school had been cruel. In her eyes, American teenagers were outspoken and often loud, while Amber had inherited her mother’s quintessentially British reserve. To her, those last five years were a blur of deflected questions, foreign social precepts and careful conservative clothing. She had used every means at her disposal to fade into the background. Now, she wanted nothing more than to be utterly, inextricably etched into the bigger picture.
It was this yearning that found her standing in front of the college information board, scrutinising the freshly-printed posters peppering the wall. Brightly coloured leaflets advertised groups for people of all persuasions – WSU Rifle Club, HOWL Project-Save the Alaskan Wolves or simply, Civil Rights Activists.
Amber was not an activist. There was little she felt strongly about, no humanitarian scandal that made her blood burn with adrenaline and rage. As she surveyed the vast expanse of causes and clubs, chewing her lip, she wondered if she could truly fit in with any of these people. Most likely, they would sense the shallowness of her concern and she would be promptly sent packing.
Her eye was drawn, inexplicably, to the corner of a dull photograph, already papered over by what someone or other had deemed to be a worthier cause. She tugged at the page and recoiled from the scene that was revealed; a barren roadside in black and white, the dusty track dotted with slumped shapes, somewhat blurred, but still horrifyingly recognisable as lifeless human bodies. Adults and children alike lay at contorted angles and beneath, the caption read, Stop the Vietnam War.
Amber did not have to fake the horror and disgust she felt then. To her, the war itself and the politics involved were neither here nor there. Until then, she had spared little thought for how it might be affecting any country other than her own but it was difficult to ignore this. She had to tear her eyes away from the battered bodies and the blank stares.
“Doesn’t it just make you sick?” a chirpy voice piped up from behind her. Amber whipped around, dropping the page in her panic and scrambled for words. The girl watched her innocently, all wide eyes and flyaway curls. She did not wait for Amber to painstakingly conjure up a reply.
“We’re having our first meeting at three. You should come. Jake’s chairperson, my Jake, Jake Wilson, we’re always looking for new members.”
The girl flashed a set of perfect, bleach-white teeth at her and Amber smiled nervously back.
“Thanks,” she muttered, clearing her throat. “I’ll be there.”
The shriek of sirens jolted her back to the present. A helicopter thumped and roared overhead as she frantically fought to keep her feet on the ground. Faces blurred around her, some as terrified as she was, others bearing that cold, steely determination that had become so horribly familiar over the last two months.
“Amber!” a voice cried over the roar of the crowd. She struggled to turn and see who it was. Sara stood there, wild hair hanging loosely around her bloodied face, her huge eyes barely surfacing in the sea of shoulders and placards. She was shouting something, but her voice was lost to Amber. Suddenly, she disappeared beneath the throng and within a second, the crowd had condensed once more to fill her space. Amber stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, then resumed her furious struggle through the crowd, screaming her friend’s name.
Sudden convictions rarely last; if they breed quickly, most often they die quickly, too. Amber’s violent aversion to the war had faded soon after it appeared. It had not been steadily gathering momentum, brewing like a pot of boiling water, ready at any moment to spill over, like many of the people she saw around her now. Four weeks in, the naivety had dissolved and reality had struck her face-on; it was not enough to merely talk like humanitarians and dress like revolutionaries. Sooner or later, people would want to act and the action would be just as violent and brutal as the cause it hid behind.
Cursing her stupidity, desperate, hopeless tears forging salty paths through the sweat-soaked mud and dust-caked face, Amber felt the energy drain out of her. She gazed listlessly at the spot where Sara had fallen and listened apathetically to the erratic pounding of her heart in her eardrums. All other sounds faded as she felt herself being shoved and tugged by the crowd, like a relentless, furious river.
She did not know how much time had passed before she found herself sitting alone  on the torn, trampled grass. It could have been minutes; it could have been years. Her head throbbed behind her left ear and cuts and bruises riddled her face and arms. Her breath rattled in her chest and all around her, was carnage.
People milled aimlessly about, all trace of violent conviction gone from their eyes. Some tended to the comatose shapes on the ground, others gathered bits of wood and broken glass that were strewn on the grass. Men in official uniforms took people’s names, while harried-looking paramedics loaded slumped, groaning bodies onto stretchers.
Amber’s eyes alighted on a baton lying close-by and, beside it, something that looked sickeningly like a crowbar. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth against the vicious nausea that coursed through her. Had this really been their own doing?
A photograph: battered, mutilated shapes; vacant stares.
A scene: eyes dulled by fanaticism, wounds, trauma; all man-made.
She knew why they had come, but these were the images in her head. Amber found it difficult to differentiate between them.