The University of New Mexico's Bayonet Night

Four days after the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State University, students at the University of New Mexico gathered at the Student Union Building to protest the United States invasion of Cambodia. It was May eighth, nineteen seventy. The protests had been building since President Nixon announced the Cambodia operation on April thirtieth. Campus after campus across the country had erupted. At Kent State, four people died and nine were wounded. At Jackson State, two more died ten days later.

At UNM, students occupied the Student Union Building. University administrators called the New Mexico Army National Guard. When the Guard arrived and the building was cleared, guardsmen moved into the crowd that had gathered outside. They bayoneted it.

Ten or eleven people received bayonet wounds that day, including students, faculty members, and a journalist. The number varies by source because the injuries were not all reported in the same place. No one died. Six of the injured sued the state of New Mexico. The case was dismissed after the court ruled that legal responsibility for the guardsmen's actions could not be established against the defendants.

No guardsmen were charged.

The events of May eighth, nineteen seventy at the University of New Mexico are documented in the university's own timeline and in first-person accounts from people who were there. One of those people, speaking to the Daily Lobo fifty years later, described being the eleventh person to receive a bayonet wound and watching the moment happen as if it were happening to someone else. The Student Union Building where it occurred is still in use. The event receives no permanent marker on the campus where it happened.