Desperate to escape, he approached his father, who used his connections to reduce Whitman’s enlistment time, and he was discharged in December 1964. He was stationed in North Carolina, where he found the return to restricted military life oppressive, and was also court-martialled for gambling, costing him all the rank he had accumulated up to that point.
His grades plummeted, he took to gambling and, despite a minor improvement to his behaviour when he married Kathy Leissner in August 1962, the US Marine Corps withdrew his scholarship in February 1963, forcing him to return to active duty. Whitman began his studies at the University of Texas in Austin on 15 September 1961 and immediately floundered, without the rigid discipline that he was accustomed to, first at home and then in the Marines. He utilised every opportunity to excel, and was granted a scholarship to study engineering, to be followed by Officer’s Candidate School. Determined to prove his worth, Whitman took well to his initial training at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, earning performance medals and excelling at rapid fire shooting, especially where moving targets were involved. This humiliation proved the final straw for Whitman, and he enlisted in the US Marine Corps a few days later, reporting for training on 6 July 1959. Shortly before Whitman’s 18th birthday, he came home from a party drunk, and was beaten severely by his father, and thrown into the swimming pool, where he nearly drowned. This idyllic lifestyle was not all that it seemed, however Whitman’s father was a strict disciplinarian, prone to violence towards both his sons and wife.
Young Charlie was a gifted all-rounder, good at both sports and school, a talented pianist and Eagle Scout. Charles Joseph Whitman was born on 24 June 1941 into a wealthy, prominent family with a home that was the envy of the neighbourhood.
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