The Madman on the Tower
I remember every detail of that day twenty years ago—the blue sky, the noonday heat, the gunshots, the screams, the blood, and …
It’s like belonging to a fraternity that never meets: you are talking with someone and learn he was living in Austin in 1966, and pretty soon the subject of Charles Whitman comes up. Then for a minute or so, it’s where-were-you time—that Monday, August 1, under bright skies with the temperature approaching one hundred. I was a University of Texas graduate student supervising student publications as a part-time job. Walking from the old journalism building on Twenty-fourth Street to the Union to get a sandwich for lunch, I could hear loud reports that had the boom, snap quality of rifle shots. They were coming from the vicinity of the Main Building, but I didn’t see any unusual activity there and shrugged them off as the sounds of a nail-driving gun, which had been periodically banging away on a construction project there. Later I discovered that everyone hearing that noise was running it though a mental card-sorter until it found a slot that offered a perfectly ordinary explanation. One person, also mindful of the construction, decided that it was the sound of large planks falling over and slapping concrete. Another, closer to the mark, decided the ROTC must be shooting blanks for some ceremonial reason on the mall in front of the Main Building with its 27-story Tower. Yet another saw a girl fling herself to the grass and assumed, having read a feature in the campus paper a few days earlier, that it was some kind of goofy crowd-response experiment being carried out by the psychology folks.
I was still operating on the nail-gun theory when some students standing behind a pillar of the Academic Center started shouting something about a guy on the Tower shooting people and how I should get moving. My first response was to resent being yelled at, so I just stood there in the middle of a grassy inner-drive area, squinting up at the Tower’s northwest corner. Sure enough, I could see a gun barrel poke out over the parapet and emit smoke, followed an instant later by the boom I had been hearing. Now the computer was working a lot faster but still coming up with a bad readout: Just look at that! There’s some fool up there with a rifle, trying to get himself in one hell of a lot of trouble! From my angle, it didn’t look like the man was shooting downward, but was trying to create a commotion.
So I turned around and started walking (don’t show fear, they can smell it) the two hundred or so feet back to the protective corner of Hogg Auditorium, maybe trotting the last few yards. A student already there was pointing and jabbering about a girl who was hit in the side yard of the biology building, which I had just crossed coming from journalism. That bumped the alarm meter up substantially, and I joined him in yelling at a student strolling along the sidewalk past the old Littlefield Home, right behind us and to our left. We nearly got the guy killed, for when he stopped to look at us in puzzlement, the sniper opened up on him with a semiautomatic rifle. That sent him scrambling to the protection of an alley as bullets whacked into the low limestone wall behind him, popping like movie squibs. Since then, I’ve wondered if he knew how lucky he was that Whitman had evidently emptied his two other rifles and was using his little open-sight Army carbine. With his scoped 6mm bolt-action Remington, it had been strictly one shot, one man, in the old Marine Corps tradition.
That bit of excitement convinced me that something not only very weird but very bad was happening. I had a queasy feeling that returned later that day when the paper said one Tower office employee looked out and saw “two young boys laying face down in front of Hogg Auditorium,” and it came back a few days later, when a Life magazine aerial photo showed X’s where people had been hit along the route I had just taken.
I had been a little slow in switching over to emergency, but my wits were supposedly about me as I made my way around the back of the auditorium to the Union, where I knew of a stairwell window that afforded a good and, I thought, a safe view of the Tower. The window was wide open, and a girl in a white blouse was already sharing the right-hand side with someone, so I went to the left where only one student was standing and looked over his shoulder. Everyone was talking, and I could hear people downstairs in the Union lobby, babbling in confusion. Someone had come in from outside and was running through the lobby, crying, “That man is dead! That man is dead!” as though such a thing were entirely impossible.
I could see the sniper fairly well; he would lean out over the parapet, bring the rifle to bear on target, fire, tip the weapon up as he worked the action, then walk quickly to another point and do the same thing. It must have been about that time that he hit an electrician next to his truck at Twentieth Street and University Avenue, a quarter of a mile away. It was about that time, too, that the Tower clock started chiming and then, with cold-blooded indifference, tolled the noon hour. And it must have been only moments after those echoes died that the sniper, evidently firing through one of the Tower’s drain spouts, put a shot through the open window where the four of us stood gawking.
The bullet struck the edge of the window opening in front of the girl’s face like an exploding stick of dynamite, filling the stairwell with glass, splinters, bullet fragments, and concrete dust. The blast put us on the floor, and the first thing I perceived was the girl, flat on her back, hands to her face, screaming. Which surprised me; I didn’t think there could be any face left to scream with. I started crawling over to her, and my left hand slipped so that I partly fell forward into blood that was rapidly covering the floor of the stairwell. The blood wasn’t hers; the bullet had fragmented, and a large chunk of it had pierced the right forearm of the guy on my side of the window. It had hit an artery that now, as he lay partly on his side, was pumping out blood in rapid squirts about three inches high.
It’s strange what happens to time in situations like this. All motion slowed down and became dreamlike. I knew how to contend with arterial bleeding, but in the second or two it took me to get my hands to his arm it seemed as if I had ages to consider the neatness of the wound, the brightness of the blood, and its fountain-like behavior. I refused to think another shot might come through that window, because my legs were still exposed. I could still hear the girl’s sobbing, and I could hear my own voice, squawking for someone to give me a handkerchief. The shooting victim used his good arm to pull one from his back pocket and hand it to me.
The girl had debris in her eyes but was otherwise okay. The guy would be okay once he was slid under the window and into the hands of other students who had come running up the stairs. I was okay but pretty blood-splattered and had trouble convincing one Samaritan that the blood was not mine. Except for a tiny bit; while washing up in the basement men’s room, I found that what looked like a shaving cut in my neck held a piece of the bullet’s copper jacket, not much bigger than a pinhead. Realizing that that could have been the large chunk of bullet made it hard to breathe for a little while.
When I went back upstairs, no one had any real idea of what was going on—how many riflemen were up there or if the killings were part of something else that was happening. That feeling was enhanced by the absence of the police. Rarely does a person witness a car wreck or a fire or another emergency except in aftermath, when the scene is swarming with cops and firemen and spectators. To witness an emergency taking place is to realize that the cops don’t come with it. After the first ten or fifteen minutes, I began hearing an occasional siren that ordinarily wouldn’t have signaled anything more than a traffic problem here or an ambulance run there. But the shooting had been under way for nearly half an hour before the sirens of police cars and ambulances became obvious, blending into yelps and howls like a neighborhood full of dogs set off by a passing fire engine. That noise, punctuated by auto horns blown in panic and anger, blanketed the city. To that was soon added the garbled voices of newscasters blaring through more and more transistor radios. At least the radio reports were bringing things into sharper focus, describing a carnage far greater than anyone walking on campus could guess. Those early shots that had caused me more astonishment than alarm had, I now learned, hit their targets nearly every time, all over campus, up and down Guadalupe, at amazing ranges, killing people. Whitman hit running targets, bicycling targets, targets at ranges of up to five hundred yards; he even put a bullet through a light plane carrying a police rifleman. And his field of fire was so great that targets never stopped presenting themselves at distances they mistakenly thought were safe.
