Chuck Mawhinney

Jim Fausone: We would like to welcome to Veterans Radio today Jim Lindsay, out in beautiful Oregon, and he’s going to talk to us about a book he wrote, “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time.” Jim, welcome to Veterans Radio.

Jim Lindsay: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

Fausone: It’s an interesting story. When it caught my attention, I got the book and read through it. I was really excited because I didn’t know about Chuck Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam. Tell us how you came about writing the book.

Lindsay: In 1979, I moved over to Baker City near the farm that we bought, and I met Chuck Mawhinney. We were pretty young fellas then, and we both liked drinking beer. There was a tavern called The Idle Hour — it was kind of a mill tavern. He worked for the forest service, and if I was in town about quitting time, maybe getting parts from somewhere, I’d stop there and have a beer with him. He was just a great guy to socialize with, an interesting fella, and we talked about everything. In fact, he came out to our ranch and hunted ducks and geese a couple of times, but we never talked about the military.

Fausone: At a time when Vietnam was going strong, I thought the story that he had to have his juvenile record kind of disappear to get enlisted into the Marines was just a classic situation. He had grown up in rural Oregon, always was an outside kind of guy, and all his buddies in the neighborhood had BB guns and were shooters, if you will. So when he got into the Marine Corps, he was looking at Camp Pendleton to move his way over to scout sniper school, and he was able to do that, wasn’t he?

Lindsay: Yeah. It was kind of like things happen in people’s lives. It was accidental. He joined the Marines right out of high school in 1967, and they sent him to Camp Pendleton for his basic training. He wanted to be an aviator — he wanted to be to fly for the Marines. So the night before the test he was to take for Aviation training, he and two other guys went out and did the town up, and he woke up in a movie theater at 5 a.m. They really did a good job, so he didn’t do very well in the test. He was going to have to wait around for another month, and they had him washing dishes. In the meantime, the scout sniper school opened, and that caught his eye because he loved shooting, liked to hunt, and that sort of thing. So he signed up for that, and that changed his life right there. No one knew, including him, that he would be the best of the best before it was over.

Fausone: And you talk about how life doesn’t always go as you plan, or is unplanned. He got into sniper school, he graduated top of the class, and they basically said, “Great, you’re going to Da Nang

— off to Vietnam, young man” in May of 1968. He gets over there, and what assignments do they give him?

Lindsay: It was heartbreaking for Chuck because getting on that plane, he was one person, but getting off in Vietnam, the cards had changed. They herded them off the tarmac there like a bunch of cattle, and he ended up in a regular Marine outfit as a grunt. He did speak up about it, but they weren’t looking for snipers. They were looking for just regular ground pounders, so he ended up in an outfit that guarded a bridge up north. It was pretty quiet, and he was there for a few weeks, and then they moved him south back down just west of Da Nang. Big battles were going on

there. He was in an outfit, and they were under fire, and he witnessed a guy next to him get killed; he was a machine gunner. And then Chuck started helping his helper, and he got shot, and then Chuck got the machine gun. He knew if something didn’t change, he wasn’t going to make it home. He was able to finagle around and get into an outfit that had a sniper platoon — that was about 20 miles west of Da Nang in a place called An Hoa.

Fausone: He knew that the machine gunners were very vulnerable. Obviously, the enemy wanted to take them out. He had trained and proven himself that he could be a sniper and was an excellent shot, but as any of us who served, the military knows better than you. So they started him as a grunt and then to running the machine gun. He knew he would be better off on his own, protecting other Marines as a sniper, and kind of forced his way in. As I read in the story, The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time by Jim Lindsay, he kind of forced his way into that sniper group by first being a scout and then, if you will, moving up the ladder to a sniper — where he was obviously extremely effective. It really was not as planned as Chuck thought it was going to be on his way over, did he?

Lindsay: No. Chuck Mawhinney is a special individual. This book starts when he’s just a child. He and I both wanted it to start early in his life so that the people the reader would find out what kind of person turns into a successful sniper like he was. He had the ability to talk himself into some pretty neat situations in his life. He got a job at the Ford dealership in Lakeview when he was just 15, a great job for a kid. He got his own pilot’s license when he was still in high school, and he was just amazing. When he got in that predicament, he handled it well. He faked a toothache, and he got back into An Hoa and was able to talk to the platoon about becoming a sniper. When they found out his record, he got to be a spotter for another fellow, and there he was. And that’s how it started.

Fausone: It is a good way to introduce people to what it takes to be a sniper because these are regular guys who have extraordinary skills in this area of patience, breathing, reading all the signs that you need to read as a sniper or as a spotter, because you’re out there all alone. You’re maybe shooting a long distance, but to be an expert marksman, you’ve got to have a lot of additional skills, don’t you?

Lindsay: Yeah. All this was new to me. I learned so much talking with Chuck about how it worked, and he was really patient with me. I would forget what he’d tell me — we met over a dozen times and he lived 400 miles from me, or he does. The fact is, I talked to him this morning. He taught me what it was like to be a sniper. One of the most important things is to know where you are at all times. When he went through sniper school, they had a lot of training on being out in the absolute darkness and knowing where you are. So, he was really handy for some of the outfits. They would kind of borrow him — he was kind of like a gun for hire — him and his spotter. They were always together. And of course, multiple spotters came and went. Most of them got to be snipers of their own. He would go out with an outfit, and they used him pretty hard about his ability to know where he was.

Fausone: That situational awareness comes through right in the book, and it’s one of those intangibles that gets talked about. As I say, you’ve got to have a real backbone, discipline, and patience. But that situational awareness saved him more than once in Vietnam. He had some pretty amazing kills, but you kind of lose the essence of the man if you just focus on the kills because he also struggled with the Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” and he struggled when he came home after his first tour. He knew he didn’t fit in anymore. So there’s a lot of stuff bubbling in the pot of Chuck Mawhinney as he’s going through living this about two-year period

where he’s becoming this top sniper. How does he reflect on all that turmoil that was going on in his head?

Lindsay: You know, calmly. Fortunately for him, he’s a person who can handle things like that. A lot of it was probably the way he was raised. His dad was a Marine, but he wasn’t raised to be a killer or anything; he was raised to do a good job at whatever he was going to do. And his job was to protect and save other Marines’ lives, and that’s how he justified it. Right before he made his first kill, he saw a Marine being killed out in the field. They had walked into this NVA outfit, and there was a kind of an ambush, and this guy just fell out in the front of him as he was gunned down out in the field. It was awful — they didn’t kill him fast – and it was hard on Chuck. It wasn’t long, and then he was doing the shooting, and he became kind of bitter when he saw what they did to his fellow Marine — so that helped. After the first one, he just did his job, and he was awfully good at it.

Fausone: The story that you’ve written, “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time” on Chuck Mawhinney, really gets across this idea that in his psyche, every kill that he’s making is saving countless Marines, and that’s his job. You said one of the things in his upbringing was, if you got a job, do it well. He understood his job was to protect these other Marines and, as a result, kept doing his job as a sniper for three tours in Vietnam.

Lindsay: He did the first one, in the Marine Corps, the first tour is 13 months. That’s when he went home, and you mentioned that his friends were still just kids. He saw right away that they didn’t have a clue or didn’t understand. The Vietnam War was different than all other wars, where they didn’t really want to know. I think maybe that might have been why he never told anybody until he was outed by another author later on. When he was home, he wasn’t welcomed by his peers, even the grown-ups around town. They kind of looked the other way, and so he spent a lot of time with his family during that month. Then he decided that his real friends, the real people that he could depend on, were back in Vietnam, so he went back and did another tour where he finished out with his 103 kills. So, he went home again and signed up for a third tour, but realizing that they wouldn’t let him be a sniper for another. I guess two tours were the max. He wanted to be a helicopter side gunner, and he got back over there, and they wouldn’t let him do that. He then became kind of a policeman, and he did a good job of that. That wasn’t his deal, but he then got the last one. He went back to San Diego, and he was a cook until somebody noticed who he was, and then he got to be a rifle instructor. He liked that.

Fausone: Again, the military always thinks it knows what it’s doing best. They take an expert marksman and make him a cook — just crazy. One of the stories in the book is about Valentine’s Day in 1969, which was a real test for Chuck Mawhinney. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Lindsay: That’s probably the one event he is most known for. He’d been there a while, right into his second tour, and he was out with a company of Marines — one that he worked for fairly often. The SEAL was Mike Wylie. A storm was coming in and they were dug in. They had a perimeter, and there was a little airplane come flying over, like a Piper Cub American plane, and the guy radioed down to him and said that there was a battalion of NVA across the river, and he was afraid they were going across. Singlehandedly, after dark, Chuck Mawhinney, with a Starlight scope and his spotter with him, stopped it from happening. It was just an amazing feat that he did. He shot 16 NVA in 30-some seconds — this was according to the spotter. It discouraged them, and they never tried to cross again. They’ve tried to set up games where people have tried doing this, and nobody can do it. They have 16 targets that pop up. It was really an amazing thing. Who knows how many Marines he saved, because if they had gone across that river, they would have gone right over those Marines.

Fausone: As you write in the book, “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time,” it is again some of that situational awareness. After the plane radioed down, he knew right where to go, where to find a hide that was the right spot to stop them from crossing the river and overrunning the Marines that he was with. Again, being able to knock down 16 NVA in such a short time is sort of an amazing feat, but it’s all those other things too. It’s all those intangibles — having the right heartbeat, breathing pattern, calmness, patience, situational awareness. It’s really an amazing feat that I don’t think most of us could do — our adrenaline and our heartbeat would be going crazy, wouldn’t it?

Lindsay: Yes. An NVA guide came across and stood right beside Chuck — this was in the dark. Chuck says he was so close to me I could hear water dripping off of him. He wasn’t going to let him get past him. He was about ready to dispatch him, and the guy turned around and went back across, and then it was just a few minutes before they all started across. He was pretty cool about things.

Fausone: That’s true. That’s an understatement. I want to talk a little bit about the fact that Chuck only stayed in for a couple of years. He got out of the Marine Corps, came back to Oregon, and went into the forest service and completed his whole professional career in the US Forest Service — had a family, kids, the whole thing — which again is this sort of his way of closing that chapter of the book. As if, “I’m not bragging about it, I’m not telling anybody about it.” You kind of stumbled on it, and only because you were really friends was he willing to open up and help tell the story and have the book written, if I understand it right.

Lindsay: He was in Vietnam when they were starting to slow down, and he got out early because of that. He went back to Lakeview and started the next chapter in his life. His credentials as a Marine helped him get on with the US Forest Service. Right away, they were moving him from here to there, and just like everything else he ever did in his life, he excelled at it. He became a machinery operator, built roads, and that sort of thing. It wasn’t very long, and he was the boss. He had some trouble, and he didn’t know what it was – it was terrible. You talk about going from a high of what he was doing over there for two years down to driving a bulldozer. He didn’t tell anybody because he knew there was nobody who would ever understand, except for another sniper, and he didn’t go around with a sign looking for one. There was some turmoil going on inside of him, and he became a heavy drinker. Not like I think of an alcoholic, but he hit the tavern after work every day and sometimes pretty late. Some things were bothering him, and I don’t even know for sure if he even really knew it, but he lived right on the edge until he met a gal who was another forest service worker. Her name was Robin Hood, and she was a few years younger, and they hit it off and had a family — three nice boys, and they’re all doing fine. She kind of helped him come out of it, and she didn’t even know it – he didn’t tell her about it either. The only way it happened to come out is that his last spotter, Joseph Ward, wrote a book called “Dear Mom.”

Fausone: And that was the outing. You mentioned earlier that Chuck kind of got outed, and it got confirmed that he had 103 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills. A confirmed kill required an officer to see it occur and be written up, and that outed him as the highest sniper, marksman number. While most of the world for a long time thought it was Carlos Hathcock, who had 93 kills — a good Arkansas boy who did a 20-year career in the Marine Corps. Chuck must have just been happy to let Hathcock have the glory, and he’d just stay out of it and keep a low profile. That’s one of the things that caught my interest in your book, “The Sniper: The Untold

Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time” by Jim Lindsay. It’s the untold story of Chuck Mawhinney, the Marine Corps’ greatest marksman of all time. I knew the Hathcock story; I never heard the story about Chuck Mawhinney.

Lindsay: It surprised everybody, and Chuck wasn’t really ready for it. It came out, and then all of a sudden he was interviewed by, I think, the LA Times. There was no way he was going to stop it. It was out of the bottle then. In fact, he had quite a time with it. Some of his friends kind of got cold, and he didn’t know why. At the time it happened, I was over in eastern Oregon for 20 years running this ranch, and then my parents and family — everybody’s getting older — so I kind of wanted to come back. So I come back, and my brother and I are partners, and we raise grass seed here for lawns and pastures, that sort of thing. I came back on the west side, and one evening I was sitting there watching TV, and there was Chuck Mawhinney. It was on the History Channel or something. It was him! I could hardly believe it. He was talking about all the stuff he did, and I thought my gosh — I just had no idea. I called him up, and by that time, I had been writing books. He remembered me and everything. We talked about the whole thing, and I said somebody ought to write about you. He said that two guys had tried and they both died.

Fausone: There’s a bad sign.

Lindsay: He said, “I’ve read your books, and I like them.” I went over and visited — stayed all night in their house and everything — and he decided, “let’s do this.”

Fausone: It’s important for a lot of reasons to get history out and the records out. That’s why we’ve been doing Veterans Radio for 20 years now, telling veteran stories. I thought the headline in the Los Angeles Times article captured it, “A Sniper at Peace With His Duties.” I really think that captured Chuck’s ultimate position here. I’m not surprised to hear that when he got back, he had difficulties and turmoil in his own head and was drinking more than he should have. I think everybody did come back and have years and years of transition to get comfortable with the Vietnam War. I’m not even sure we’re comfortable with it today. Your book does a great job. It’s an easy read. I really tell people that if you want to know about the greatest Marine sniper, this is the true story. Jim where can they find the book?

Lindsay: You can get it online at Amazon. There are several different outfits you can order — it’s in the major bookstores and even some small ones. You can get it at the New York City Airport. There’s a lady here in Corvallis, Oregon — she’s my editor, and she’s about my age — this has been a real thrill for her, too. The book has been so well received, and I’m happy for Chuck. She was on a little trip and went through the airport there, and there was the book that she was, you know, involved with so much. That really tickled her. So you can get it anywhere. There’s a lot of feedback coming back now that I’m awfully proud. Personally, people have mentioned things to me about reading it. It is a really easy read, and it’s my way of writing.

Fausone: It’s a good read. I encourage folks to do it, and Jim Lindsay, I appreciate you taking some time with Veterans Radio today and certainly pass along to Chuck Mawhinney our thanks for what he did to save all kinds — untold numbers of Marines — back in the day in Vietnam. Jim, thanks for your time today.

Lindsay: Thanks for having me on here. You’ve got a nice deal here, and you do a good job of it. Fausone: Thank you.