![]() “I got 16 rounds off that night as fast as I could fire the weapon,” Mawhinney said, according to Business Insider. ![]() In the span of just 30 seconds, Mawhinney fired 16 shots, every one of them a dead-on headshot, single-handedly bringing the enemy attack to a screeching halt. Mawhinney took position with just his spotter, as well as his trusty Remington M40 and M14, and waited until the entire contingent waded into the river - then he started shooting. A monsoon made air support an impossibility, so Mawhinney volunteered to sneak forward and cover a river that the enemy was sure to cross.īut the first wave of North Vietnamese never crossed the river. In perhaps his most astonishing moment, on Valentine’s Day 1969, Chuck Mawhinney was set up at a base near Da Nang when he got word that a large North Vietnamese Army platoon was advancing toward them. He later said of Vietnam, “It was the ultimate hunting trip.”Ĭhuck Mawhinney Throughout the Vietnam War, no sniper had more known kills than Chuck Mawhinney. However, after only three months in the battalion, he was transferred to several different battalions, before ultimately landing with the Delta Company.īut it was his time with the Delta Company that proved to be the most lethal, and where he racked up his confirmed 103 kills. Becoming A Deadly Legend In VietnamĬhuck Mawhinney was initially dispatched as a rifleman to Lima Company 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division - and he hit the ground running as a deadly shot. With his formal training out of the way, Mawhinney was dispatched to Vietnam, where the war was in the middle of one of its bloodiest stretches. “I started shooting at a very young age, and he taught me to shoot like the Marines taught him, so there wasn’t any big transition from hunting in Oregon to becoming a sniper.” “My father was a Marine during World War II,” Chuck Mawhinney told American Rifleman in 2012. The allure of being a sniper also came naturally to the younger Mawhinney, who had spent most of his life doing what formal sniper school had trained him to do anyway. And that’s exactly what he did: Shortly after the deer-hunting season was over in June of 1967, the younger Mawhinney graduated high school and enlisted in the Marines.īut before he could be sent off to war, Mawhinney enrolled in Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton in California and graduated in April 1968. Why Chuck Mawhinney Was Destined To Be A Sniper From The Very Beginningīorn in 1949 in Lakeview, Oregon, Charles Benjamin Mawhinney was the son of a World War II Marine Corps veteran who hoped his son would follow in his footsteps. This is the amazing true story of Chuck Mawhinney, the legendary sniper who was as deadly as he was humble. ![]() Forest Service, telling no one - not even his wife - about his career in Vietnam. In one incident alone, Mawhinney had 16 confirmed kills in a mere 30 seconds - all of them headshots.īut when the war ended, Chuck Mawhinney simply retired from the Marine Corps and spent his days working in the U.S. United States Marine Corps Chuck Mawhinney in an undated photo taken during the Vietnam War.Īs one of the most prolific snipers of the Vietnam War, Chuck Mawhinney was a lethal sharpshooter who racked up the most confirmed kills in the history of the United States Marine Corps and the second-most confirmed kills of any American soldier in the country’s history. ![]()
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