Chuck Mawhinney can’t suppress a chuckle as he tells the story about how his name wound up on the cover of a book.

It’s a rough noise, that chuckle.

The sound of a piece of thick cloth being slowly ripped.

Or a mountain stream in spring flood, tumbling an occasional boulder.

Which is where Mawhinney, who has lived in Baker City since 1981, would rather be, waiting for a buck or a bull to show itself while he hunkered with a rifle in his hands.

Better there than sitting in his shop and talking about himself.

Or, stranger still to Mawhinney, seeing his name on that book, or leafing through the pages that preserve his story forever.

It might have been inevitable, this book.

Certainly Mawhinney’s accomplishments, unrivaled in the history of one of America’s most renowned military groups, the Marine Corps, would seem to have guaranteed a book-length chronicle.

But still it took better than half a century to happen, a testament not to a lack of interest among writers, but to Mawhinney’s instinctive modesty.

And even then it required quite a bit of cajoling from two people — including Mawhinney’s wife, Robin.

Robin teamed up with Jim Lindsay, an author and farmer who lived near Baker City from 1979 to 1999 and met Mawhinney at the Idle Hour tavern in Baker City, to convince Mawhinney to tell the complete story.

They were at the Mawhinneys’ home in Baker City, sitting outside, chatting.

It was about five years ago.

Mawhinney, 74, who had become adept over the decades at deflecting attention from himself, resisted.

But eventually, with Robin and Lindsey encouraging him, he gave in.

That admission elicits the distinctive gravelly chuckle.

“Well crap, I couldn’t get out of it,” Mawhinney said in an interview on March 9.

Two days earlier, Lindsay’s book, with a foreword written by Mawhinney, was released.

“The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time,” is available at Betty’s Books in Baker City.

The 256-page hardcover is Mawhinney’s account of his tours in Vietnam, which extended for two years and one month in 1967-69. During his service in the war, Mawhinney, who was still a teenager for much of the time, recorded 103 confirmed kills over 16 months as a Marine scout sniper.

Another 250 or so were unconfirmed.

Mawhinney, who grew up in Lakeview and graduated from Lakeview High School in 1967, had no idea that his tally exceeded what military historians believed was the Marine Corps record of 93.

And even if he had known, Mawhinney wouldn’t have talked about what he had done, much less touted his record.

“I never, ever planned on doing a book,” he said.

But then another Marine scout sniper wrote one instead.

The first wave of publicity

That book is “Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam.”

The author is Joseph T. Ward, a sniper who briefly served as Mawhinney’s spotter in 1969. Ward inherited the M700 Remington bolt-action rifle that Mawhinney used.

Ward wrote that Mawhinney had 101 confirmed kills.

Ward’s book, published in 1991, didn’t generate a great deal of immediate interest among historians.

Mawhinney wasn’t even aware of the book.

But several years later author Peter R. Senich, who had written several books about military snipers, read Ward’s memoir.

Senich was intrigued by Ward’s claim about Mawhinney’s confirmed kill total.

Mawhinney said Senich, who had access to Marine Corps archives, reviewed the official record that Mawhinney filled out in Vietnam.

Senich confirmed that Mawhinney’s confirmed total was 103, and thus the all-time record for Marine snipers.

In 1996 Senich called Mawhinney and interviewed him for a story published that December in Precision Shooting magazine.

That article was a milestone in Mawhinney’s life.

Senich’s magazine story spawned a wave of publicity featuring newspaper articles — including one in the Baker City Herald that was reprinted in June 1997 in Mawhinney’s hometown paper, the Lake County Examiner — television interviews and appearances in documentaries.

The publicity also led to invitations that Mawhinney couldn’t have conceived.

Instead of focusing on hunting and fishing, as he expected to do after he retired in 1997 after a 27-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, Mawhinney and his wife traveled to events across the country.

They attended a super sniper conference in New Mexico, where Mawhinney was the guest of honor at an awards banquet.

Then he went to Alabama to help Autauga Arms design a sniper rifle.

He helped train police officers in the intricacies of long-range precision shooting.

Less happily, he once autographed 500 photos of himself taken in Vietnam.

“I don’t care if I ever sign my name again,” he said in a 1997 interview with the Herald.

Mawhinney said in that interview that although he wasn’t comfortable talking about his accomplishments, he decided to use the chance for another purpose.

“It’s an opportunity for me to get some recognition for a lot of the Vietnam vets that didn’t receive any recognition,” he said. “We were all there together. If I have to take recognition for it that’s OK, because every time I talk to someone, I can talk about the vets. It gives me an opportunity to talk about what a great job they did.”

Interested authors

As might be expected, the publicity generated by Ward’s book and Senich’s magazine article also provoked interest in authors.

Senich was among them.

Mawhinney agreed to work with Senich, and the author had a manuscript in progress when he died in 2004.

Robin Mawhinney said she talked with Senich’s widow, and asked about the book, but it wasn’t finished. Nothing came of that project.

Which didn’t particularly bother Mawhinney.

He said a couple other authors later expressed interest in writing his biography.

“I said no,” Mawhinney said.

Until that afternoon in Baker City when Robin and Lindsay, as he recalls, ganged up on him.

Lindsay wrote “The Sniper” based on dozens of hours of conversations with Mawhinney and Robin.

“All face to face,” Mawhinney said.

Although he had become somewhat used to talking about his combat experience in Vietnam since that initial flurry of publicity in the 1990s, Mawhinney said those were all relatively brief interviews that yielded similarly limited accounts.

“The Sniper” is different.

It has the detail and the thoroughness that a book allows.

“This is the whole story,” Mawhinney said. “I think Jim did a good job.”

Well, not exactly the whole story.

Mawhinney said the book focuses on his military career rather than on his childhood in Lake County, where his father, Charles, himself a Marine and combat veteran of World War II, taught his son to shoot.

Mawhinney laments that some of his favorite anecdotes — and the funnier ones, which predated his joining the Marine Corps at in October — weren’t included.

But those stories were preserved as well.

Robin plops down on a table in the couple’s shop a 2-inch thick stack of double-spaced sheets, held together by a three-ring binder, that is the unabridged manuscript.

Within are all the madcap exploits of a rambunctious Lake County boy.

Mawhinney said those extensive conversations with Lindsay awakened his memories, many of them dormant for decades.

He laughs as he recounts one of his most vivid, and favorite, recollections.

He spent quite a bit of time as a boy in Pine Creek, a village about 15 miles south of Lakeview near the California border. Mawhinney noticed that people coming out of the tavern were sometimes a trifle wobbly, and when they tried to slip a handful of change into a pocket, their aim often wasn’t true.

The quarters and nickels and dimes, though, frequently fell through the cracks in the wooden porch.

Mawhinney, with the cleverness of a child with a sweet tooth, figured out how to mold a wad of chewing gum at the tip of a stick, thrust it into the gap and snatch the coins, which he quickly exchanged for candy at a nearby store.

Reviving memories

Although working on the book with Lindsay yielded many memories, Mawhinney said he also relied on his squad leader in Vietnam, Mark Limpic.

“He kept everything — he had all my kill sheets,” Mawhinney said. “Without that I wouldn’t have been able to put it all together.”

Robin said Limpic was among those who have asked over the years when Mawhinney would agree to have his biography written.

Mawhinney laughs when he recalls a conversation with Limpic during a Marine Corps reunion that Robin arranged in Las Vegas.

Limpic asked Mawhinney why he was always assigned to work “in the hottest places” — a reference not to temperature (although it was almost always hot and humid in Vietnam) but to the number of enemy soldiers in the sector.

“You never complained,” Limpic said to Mawhinney.

Mawhinney’s response: “Good god, you don’t complain in the Marine Corps.”

Robin also remembers the rest of her husband’s reply: “Chuck looked at him and said, ‘do you think I liked being shot at all the time?’ We all laughed about that.”

Relief at book’s completion

After about five years of conversations and reading Lindsay’s draft chapters and revisions and writing the foreword, Mawhinney said that even though he never intended to have his biography published, he’s glad “The Sniper” is on bookstore shelves.

“It’s a relief that it was done — finally,” he said.

Mawhinney slowly turns the pages of color photographs showing him and his comrades in Vietnam.

He pauses on one page, and guffaws.

There he is, shirtless, holding in his arms the 240-pound sniper who went by the nickname Sugar Bear.

Mawhinney recounts a foot race to the mess hall against Sugar Bear, whose real name was Robert Bryant.

They met again, for the first time in more than 30 years, at a reunion that Robin arranged — without her husband’s assistance or even knowledge — around 2000 in Las Vegas.

“I had no clue what was happening,” Mawhinney said. “But we had a great time.”

Mawhinney said Bryant was drafted by an NBA team. He survived the war but died several years ago of cancer.

Mawhinney is silent as he goes through the pages, each photograph no doubt spawning memories of a place, and an experience, that was like nothing he had experienced before.

Or since, over all the years when each time he squeezed the trigger of a rifle it wasn’t with his life, or those of his fellow Marines, potentially at stake.

When it’s an elk, or a paper target, in the scope, that’s recreation.

Mawhinney expects to endure another bout of publicity, but after his experiences following Senich’s magazine article more than 26 years ago, at least he is accustomed to the attention.

Grudgingly.

Mawhinney still much prefers hunting big game to signing autographs.

He feels at home in the mountains rather than a convention center.

But Mawhinney also relishes any chance to honor his fellow Marines and all other Americans who served in Vietnam.

With his customary self-deprecation, he talked about this during a 1997 interview with the Herald.

“I pulled the trigger, but the reason it happened was because of the support I had,” he said. “Every individual over there was part of the same effort. I don’t feel like I should be treated or talked about any differently.”

“I never, ever planned on doing a book.”

— Chuck Mawhinney, Baker City resident who holds the Marine Corps record for confirmed kills by a sniper with 103 during the Vietnam War

Jim Lindsay thought he knew Chuck Mawhinney pretty well but he had no inkling of what his friend had done in Vietnam.

The topic didn’t come up when they met for beers at the Idle Hour tavern in Baker City.

Not on duck hunting trips either.

Indeed, Lindsay had long since moved from Baker City, back to the Willamette Valley near Albany in 1999, when he learned that Mawhinney was the most prolific sniper in the history of the Marine Corps.

About a decade after Lindsay moved, he was watching a military documentary on TV when suddenly there was Mawhinney’s face on the screen.

Lindsay was fascinated.

He had also become an author since leaving Baker City.

Lindsay wrote two novels — “Little Bastards” and “Swerve!,” both set against the backdrop of 1950s hot rod culture.

He became reacquainted with Mawhinney.

And they agreed to collaborate on a biography, with Mawhinney telling his story and Lindsay writing it.

“Chuck’s very quiet, but he’s got a lot of charisma about him,” Lindsay said in a phone interview on March 14, a week after his book “The Sniper,” was released. “He has a good memory. That was a long time ago when all this happened.”

Lindsay ended up doing a lot more, however, than listening to Mawhinney’s accounts of his time in Vietnam in 1967-69.

Lindsay also flew to Vietnam to visit military bases and sites where battles were fought during the war, including areas where Mawhinney operated as a Marine scout sniper.

Although Lindsay said he prefers to read — and write — fiction, he’s pleased with how “The Sniper,” his first nonfiction book, came out.

It includes a foreword written by Mawhinney.

Lindsay said his goal was to write “narrative nonfiction” — a true story that has some of the seamless, reader-friendly flow of a well-paced novel.

Although Lindsay said he enjoyed the dozens of hours he spent talking with Mawhinney and his wife, Robin — whom Lindsay said was a valuable resource in helping gather the information and keep timeframes straight — he did at times have trepidation about the project.

“I was worried about getting my nose in somebody’s life as deeply as I knew I would have to,” he said. “But the outcome was wonderful.”

— Jayson Jacoby

Chuck Mawhinney is asking residents who would like to have him sign their copy of “The Sniper” to wait for an event tentatively set for late May in Baker City. Details about the book-signing will be announced.