For more than a quarter century, Chuck Mawhinney’s unprecedented record as a Marine Corps sniper in Vietnam was unknown.

Hidden, just as the longtime Baker City resident was so many times hidden as he hunkered in the fetid jungle, his finger resting outside the trigger guard of an M700 Remington bolt-action rifle, his eye peering through its scope.

Had the matter been left to Mawhinney, his exploits likely would have remained concealed.

But then someone wrote a book.

And it was followed by articles in magazines and newspapers.

And eventually the truth was revealed.

Mawhinney, who grew up in Lakeview and moved to Baker City with his wife, Robin, in 1981, has the record for Marine snipers with 103 confirmed kills in Vietnam.

Mawhinney, who told his tales always grudgingly and always by deflecting attention away from himself and toward his fellow Vietnam veterans, died Feb. 12 at his Baker City home.

He was 74. Feb. 23 would have been his 75th birthday.

“Chuck was one in a million,” said Jim Lindsay, a former Baker Valley farmer who had a unique relationship with Mawhinney.

It was Lindsay, along with Robin Mawhinney, who convinced Chuck, after the decades, to finally tell his entire story.

Based on dozens of hours of conversations with Mawhinney, Lindsay’s book describes in detail Mawhinney’s Vietnam experiences, but it also explores his entire life, starting with his rambunctious childhood in the remote country near where Oregon meets California.

The 256-page book — “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time” — was released almost one year ago, in March 2023.

Mawhinney signed copies of the book in May 2023 at Betty’s Books in Baker City.

In an interview with the Baker City Herald a couple days after the book’s release, Mawhinney, with the gravelly chuckle that was one of his trademarks, explained how the book came to be.

“Well crap, I couldn’t get out of it.”

The book, with a forward written by Mawhinney, was something he never envisioned, or indeed wanted.

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

But then, in 1991, another Marine scout sniper wrote one instead.

A book begins to break the silence

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

Ward wrote in his book — “Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam” — 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 over 16 months as a sniper, along with 216 probable kills, a period that spanned parts of 1967, 1968 and 1969. Mawhinney, who graduated from Lakeview High School in 1967 was a teenager for much of his service in Vietnam.

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.

In the 1997 interview with the Herald, Mawhinney said that although he disdained speaking about himself, he agreed to talk about his experiences for one reason.

“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.”

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

A sniper whose skills and stories are in demand

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.

Mawhinney agreed to work with Senich on a book, but the writer hadn’t finished the manuscript when he died in 2004.

Mawhinney didn’t much mind, given his aversion to publicity.

A few other authors tried to convince him to collaborate on his memoirs.

He always said no.

Until one afternoon at his Baker City home, around 2018, when, as Mawhinney recalled in the March 2023 interview, Robin and Lindsay ganged up on him.

Lindsay wrote “The Sniper” based on dozens of hours of conversations with the couple.

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

Lindsay’s friendship with Mawhinney dates back much further.

Lindsay, who lived near Baker City from 1979 to 1999 and now lives near Albany, met Mawhinney around 1980 while having a beer at the Idle Hour tavern on Broadway Street in Baker City.

Although the men became friends and had many lengthy conversations, Lindsay, like almost everyone else, was unaware of Mawhinney’s record as a sniper.

Mawhinney never spoke of it, not during their beer-drinking sessions and not during the occasional duck hunt.

Lindsay had long since moved from Baker City when, about 2009, he was watching a military documentary that mentioned snipers.

Mawhinney’s face suddenly appeared on the screen.

Lindsay said that although he was amazed by Mawhinney’s record, he was hardly surprised by his friend’s reticence.

“Chuck was never one to gloat or brag about anything,” Lindsay said.

Lindsay recalls a conversation that he and Mawhinney had with another man, this during the period when the pair were having the conversations on which the book is based.

Mawhinney, in introducing Lindsay to the other man, mentioned the book that was then in progress.

“He said, ‘Jim’s writing a book about me,’ and it was like he was saying, ‘Jim mows my lawn,’ ” Lindsay said with a laugh. “It was no big deal to him.”

Lindsay said that after he found out what Mawhinney had done during Vietnam, he was so fascinated that he felt compelled to write about Mawhinney’s life — to try to understand “just what kind of a background it was that led to him being the Marine Corps’ all-time sniper. To go deeper.”

Lindsay said that throughout their friendship, and during their intimate conversations about some of the terrible things he experienced in Vietnam, Mawhinney was always candid and straightforward.

“The guy is so honest,” Lindsay said. “He never held anything back. The thing that was most important to him was that everything that went into the book was true.”

Lindsay said one of Mawhinney’s great fears was that the publisher would embellish the book with Hollywood touches.

That didn’t happen, Lindsay said, and Mawhinney was pleased.

The greatest compliment Lindsay received was from Mawhinney himself.

When Mawhinney finished reading the published book, he told Lindsay: “Jim, you hit it out of the park.”

“I felt so good,” Lindsay said.

Reluctant but charismatic

Mawhinney was something of a contradiction, Lindsay said.

Despite his instinctive dislike for talking about himself, Mawhinney had a powerful presence.

“He had a charisma about him,” Lindsay said. “He was the kind of guy that you’d want to be around. But he didn’t try hard to be that. He’d listen to anybody else’s stories before telling his own.”

Although Mawhinney became somewhat accustomed to public appearances, first during the 1990s and early 2000s after the initial wave of publicity following Senich’s magazine article, and then last year after Lindsay’s book was released, Lindsay said his friend was happier on a hunting trip, or driving.

Mawhinney’s affinity for speed dated to his childhood, Lindsay said.

It started with motorcycles. Mawhinney and a friend would race around the mountains near Lakeview.

After he returned from Vietnam, Mawhinney bought a bright red Pontiac GTO muscle car.

He also started his 27-year career with the U.S. Forest Service. Mawhinney was stationed at Mapleton, near Florence on the Oregon Coast, when he met Robin.

The couple have three sons, Don, Dennis and Cody.

“Chuck was a good father,” Lindsay said.

As a testament to his feelings about Mawhinney, Lindsay said he would make an exception to his reluctance for public speaking if Mawhinney has a funeral.

“I would get up and do the eulogy,” Lindsay said. “I wouldn’t do that for anyone else.”