Lol...talked to a "Marine sniper"

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"I dont know about you other guys that have been through basic but to me the closest movie I could relate to, not saying its totaly exact, but even though I was Army, Jarhead was the closest that a movie has ever came to realistic as possible. If you want to see some of the reasons guys go nuts watch that movie, its depressing but good!"

Yeah, right. That movie was BS. The book was closer to reality but when the author "sold" it to the Hollywood folks he let them have their way with it. There was a bunch of garbage in the movie that just would not fly in the USMC. The first thing that comes to mind is a corporal running off at the mouth to a staff NCO. In the real USMC, (not Hollywood's version), you better expect to have your head handed to you if you spoke to to any staff NCO in that manner.

Read the book and watch the movie again. You will see that the author "whored" himself out to Hollywood.
 
There are guys who were in Swofford's STA platoon and the Bn commo guys who knew him who all say he more or less invented a lot of stuff in his book.

Can't find the list of cites (there was one in an older thread) but Swofford was about ready to get bounced out of the Corps for being a dirtbag and was taken to Kuwait because we needed the bodies and no one was getting let go. Similar to the Muslim soldier who was a trouble case but was taken anyway and ended up killing his own men.

When the bean counters put raw headcounts above quality Marines there will always be losers left in the mix.

A far better book about Boot Camp is called (cleverly) "Boot". It's way outdated now (not so much when I went through) but there's no ego-stroking BS.
 
There were Starlight scopes in Vietnam.

Not likely he was there at all in 1975 as combat troops were gone by March 29, 1973. That was the last day. I was there. After that the ARVN and VNAF were on their own. There were a few Marine embassy guards left in 1975, until the infamous bugout on April 30, 1975. That's it. Anything else would be black and this guy wouldn't be talking about that.
 
An acquaintance who really was/is a Marine and says he was a sniper (and I believe him- not a poser type) once mentioned using a 7mm Magnum in the service. Sounded a little off to me- I thought they went straight from .30 to .50 cal. Did the Marines ever use a 7 Mag?
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Don't know about the USMC, but the Secret Service counter snipers do (or did) use 7 mags.

Regarding Vietnam, it's tough to say. The conflict was such a quagmire that many different types of arms were issued and, as I understand it, many personal arms went as well. The 7mm RM was developed in 1962, so it's possible it was there. I would bet that .30-06 was the dominant round for sniper work, though. Heck, there were probably plenty of '03A4's there.


I do know one fellow (who I trust) that was there in '70-71 and was a DM. His weapon was a Winchester M70 in .30-06. Never asked him what the optics were. I also never asked the milion dollar question, and he never said.
 
I've got a great-uncle who was some sort of SF in Vietnam. He had problems for years afterwards, but is fine now. It's sort of a family rule that no one talks about it. I'd bet if a stranger asked him he would say he had never been in the army.

I had a boss who was a medic in Vietnam. He'll tell any funny stories or stories that showed how stupid the army acted at times, but will not say a word about combat except to explain how he got hurt. He would be lowered by winch from a helicopter when there wasn't a landing zone. Strap in the wounded, and then he'd go up last. During one pick up when it was his turn to go the helicopter came under fire and the pilot took off---slamming him into a tree. Messed him up pretty bad, but not enough for a discharge. He had a buddy over there who was a sniper and he said his buddy went nuts---ear necklaces and everything. A great guy, but he doesn't take too kindly to imposters.

Another boss was in the navy during WWII. He'd tell funny stories, and since his boat mainly chased subs any combat was basically dropping dept charges and looking for oil slicks and debris. Dry, technical, and passionless. He once talked about once being around Alaska where he was shooting special shells (he said it was some kind of phosphorus) into ice caves. He said you could see a dim glow---he thought it might have been heaters---and that's where you fired the shell. He said that you could see burning bodies tumble down the mountain side sometimes. Just talking about that incident visibly upset him.

My experience from these guys verses some that I know were posers has lead me to believe that those who will freely or even somewhat happily talk about combat should be taken with quite a bit of salt.
 
I do know one fellow (who I trust) that was there in '70-71 and was a DM. His weapon was a Winchester M70 in .30-06. Never asked him what the optics were. I also never asked the milion dollar question, and he never said.
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Well, I recall that Carlos Hathcock's Model 70 .30-06 wore a 3x9 Redfield that was bought from a sporting goods store on Okinawa, or that's what I picked up from the History Channel.

He once talked about once being around Alaska where he was shooting special shells (he said it was some kind of phosphorus) into ice caves. He said you could see a dim glow---he thought it might have been heaters---and that's where you fired the shell. He said that you could see burning bodies tumble down the mountain side sometimes. Just talking about that incident visibly upset him.
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This sounds like WP rounds- White Phosphorus. I'm not certain how many ways white phosphorus was applied in WW2, but a friend of mine who served in Korea told me they had WP bazooka rounds. He said they were anti-tank, but actually they were anti-personel (as in personel inside the tank). That WP stick to you and burns through. From what I understand, that scene in "We Were Soldiers" where they had to cut the WP out of that one guy... that scene was accurate. Some of my online buddies on another board have discussed the use of WP hand grenades in Vietnam... said they'd rather deal with HE grenades than WP.

I'd say the sight of people dying after you fired the round would be upsetting. That is, to a sane, thinking, caring man.
 
I worked with a Navajo indian once at a gun store. Said he was a sniper during Vietnam. When I asked a his kills (I was pretty young at the time). He said "5 kills, 3 men, 2 women". And that was all.

Thought he was joking...but now that I think about it. I'm not so sure.
 
Growing up working in the family pawn shop in old East Dallas, I met several 'snipers' who were in Vietnam. In fact, whenever folks volunteered their service information as part of doing business with us, it was because they were snipers. We had another employee that served in Korea. He was amazed (sarcasm) and noted that there were sure a lot of snipers that moved to Dallas after the war and became construction workers and he pondered why so many snipers did business with our pawnshop. Either I grew up in sniper haven or there were a lot of guys that maybe took a singular shot at a target while in the war and because it was a sniping type of shot had designated themselves as snipers...or maybe most were just were wannabes.

So why would these guys just volunteer information about being snipers? Simple. For whatever reason, they had failed to fully integrate into society with state ID or DLs and still retained their military IDs that they used for legal identification. Of course, the military ID didn't say they were snipers. That had to be verbalized.

And of course, not all guys in construction with military IDs claimed to be snipers, but an unrealistic number did.
 
...and sometimes it's TRUE

I struck up an acquaintance with a guy who let it be known, in casual conversation, that he had not only be a Marine scout-sniper, but also on the LAPD SWAT team. Bull-poop meter is over to the peg, but he's not making such a big deal about it, and nothing he's said is demonstrably untrue, so I let it be. We had other common interests and friends, so the whole "Sniper-SWAT-"Executive Protection" thing sorta died down.

Then, one day, he invites a few of us over to his townhouse for a small party. Well, he was the real deal. I saw his Ghillie suit (kept it for some reason), his reloading setup, his custom-built rifles, his shooting scrapbooks and notes, pictures of him with others in his Scout Sniper class, pictures of him at the LAPD academy and later with some of his SWAT squaddies, etc.

He gave a vivid description of the final exam in Scout Sniper school(he failed once). This was long before the proliferation of this information via cable/sat TV, and his description was confirmed in detail by TV documentaries. Not everyone is a poseur. I count myself among a very few who've actually met the real McCoy.
 
Well, they aren't exactly as scarce as hen's teeth.

Right next to the 1st MARDIV HRST Master school I attended (not a big quonset, a real single story building, thanks Aggie's Rev) was the 1st Div Sniper School. You've got Bn Recon guys who happen to score a slot, the Anglico guys (I'm pretty sure they can get school seats too),the Force guys with actual Sniper billets (one per team?) and then the actual SS guys in STA platoon, each division has a large handful of school-trained snipers.

Whether or not an individual Marine was actually in a sniper billet for any length of time (and presumably got shots off with one of the precision rifles in wartime) is a different story. But the school itself isn't some super-secret, elite compound. We had to borrow their garden hose cause somebody cut the wrong end off ours and in return we invited them to our barbeques. They're just Marines. Kinda scary Marines. :D
 
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...and sometimes it's TRUE
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Yes it is. He wasn't a sniper but I had the privelege of working a few years for one of the surviving 5th Rangers that climbed the cliffs at Pont du Hoc. He was actually quite free in telling us stories of his combat experiences, including the climb. I do know he suffered from violent nightmares for ~ 20 years afterward. I'm afraid he was a bit of an alcoholic too. While I knew him he went to the 50th anniversary reunion for his unit and told us a few stories from that. Like I said, it was a privelege to know him.

One of the more memorable things he said to me was, "You ever kill a man with piano wire?"

I'm like, "Uh, no."

He says, "You don't want to."

I'll take his word for it.

Which now reminds me of this other guy. Little old decrepit looking thing. Wanders around the local strip mall mostly these days. I always see him and his wife together in one of the different restaurants there, I never gave them a second thought. We know each other enough to say hello. One day I'm sitting near them and he's approached by some guy that started a conversation with him concerning his WWII service. Turns out this little old guy was part of the mission in the Philipines to save the Nurses and orphans from the Japs. There were only 60 of them on the mission, here right in front of me was one of them. I overheard him say, "When we got there, there were no Japs. They had all run away." Some day when the opportunity arises, I plan to pay for his and his wife's lunch.
 
It is a proud tradition in the military to tell tall tales, and BS to no end. What drives me wild are those who dont even make an attempt for their malarkey to be beliveable. I.E. we have a Nuke Electrician on my boat, super athlete!!! All-State in: football, baseball, soccer, track, hockey, wrestling......, curling, and underwater basket weaving. Can shoot a penny with iron sights at 200 yards, but never willing to come out and shoot with us.

And my favorite:

EM3: "Seagrams 7 is a bourbon."
Me: "Are you demented? It says blended Canadian whiskey on the bottle!!!"
(pointing at bottle with look of utter shock)
EM3: "What! No its not!"
(hands bottle pointing to lable)
EM3: "Exactly, blended Canadian whiskey, they just didnt print the bourbon
part"

I have no doubt that this Nuke EM is going to get out and spend the rest of his life regaling listeners with stories about how he got to drive the ASDS and go on ops with seal teams.

As for me, i boil water to defend my country, and nary a need to lie about that.
 
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/pontduhoc.aspx

By spring, the stage was set for the massive Allied invasion. Rudder's Rangers spent considerable amounts of time in detailed training, preparing for what many believed was an impossible task, or at the least, an undertaking that would result in heavy casualties to the attacking force. Rudder had assigned Companies D, E, and F of the Second Ranger Battalion to scale the cliff, leading the overall attack with the specific responsibility of destroying the field guns. Companies A and B, accompanied by the entire Fifth Battalion of six companies, would wait on the landing crafts below marking off time, while waiting for a signal that the advance attack had been successful. Then, these reinforcements would scale the prominence. If the signal was not received within thirty minutes of the initial assault, the waiting force of Rangers were to land on Omaha Beach and force-march behind Ponte-du-Hoc to seize it from the rear.
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Apparently the initial attack was succesful. There is no doubt that he was 5th Ranger and no doubt he climbed the cliffs.
 
Correction, he climbed cliffs but apparently not the ones at Pont du Hoc.

My error...

http://www.ranger.org/rangerHistoryWorldWarIIBattalions.html



The Fifth Battalion Rangers broke across the sea wall and barbed wire entanglements, and up the pillbox-rimmed heights under intense enemy machine-gun and mortar fire and with A and B Companies of the 2nd Battalion and some elements of the 116th Infantry
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A little more:
As Colonel Schneider's first wave, Companies "A" and "B" of the 2nd Rangers landed at Vierville, they were cut to pieces by massive German machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire. Colonel Schneider diverted his remaining forces, the entire 5th Rangers, to the east. Approximately one mile and ten minutes later, the 5th Infantry Battalion landed intact astride the boundary between Omaha Dog White and Red Beaches.

Schneider immediately ordered the battalion to proceed to rallying points by platoon infiltration. Four holes were blown in the wire that trapped the American forces on the beach. Rangers poured through those gaps in the wire and stormed the crest of the smoke covered bluffs, taking the German defenders by surprise.
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I'm just learning of all this as I read. Now I'd like to talk to him again but I haven't seen him in years.
 
Just read this thread and thought I would add a story.

A couple years ago I was attending the Blade Knife show here in Atlanta. I was standing in the Strider Knives booth drinking a Guinness when a older man asked if I had one for him. Heck, I didn't know the guy from squat but he was friends with the Strider guys so I figured he was a good guy. He said his name is Chuck and gave him a beer. We started talking and I found out that he did training for various police departments.

Later that night when I was at the bar this same gentleman and I stuck up a conversation. The more I talked with Chuck the more I liked him. I found out how he meet the Strider Guys and what he did for a living. I also found out that he was a Vietnam vet and a sniper. All of a sudden a light went off in my head - The same Chuck I had been speaking with over the past couple hours of so was Marine Sniper Chuck Mahwhinney.

Getting back to the original topic, Chuck was a modest guy who didn't talk about himself like he was a God or not. A good salt of the earth person. He is definately a man who has been there and done that, but he didn't have to brag about it like man this original thread was created for. I am always suspicious of people who brag about things and think that most are full of it or only 5% of what they are saying is true as it relates to them.
 
Carebare,

When I attened HRST school in 1997 they had moved it to one of the single story squadbays in Camp Margarita. Anglico and Recon were still down the road from Edson range (never could recall the name of the camp where they are at)
 
Having grown up in a military family (men in our family have served clear back to the French and Indian War) and spent a little time around around the "real Rambo's":rolleyes: I've found that the real deals just don't draw attention to themselves.
One of the best examples was the father of one of my best friends. We went to church together and to me, his father was just a normal guy. Short, fat, bald, a real estate agent who fell asleep every Sunday in church.
Found out from my father who was a career NCO in SAC, that the guy was one of the original OSS guys from WWII and spent roughly two years in German occupied France. He would never speak about it other than to say that he served during WWII. I've found that that is much more common than the guys volunteering details of amazing exploits. Most really down play what they did and experienced.
 
I used a Scoped Springfield, from the beach at Point Du Hoc, on Call Of Duty 2. Does that make me a sniper ? :D

j/k, but it is an awesome game, and gave me even more respect for those who really stormed up that beach and climbed those cliffs. My hats off to you gentlemen, thank you.
 
As a kid, I listened to my granddad tell stories of his WW2 exploits, including Normandy. He personnaly took pictures of the dead jews on railcars, watched a german dive bomber get shot down over his camp, etc.

Every time I see that footage of the D-Day invasion, I always wondered if gramp were on that footage.

Much to my suprise, I noticed in old photos, that gramp was wearing a "pilsbury dough boy" hat at a family BBQ. I inquired to my mother why this was, about a year ago.

"Well, he was a chef", was her reply.

"he landed at Normandy a few days after the invasion"

Not implying that he ever lied to me, or even stretched the truth. Just that as a kid, I just assumed that with the really cool stories I heard, gramp must have been SGT. Rock.

But, yes, there were cooks in WW2.

And my infantry pedigree is now in ruins.
 
My father's father- he died back in 1997- was a truck driver during and after WW2. But he did go in on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He told me it was he worst feeling he ever had, but didn't go into too many details. During the Battle of the Bulge, he and his unit had to fight their way from Antwerp, Belgium to the units they were resupplying at Bastogne. I know this partly because of his stories and partly because I saw a letter of appreciation that was addressed to all transport personel who worked out out Antwerp between November 1944 and January 1945. Grandpa drove heavy trucks and parts of his job included transporting supplies, German POWs, and tank retreival as he drove wreckers too.

My mother's father was an infantryman in the South Pacific. I grew up with his stories too, of a couple of firefights he was in and men he knew... some made it home and some didn't, and some things he recalls on the troop ships like the time they shot down he suicide pilot that hit the water between two troop ships so hard it didn't even splash. And how his brother was a driver for officers in France and wouldn't talk about his experiences.

"Well, he was a chef", was her reply.
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You know, our guys hafta eat to keep doing their jobs. To me the cooks are just as deserving of our respect and appreciation. It's just too bad hearing that so many former cooks feel like they hafta make out like they were "Rambo" to impress everybody.

And my infantry pedigree is now in ruins.
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I wouldn't worry too much about it.:cool:

BTW, on one of my jackets, I have a USMC Gnny.Sgt.'s pin. That don't make me a Gnny.Sgt. What it does mean is that my 2nd cousin who IS a Gnny.Sgt. and Vietnam veteran thought enough of me and what I was doing at the time (a college class on Vietnam) to pin it on my collar. It was a total surprise to me too. I'm proud enough to have that that it ain't coming off my collar except for if I get that jacket dry cleaned. If somebody has a problem with it I'll explain he situation if they'll let me. If not, it's their problem.
 
Correction, he climbed cliffs but apparently not the ones at Pont du Hoc.

My error...
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No worries. The story of 2d battalion's climb is one of those things the RI's of 4th RTB drilled into our heads during City Week, and reinforced at Camp Rudder during Mountains. I have no doubt that your friend did a climb at Omaha. I went to Normandy for the 50th Aniversary in 1994 and walked down to the shore. I looked back and was amazed at how tall and steep the bluffs over looking the beach actually were. It gave me an immensely greater appreciation of what those men did that day.
 
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