Effort underway to build Marine Scout Sniper Memorial

Marine Corps veteran Tim Parkhurst’s efforts to preserve the legacy of the Marine Corps Scout Snipers is being honored in the Veterans of Foreign Wars #StillServing Campaign.

The VFW initiative highlights all veterans who continue to give back after the military and that they are more inclined to do so than their civilian counterparts.

Parkhurst, the founding president of the Marine Scout Sniper Heritage Foundation, graduated from scout sniper school in 1991 when he was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines at Camp Pendleton in California.

“The day I graduated from the school, I also became the team scout for the platoon because I was one of the senior guys there,” he said. “I was a young corporal. Here I was the team scout as a young corporal.”

Parkhurst then met his wife and left the Marine Corps in 1993. He rejoined the Corps in 1998.

“When they brought me back in, they made me a parachute rigger of all things ” he explained. “I spent the next 16  years of my career doing other things. My scout sniper time was way back in the day in the early 90s, but it was the best time I had in the Marine Corps.”

Parkhurst retired from the Corps in 2014 after spending 26 years in the Marines, He found his niche in the civilian world by working with a couple of veteran nonprofits. By 2018, he was on the board of directors of the USMC Scout Sniper Association. The association has a six-year term limit and Parkhurst left the board in December of 2023.

Parkhurst then became instrumental in establishing the Marine Snout Sniper Heritage Foundation, a separate independently operated subsidiary of the Scout Sniper Association.

“We did it so the Heritage Foundation will always have to answer to scout snipers,” he explained.

The mission of the foundation is to Remember the Sacrifice and Honor the Legacy.

“Our mission is to uncover that lost history, to build a memorial to honor our fallen and to put a name to every single individual that has served as a scout sniper who was killed in action and to educate the Marine Corps and the general public about the contributions we’ve made to our national defense,” he said.

Parkhurst soon learned from retired Marine Gunner and scout sniper Alex Carlson that no memorial existed for scout snipers. That led to an effort to build the memorial.

“We’re trying to raise $5 million, but the memorial is going to cost $3 million,” he said.

The remaining $2 million will be used to identify those who have served as Marine scout snipers.

“We need to identify our fallen and that’s going to take time,” Parkhurst said. “We know we’re still going to be identifying our fallen long after the memorial is unveiled.”

Semper Fidelis Memorial Park at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia has been selected as the site for the memorial.

“We’ve got one of the best sites in the park for our memorial,” Parkhurst said. “It’s on one of the highest elevations in the park and is back at the end of the new section. You can’t miss it. You just keep walking until you can’t walk anymore in the park.”

The concept for the memorial is a two-man sniper team, with the observer being a World War I Marine and the shooter being an Afghanization-era Marine.

“Those are the bookends of our time,” he said. “We have a beginning and an end. The Marine Corps got rid of us last year on active duty and so we have an end.”

Since the project began, the group has discovered that Marine Corps scout sniper history can be traced to World War I. Parkhurst said 450 snipers were trained by the Marine Corps in 1918 alone.

“We didn’t know that before and that’s shocking to us,” he said, considering how much Corps history is stressed to recruits in boot camp.

“We thought we were founded in Vietnam,” he said. “It’s not just a rumor. We have documents, we have photographs, we have orders of the commandant of the Marine Corps and letters to and from different commands that represent the formation of a formal program both in World War I and World War II.”

“People don’t really know anything about us,” Parkhurst added. “They just don’t. Part of the reason is because we don’t really know anything about ourselves and our history. The Marine Corps has failed to maintain that history.”

He stressed he isn’t bitter about that, explaining “it just is what it is.”

“The Marine Corps today, no one in the Marine Corps, not the commandant, not the commanding general of Manpower and Reserve Affairs, not the History Division, no one can tell you who served as a scout sniper going back to World War I,” Parkhurst said.

Assuming the fundraising effort is successful. Parkhurst anticipates the memorial being built in the next 24 months.

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Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com .