Rafterman comes not from history but from Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, in which Lance Corporal Rafterman is a Stars and Stripes combat photographer sent up to Hue with the correspondent "Joker" during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Kubrick built his ruined Hue on a demolished gasworks in England, and the film's second half remains one of cinema's most unsparing depictions of urban combat. Behind the fiction stood real men: the military's own combat photographers and the Stars and Stripes staff who carried cameras instead of extra ammunition, documenting the war from inside it — and dying at the same rate as the Marines they followed. K&C sculpts Rafterman as the film's eager shooter — camera up and ready, an M16 slung at his side, in flak jacket and helmet, a Marine caught between two jobs. As the figure at the heart of the range's photography theme, he pairs with the McCullin-inspired "What Me Worry?" prisoner escort and the Marines cautiously advancing through the same Hue streets. Read the story of the real cameramen behind these figures in our feature on the photographers of the K&C Vietnam series. King & Country model VN131. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.
