More than a few of the figures in King & Country's Vietnam series were sculpted from specific photographs — actual combat images, taken by named photographers, at named battles, in 1968. This post is about two of those photographers and the figures their work inspired.

Both men were at the Battle of Hue in February 1968. The Tet Offensive had begun on January 30th, when Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces simultaneously attacked more than a hundred cities and towns across South Vietnam. Hue, the ancient imperial capital, became the costliest urban battle of the war for American forces — house-to-house fighting through a city designed for emperors, not assaults. U.S. Marines, ARVN troops, and the North Vietnamese Army fought through Hue for nearly a month. When the smoke cleared, two photographers walked out with images that would shape how the war was remembered. Their names were John Olson and Don McCullin.

John Olson

John Olson arrived in Vietnam in 1967 as a nineteen-year-old U.S. Army draftee. He had been highly motivated to be a combat photographer before he was drafted, and he hit the lottery on assignment: he was the only photographer attached to Stars and Stripes, the U.S. armed forces' own newspaper. As he later told C-SPAN:

"They gave me just total freedom to go where I wanted to go and do what I wanted to do. So I spent a year there photographing combat throughout the country."

When Tet broke out at the end of January 1968, Olson heard the fighting was worst at Hue and traveled there. He carried multiple cameras — black-and-white film for Stars and Stripes, color film for anything he might sell elsewhere. His sergeant and colonel had agreed he could syndicate his work to other outlets so long as it ran credited as "photographed by Stars and Stripes." That meant the same photograph might appear in Stars and Stripes, on the Associated Press wire, and in LIFE magazine — sometimes the same image, sometimes black-and-white in one place and color in another.

Over a few days at Hue, Olson made a series of photographs of eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-old Marines in house-to-house combat. They were jungle Marines — they had never fought in a city before. The most famous of his images ran in LIFE in color and showed an M48 Patton tank being used as a casualty evacuation vehicle. Wounded Marines lay across the tank's deck. A corpsman held an IV bag aloft over a shirtless Marine on what looks like a wooden door used as a makeshift stretcher. Around them, more wounded — bandaged faces, bandaged arms, exhaustion.

That photograph is on the left side of the hero image at the top of this post. The figure on the right — King & Country's Taking Care of a Buddy (VN179) — was sculpted directly from it. The corpsman cradling his fallen comrade, the chest wound, the discarded M16. K&C founder Andy has said the LIFE color version was where he first remembers seeing the photograph; decades later, he commissioned the sculpt.

Olson himself doesn't remember much of taking it:

"This is my most iconic photograph. I have little memory of when I shot this or how I shot this. I remember mortars coming in. I remember having shot this with a couple different lenses, but this is the single image from that that stands out."

The memory gap turns out to be part of the story. Years later, working on a 50th-anniversary Tet exhibit at a museum in Washington, D.C., Olson came across an Associated Press article published in Stars and Stripes on February 21, 1968 — the paper he had worked for. The reporter had credited a single eyewitness for an entire horrific combat account. The eyewitness was Olson himself:

"I read it quickly and the hair stood up on my neck. What the reporter had written was far more horrific than anything I'd seen. And then I went back and read it a second time slowly. And the reporter credited one eyewitness to all of the horror — and that was me. And I blocked it all."

For the same exhibit Olson tracked down the survivors of his photographs. The wounded Marine on the door-stretcher in the M48 photo turned out to be Private First Class A.B. Grantham. By the time Grantham reached the surgical station behind the lines, he was clinically dead. A U.S. Army captain and surgeon named Mayor Katz and his partner massaged Grantham's heart for forty-four minutes without success. Mayor finally told his partner he thought they should call it. His partner said, "Give it another minute." Grantham's heart started.

The K&C figure shows him on that door, just as Olson photographed him — between the moment he was carried off the floor and the moment he came back from the dead. The LIFE magazine photograph launched Olson's career; he was hired as the youngest photographer ever taken on at the magazine. He has since developed a process through his company 3D PhotoWorks that converts two-dimensional images into tactile reliefs that blind viewers can experience by touch — and his Tet exhibit uses that technology to make the Hue photographs accessible to blind veterans and visitors.

Sir Don McCullin

If Olson is the American photograph of Hue, Don McCullin is the British one. He arrived in Vietnam as a working photojournalist for The Observer and later The Sunday Times Magazine, with a few wars already behind him — Berlin in 1961, Cyprus, Congo. He would go on to document Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, and Beirut. He was knighted in 2017 for services to photography. Among the people who care about war photography, he is regarded as one of the finest of his generation.

In February 1968 McCullin was embedded with the U.S. Marines in Hue during the same days Olson was working. K&C's Andy has called McCullin's Hue work "among the very finest of any taken of any war at any time" — and three K&C Vietnam figures were sculpted from individual McCullin photographs.

The first is Wounded (VN128). The K&C set shows a Marine bandaging another Marine, gut-shot, in what looks like the rubble of a Hue building. It is the kind of moment McCullin photographed dozens of times across his career — the quiet, terrible work of trying to save someone before the next round comes in.

The second is What Me Worry? (VN181). The original McCullin photograph shows a Marine bringing in a captured, blindfolded NVA prisoner with hands tied behind him. Slung over the Marine's shoulder are two rifles — his own M16 and the prisoner's AK-47. On the back of the Marine's flak vest, painted in marker, is Alfred E. Newman from MAD magazine and his motto: What, me worry? That single visual collision — American countercultural humor on the back of a man walking out of the worst urban combat of the war — is why the photograph endures. K&C's figure preserves it, MAD mascot and all.

The third K&C figure from McCullin's Hue work is a portrait of McCullin himself, sitting cross-legged with his Nikon, based on a photograph of him taken in Hue by fellow photojournalist Nik Wheeler. I haven't carried that figure at Breagans yet, but I plan to. It's a rare thing in this hobby: a sculpt of the man behind the camera, sculpted from a photograph taken by another man with another camera, on the same day, in the same battle, with all of the wounded he was photographing somewhere in the next street over.

McCullin is now in his 80s. He has left the wars behind and lives in the English countryside, photographing pastoral landscapes and the occasional commissioned portrait. The work he made in his thirties and forties is what the Imperial War Museum, the V&A, and Tate Britain put on their walls.

Why this matters

This is a hobby of small figures and large stories. Some of the figures on my shelf are entirely invented — a uniform researched, a pose imagined, a regimental flag painted. Others are exact. The Olson and McCullin K&C figures fall into the second category. They are not abstractions of war. They are particular men, in a particular city, on particular days, captured by particular cameras held by particular photographers — and then translated, decades later, into objects you can hold in your hand.

When I look at the K&C Taking Care of a Buddy set, I am not just looking at a Marine corpsman attending a wounded Marine. I am looking at A.B. Grantham, on a wooden door, in a moment that briefly killed him. When I look at What Me Worry, I am looking at someone McCullin really walked past — and what someone in his platoon actually wrote on his flak jacket as a private joke against the worst week of their lives.

That specificity is what makes these K&C figures unusual in this hobby. It is also why I wrote about them.

If you want any of these in your own display, the three in-stock figures are linked above. The Don McCullin portrait figure (VN048) will land at Breagans when I get a shipment in. If you're researching a specific Hue photograph or figure and want to talk about it, write to me at daniel@breagans.com.

— Daniel