News of his passing prompted Bob Bayer, a 1st Marine Division correspondent in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, to recall that the original Rafterman is still alive and well.
Bayer said he served alongside the late Gustav Hasford, author of “The Short-Timers,” the semi-autobiographical novel that inspired “Full Metal Jacket.”
“Another member of our unit was Eric ‘Rafterman’ Grimm,‘” Bayer told Stars and Stripes in a Feb. 19 email.
Grimm earned his nickname after an incident at The Thunderbird Club, an enlisted venue near 1st Marine Division headquarters outside Da Nang, Bayer wrote.
“There was a small stage in the club and one night there was a USO show consisting of a Filipina trio,” the former Marine recalled.
When Grimm arrived, the club was packed, and he wanted a better view of the performers.
“To do that [he] hoisted himself into the rafters and worked his way up near the stage,” Bayer wrote. “At some point the rafter he was on broke, and he crashed down onto a front row table. It was quite a spectacle. And from then on Grimm was referred to as Rafterman.”
Grimm confirmed the story during a phone call Tuesday from his home in Lake Havasu, Ariz.
Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Marines for three years and served in Vietnam as a combat correspondent, he said.
Most of Grimm’s work was for Sea Tiger, a Marine Corps newspaper, though a few of his stories appeared in Stars and Stripes, he said.
Hasford used the nicknames of Marines from his unit for characters in his book, including Rafterman, but those characters didn’t always reflect their real-life counterparts, Grimm said.
“Some of the empathy [the Rafterman character] had for people was probably more like me than some other people,” he said.
In the film, Rafterman and Joker, a combat correspondent played by Matthew Modine, head to the field in search of the truth during the Battle of Hue.
The battle, from late January to early March 1968, was a major engagement during the Tet Offensive, in which North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong fought against U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. The Americans and their allies ultimately recaptured the city after intense house-to-house combat.
Midway through “Full Metal Jacket,” another Marine, Cowboy, introduces his squad to Joker and Rafterman, saying: “They’re from Stars and Stripes; they’ll make you famous.”
Grimm, however, noted that his experience differed from the film’s portrayal.
“The story in Hasford’s book and in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ is fictional,” he said, adding that while he did go to Hue, it was only after the battle had ended.
“We went out looking for action, but most of the time it was just a walk in the sun,” Grimm said of his field assignments, which included stories on an amphibious operation and tunnel rats — troops who cleared underground enemy hideouts.
Combat correspondents in Vietnam had tremendous freedom to do their jobs, recalled Grimm, who later wrote for the Evening Outlook in Santa Monica, Calif.
“We could go out with these different units on operations, and we were just like one of the grunts,” he said.
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