Essay

Camouflage

By Douglas Lummis

In Okinawa, you occasionally see a young person wearing a green camouflage T-shirt or trousers, imitating the uniforms of the U.S. troops here. I suppose they think it looks good. Sometimes you can also see GIs walking around in these camouflage uniforms. The other day at the Naha Airport I saw a big military truck painted up that way.

This kind of leafy camouflage is designed to hide things in a jungle. It wouldn't work in a desert. In the sandy parts of Iraq, if you lay on the ground dressed like that, it would be like holding up a flag saying, "Here I am!" I wonder what areas of the world the U.S. military is imagining, when it issues its troops uniforms like that.

When I was in the U.S. Marines, I was in charge of a platoon equipped with nine jeeps. Each jeep was fitted with an anti-tank gun called a 106mm recoilless rifle. This gun was nowhere near as effective as the cannons that tanks have. And when you fired it, it raised a huge cloud of smoke and dust, which would show the tank exactly where you were. This meant that you had one shot only. If you missed, you had to put your jeep into reverse and back out of there as quickly as you could, because within seconds there would surely be a big explosion where you had just been.

This also meant that camouflage was everything. Without good camouflage, the tank would find you first, and you would not even have the chance to get that first shot. So the point was not to chase after tanks with these jeeps — that would have been suicide — but to camouflage them and wait for the tanks to come to you.

One of my squad leaders (a squad leader was in charge of three jeeps and their crews) was a sergeant named Luther Sanders. He was African-American, I think from Alabama. Given his soft-spoken, gentle manner, you would never guess he was a Marine if you saw him out of uniform. He was brilliant at camouflage. His jeeps would just disappear, like magic. I remember once the battalion commander came to inspect our camouflage. He said, "Well sergeant, show me where your jeeps are." Sergeant Sanders said gently, "Colonel, if you would just put out your left hand, you could touch one of them." It was a wonderful moment.

This was 1960, one of those rare periods when the United States was not at war with anyone. War seemed like a vague and distant possibility, and training was like a strenuous sport. It was fun if your body is in good shape

I left the Marines the next year; most of my comrades who extended their contracts ended up going to Vietnam. I never learned if the 106mm recoilless rifle was dispatched to Vietnam, or how it fared there. I expect that in Vietnam's jungles, it must have been useless. I also have no way of knowing what happened to Luther Sanders and the other men. I hope they got out alive and sane.

Shukan ST: March 9, 2007

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