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MWSA Review
The Fine Art of Camouflage by Lauren Kay Johnson captured my attention from the first chapter. “My boobs hurt. My body armor was designed for men and, for obvious reasons, didn’t fit perfectly.” This is the beginning of a book that is hard to put down.
Lauren Johnson serves her country for the first time as a member of a military family at the age of seven when her Army Reserve nurse mother deploys during Desert Storm. For this child, it is traumatic. It is heart-wrenching. Lauren hates having her mother gone, but ten years later, wanting to emulate her mother, she enlists in ROTC and is eventually deployed to Afghanistan.
As an information officer, young Lieutenant Johnson acts as a liaison between the U.S. Army and the Afghan people to help promote a sense of nationalism among the Afghan people, supporting the mission of “connecting people to their government.” She deals in sound bites, base tours, presentations, media lectures, and newspaper articles. Halfway through her tour, Lauren finds herself losing her optimism and questioning whether the effort in the war-torn country is going to change anything. One day, she realizes there is no ideal plan due to cultural differences, bureaucratic red tape, and politics on both sides.
As a reader, I felt I was with Lauren Johnson on this journey. I felt her disillusionment growing in the effort to do her job of painting a positive picture. I felt the changes she experienced in a war zone, wondering when she would be the next victim of a random IED. Author Lauren Johnson’s writing is stirring and evocative.
Review by Nancy Panko (April 2024)
Author's Synopsis
Lauren Kay Johnson is just seven when she first experiences a sacrifice of war as her mother, a nurse in the Army Reserves, deploys in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade later, in the wake of 9/11, Lauren signs her own military contract and deploys to a small Afghan province with a non-combat nation-building team. Through her role as the team's information operations officer-the filter between the U.S. military and the Afghan and international publics-and through interviews and letters from her mother's service, Lauren investigates the role of information in war and in interpersonal relationships, often wrestling with the truth in stories we read and hear from the media and official sources, and in those stories we tell ourselves and our families.
A powerful generational coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of war, The Fine Art of Camouflage reveals the impact from a child's perspective of watching her mother leave and return home to a hero's welcome to that of a young idealist volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan who, war-worn, eventually questions her place in the war, the military, and her family history-and their place within her.
Format(s) for review: Paper and Kindle
Review Genre: Nonfiction—Memoir/Biography
Number of Pages: 270
Word Count: 88000