Combat Barbie by M.C. Armstrong
The Fine Art of Camouflage
By Lauren Kay Johnson
MilSpeak Books, 2023
254 pages
In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Lauren Kay Johnson refers several times to Greg Mortenson’s 2007 best-seller, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at a Time. This intertextuality shines a sharp light on the unvarnished Afghanistan Johnson reveals in her fantastic new memoir. Three Cups of Tea was the inspiring “feel-good” story of a recently invaded country that an American humanitarian ostensibly transformed, one girls’ school at a time. Unfortunately for Mortenson, an investigative journalist named Jon Krakauer, who donated tens of thousands of dollars to Mortenson, decided to poke around and see for himself whether Afghanistan was indeed becoming a successful example of nation building via tea and teaching. What Krakauer discovered was that many of Mortenson’s schools stood empty and that many of Mortenson’s claims were fraudulent. As a result of Krakauer’s work, the state of Montana launched an investigation into Mortenson and his sponsoring institution, the Central Asia Institute, and disclosed that the author had misspent $6 million of CAI funding. Mortenson later repaid $1 million. In between the publication of Three Cups of Tea and Krakauer’s exposé, Three Cups of Deceit, Johnson deployed to Afghanistan as part of a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) with an optimism buoyed by stories like those of Mortenson. Now, after America’s recent messy exit from Afghanistan, Johnson offers her bold dismount.
I have spent the last fifteen years studying military writing, broadly, and post-9/11 soldier-writers, specifically. However, even as America now enters the third decade of “The Forever War” (we conducted over 300 missions in Iraq and Syria last year and Guantánamo Bay is still open), I still don’t quite know how to sell war stories to a public that loves books like Three Cups of Tea and unquestioningly supports new wars, but is terrified of learning the hard truths about them. So maybe this review is just for that small bubble of people who love to see their bubbles burst. In The Fine Art of Camouflage, the reader gets to spend time with a gifted author who served as an information operations officer in the Paktia Province of Afghanistan right after Barack Obama took office. In the early pages, you feel Johnson’s Obama-era idealism and her desire to change the world. You step into the shoes of a courageous woman who served the other side of the world and then dared to be skeptical about that well-intentioned service in public. Johnson’s memoir brilliantly straddles the fence between the starry-eyed marketing of Mortenson and the chilly exposé of Krakauer.
On the one hand, this is the account of Johnson trying to deliver freedom and democracy to the country she occupied. But it’s also the story of stories as weapons of self-defense. In an inventive moment, just before deployment with the PRT, Johnson imagines a fiction in which her mother, a veteran of the first Iraq War, cautions her, saying, “[B]e careful, Lauren. The military always has an agenda.” Some of Johnson’s most nuanced writing comes from these imagined interventions, her confabulation of a country where Americans are honest with each other. “In difficult situations,” she writes, “parents must walk the tightrope between silence and the pummel of truth. At seven, I needed the illusion of normalcy. At eighteen, would I have been better served by blunt honesty?” This question is a stand-in for every American who came of age (or refused to do so) during The Global War on Terror.
Johnson’s memoir strikes an admirable balance between riveting and reflective. Like Phil Klay, Matt Gallagher, Elliot Ackerman, Chelsea Manning, Erik Edstrom, Brian Turner, Shoshana Johnson, Benjamin Busch, Edward Snowden, Joseph Hickman, Kevin Powers, Kristen Beck, and so many other veteran-authors from these wars, Johnson’s book is marked by a pattern of what I call “martial cosmopolitanism” or “compulsory cosmopolitanism.” Distinct from the species of neoliberal cosmopolitanism one might associate with jet-setting CEO-authors like Bill Gates or Richard Branson, Johnson’s writing, like her time in Afghanistan, reflects a duty to something beyond profit. Her voice is worldly and exhibits a care for the people of Paktia Province and memorable characters like a detainee held without clear cause or “John” (“John wasn’t his real name”), a Christian interpreter “who pulled his alias from the Bible” and “prayed to Allah five times a day” and, thereby, convinced even his wife that he was “a devout Muslim.” Such cross-cultural attention to the daily fictions of real life is not just nifty in Johnson’s hands. Understanding the Other, whether you are “John” or Johnson, is often a matter of life and death when one is deployed. “I was learning,” Johnson writes, “to see information not just as a communication tool, but as a weapon.” In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Johnson’s sword becomes her scalpel.
The Fine Art of Camouflage is utterly compelling when Johnson repurposes the American propaganda she was ordered to deliver. Johnson struggles with the burden of the many half-truths and certitudes of her friends, collaborators, and commanders. Johnson constantly, self-consciously, and hilariously reminds us that she is trying to tell a story that will win the hearts and minds of not just the Afghans, but also her parents, herself, and an American public that would prefer the fiction of Mortenson’s non-fiction and would just assume Johnson behave like a pretty and quiet “Combat Barbie.” “Combat Barbie” knows a certain kind of American would rather see her as a strong and silent caricature rather than as a woman with character. And there are certainly some advantages to playing the “Barbie” part in a part of the world where patriarchy reigns supreme. But “Combat Barbie” can’t continue wearing her mask. Johnson believed in her mission until she didn’t. What I admire most about her story is what I admire in so many of the best books of the GWOT: the bold, worldly, and contrarian spirit of this public servant discovers a larger service through telling her tale and immersing herself retrospectively in the fictions, illusions, and fragilities of all the competing parties and tribes she witnessed in her conflict, including those of the military itself.
“Why was the military, notoriously closed off to vulnerability, the recipient of our care?” she asks.
This is a powerful question that deserves a longer pause than any book review can provide. From Johnson’s question squirms a horde of answers. In spite of the hundreds of thousands dead and the millions displaced by our wars, Johnson still cares enough about our country and military to tell her story with the kind of questioning humility that I call bravery. The Fine Art of Camouflage is that cup of coffee we all need after Three Cups of Tea. I encourage everyone to read this book if, for no other reason, than to experience a feisty and precocious daughter growing closer to her mother and then becoming a mother herself who wonders how to tell these war stories to her children. For remember, in America, the next war is always right around the bend.
M.C. Armstrong is the author of The Mysteries of Haditha, published in 2020 by Potomac Books. The Brooklyn Rail called The Mysteries of Haditha one of the “Best Books of 2020,” and Armstrong’s story was nominated for “Best Memoir” at the 2021 American Book Festival. Armstrong, who grew up in Winchester, Virginia, embedded with Joint Special Operations Forces in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2008. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. Armstrong is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, Criticism, Consequence Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Wrath-bearing Tree, Epiphany, War, Literature, and the Arts, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the guitarist and lead singer-songwriter for Viva la Muerte, an original rock and roll band. His first novel, American Delphi, was published in the fall of 2022 by Milspeak Books, and his study of post-9/11 veteran-activists will be published by Bloomsbury in 2024. You can follow him on Twitter @mcarmystrong.