Lauren Kay Johnson

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.

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REVIEWS

“A book about the stories a nation’s veterans—and parents and children—tell ourselves and each other when the truth is too painful to confront directly…The Fine Art of Camouflage is a new breed of memoir.”—Penthouse

“Johnson is a talented writer who aptly captures the emotional tensions and intellectual complexities of not only her experience, but the experience of war itself, from an unusual point of view . . . a refreshing new voice in the genre of war memoir.”—War, Literature & the Arts

“The Fine Art of Camouflage by Lauren Kay Johnson captured my attention from the first chapter . . . 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.”—Military Writers Society of America

“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.”—MicroLit Almanac

“Camouflage can exist on a number of levels. There is the basic military definition of disguising personnel, equipment, and installations to make them “invisible” to the enemy. There is the idea of blending into one’s surroundings to be unobserved, hiding in plain sight. There is the connotation of pretending, concealing, falsifying. One could add that there is also self-camouflage, where one pretends or conceals or falsifies to others and even the self. These latter connotations are more relevant to Lauren Johnson’s The Fine Art of Camouflage . . . [interweaving] all three phases of her military experience, along with the gradual peeling away of self-camouflage leading to a more truthful vision of self and others.”—Wrath-Bearing Tree

“As someone who served on a PRT this book really resonated with my experience. I remember the hope of helping people and the discouragement, challenge and frustration that came through the month the deployment dragged on . . . I am so thankful for the bravely Lauren showed in telling her story with real depth and meaning.”—Amanda Huffman for Airman to Mom

“A brave and heartfelt debut memoir, one that takes us deep inside the visceral reality of a woman at war. With Johnson as our guide, we taste the stale M&M’s, feel the uniform unsuited to our bodies, and struggle to carry a gun that is too big for our hands. At the heart, this is a story that asks the question: why do we serve? Her answer is at once brutally honest and ultimately triumphant.”—SUSANNAH CAHALAN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

“With stark honesty and an unflinching eye, Johnson redefines what words like strength and sacrifice mean in military service. A war memoir like you’ve never read before.”—BRIAN CASTNER, bestselling author of The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows

“The first book I’ve read in which a woman followed her mother into military service, The Fine Art of Camouflage is riveting. A spot-on account of being on a combat deployment as a woman, with fascinating insights into the ethical and emotional challenges of serving in a fraught environment. This is a book I will give to anyone considering joining the military, but its appeal goes far beyond that audience: it is a well-crafted exploration of the journey to finding one’s self as an independent person.”—KAYLA WILLIAMS, author of Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army

“The Fine Art of Camouflage heralds the arrival of a sharp new literary voice. From her family inheritance of duty to country, to her inner conflicts between being a good public affairs officer and a decent human being, to her chronicles of day-to-day life as a counterinsurgent in Afghanistan, Johnson writes with a fascinating blend of how-it-was immediacy and astute reflection. What a great memoir.”—MATT GALLAGHER, author of Empire City and Youngblood

“Johnson has written the rare first-person account of a woman going to war, but The Fine Art of Camouflage is so much more than that. It’s a deeply moving memoir of having her own mother go off to war when Johnson was a child. It’s a ruthlessly honest portrait of life in a war zone and of information warfare in particular. And it’s an unflinching recounting of Johnson’s growing doubts about the war in Afghanistan and her service there, of losing faith and attempting to find it again. I’m so glad I read this.”—AMY WALDMAN, author of A Door in the Earth and The Submission

“Beautifully crafted and deeply moving, The Fine Art of Camouflage is a memoir of Johnson’s dual deployments—one to help bring stability to a war-torn land, the other to discover the true meaning of service to country. Courageous and difficult undertakings both; thus, the wisdom and insight they yield are as captivating as they are hard-won.”—JERALD WALKER, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, National Book Award finalist

“In The Fine Art of Camouflage, Johnson writes movingly about her time serving in Afghanistan, as a woman who worked actively in a combat zone—a perspective we don’t hear enough about in media or literature. Her respect for the people she worked with in Afghanistan is admirable, and her cultural observations are riveting. There is so much more to this book too: thoughts on family, legacy, connection, efforts, and, ultimately, the way we care for the people we love. It is a gorgeous book.”—ANDRIA WILLIAMS, author of The Longest Night