The Fine Art of Camouflage

<p>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 <em>truth</em> in stories we read and hear from the media and official sources and in those stories we tell ourselves and our families.  </p><p> </p><p>A powerful generational coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of war<em> The Fine Art of Camouflage </em>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. </p>