Vol. 03 No. 09
Q&A with Wesley Morgan
This week I was able to catch up with journalist and author Wesley Morgan. Wesley has been covering the US wars Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007 and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico. He is also the author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley. This is Combat Threads' first interview and we talked to Wesley about his new article in New Lines about how, as he says, “everything became MultiCam and MultiCam became everything.” As longtime readers know, this is a subject I have covered before and I was fortunate enough to talk to Wesley about for his story. Wesley was able to fill me in on how his story turned out, how video games played a key role in popularizing MultiCam, a bit about Tiger Stripe, and how looking at gear and uniforms can help tell the broader history of conflict.
Combat Threads: So you wrote this story about how MultiCam is now everywhere. How did you come to this story?
Wesley Morgan: I noticed MultiCam on a Green Beret in Afghanistan in 2009, or a few Green Berets, and in the decade and a half since then, it has been hard not to notice is this one camouflage pattern has just kind of taken off and taken the world by storm. First with the special operations forces of the world, then the conventional militaries of the world, and then also just kind of non-state actors and militia groups all over the place. When I went down and took photos on January 6th of the insurrection, there was a whole lot of MultiCam in the crowd.
You notice it now in Taliban propaganda(see video below). This is the camouflage that the Americans and Brits and Australians who they fought against for all those years wore, especially the special operators, and now Taliban special operators wear it.
CT: You just touched on it, but do you remember the first time you saw MultiCam?
WM: I had done two Iraq trips, and then my first Afghanistan trip was in the spring of 2009. I remember doing an embed with a set of Green Beret teams that were in Wardak Province, south of Kabul. The Green Berets obviously had more leeway in what uniforms they wore than the conventional military did. So what you did not see on them so much, was the gray ACU Universal Camouflage Pattern that all the rest of the army wore at that time. I remember noticing there was one group of Green Berets that were all wearing the old woodland pattern camouflage, and that was because their ANA [Afghan National Army] commando partners wore that, so that was to blend in with them. But then I also remember there was a team that wore a mix of woodland and other stuff, including a bunch of this MultiCam. It was different to me. I don't know whether I had seen it online before that, but that was the first time that I saw it in the wild.
CT: Can you tell me how the video game industry played a role in popularizing MultiCam on a large scale?
WM: this was something I didn't understand until I wrote the article because I'm not a gamer, I wasn't familiar with the games that it first appeared in. But it helped answer a question for me: How did MultiCam gain popularity outside the narrow Special Operations circles that it was existing in? How did people outside those circles come to associate it with eliteness and with Special Operations forces?
You weren't really seeing photos of Special Operators back then. I mean, now you see it constantly on Instagram, this flood of photos of JSOC guys, SAS guys, whatever, from back in the day. But at the time, those photos were not public. It was very, very rare to see photos of Special Operations forces back in the early years of the war, other than the initial push in Afghanistan and the initial push in Iraq where there were a lot of photos.
So it seems like video games, in particular, Tom Clancy's: Ghost Recon franchise, stepped in and it familiarized video game users with the connotation of MultiCam as the camouflage of Special Operations forces.
In 2005, when Delta Force was starting to field MulitCam in Iraq, at this LA video game expo, a video game artist encountered MultiCam at the Army Natick labs stand at this expo. He asked them about it and they explained to him what they were doing with it and what it was. I don't think they gave him a whole lot of detail about like, "Hey, this is what Delta Force wears," but he was impressed enough and excited enough by it that he took it back to Red Storm Entertainment, and it wound up being worked into the next expansion pack of Tom Clancy's: Ghost Recon game, which involved a Special Operations mission up in Central Asia.
Then the next iteration of the game after that featured it much more prominently. The main character wore it. It's on the cover of the video game. So by 2008, you're not seeing MultiCam in photos in the news from embeds, but you are seeing it in video games on Special Operations guys. So it's art mimicking life, but before we could really see the “life” from outside.
CT: You'll appreciate this, just as a quick aside. I was out to lunch yesterday in SOHO, in Manhattan, and at this restaurant that was a little too trendy by half. But the hostess was wearing MultiCam pants and just straight fatigues.
WM: Oh, absolutely. It's going to be really interesting to see what are the camouflage relics of the war on terrorism that persists over time, and what do they connote. Because MultiCam, at one time, had this connotation of eliteness, and I think in some ways it still does, and that's why it's worn aspirationally by a lot of people who are not Special Operations forces. But for actual military veterans over the past decade of many armies, it's just their regular camouflage now and it doesn't signify what it once did.
Whereas there are some other patterns to come out of the wars, I mean, like the Tiger Stripe. The legacy of Tiger Stripe as a pattern of eliteness is certainly one that has been perpetuated by Iraq and Afghanistan, where Tiger Stripe and its variants were very closely associated with the CIA its Afghan and Iraqi surrogates.
CT: I know this is a little off-topic, but could you maybe talk a little bit about that and how that came to be?
WM: I think is basically through nostalgia. When the CIA and with help from the Green Berets were standing up its militias that would become its Afghan surrogate commando forces, the CTPTs in the early years of the war in Afghanistan, a lot of those guys on the American side had been taught by old Vietnam hands, both in the Special Forces and at the Agency. On the agency side, there were still Vietnam veterans around and I've talked to a couple of them, guys who were involved in the early years in Afghanistan and had also been involved in the Phoenix Program back in Vietnam. So I think it's a visual artifact of the fact that there is DNA from Southeast Asia in the CIA's Afghan surrogate programs. You see both a desert tigerstripe version and a more traditional one. But when you see pictures of special operators wearing that, typically that's because they were on a rotation on an Omega team attached to a CIA base. Not a hundred percent, but it's a clear visual indicator of the CIA's covert role in the war.
But some of these things can help you tell the history, too, if you're attuned to them and because people supply you with photographs. When I was doing interviews with infantrymen who fought up in Kunar and Nuristan in 2006, I was given a lot of photos. In some of those photos, you can see that on the first trip that an infantry battalion commander took way up to the Waygal Valley in the summer of 2006 as US forces were expanding to this very remote place, there is in the background of many of the photos a guy in desert Tiger Stripe. So I go and ask, "Well, who is this guy? Did the CIA guys go along with you?," and that helped open the door to understanding more about, well, what was the CIA's interest in this area, and what in fact had their role been in whispering in the conventional military's ear to say, "Hey, yeah, you might want to go establish an outpost up in that area. It's a place of interest to us"?
CT: MultiCam becomes popular in video games and with Special Operations forces. How does it get popular to wear in the US?
WM: I think this just has to do with the lionization of Special Operations forces. I mean, there is our culture reveres the military and of the military, it especially reveres Special Operations forces. So, there's a natural imitation that happens.
I mean, to me, one of the biggest vectors, I think, is police forces and aesthetic imitation of Special Operations forces especially by SWAT teams. Take the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, they adopted MultiCam because they actually worked very closely with JSOC, including on deployments overseas, and it makes a lot of sense for them to do so. Then maybe you've got a Border Patrol tactical element that adopts MultiCam because they have a fairly paramilitary mission operating out in terrain and vegetation, and it makes sense for them.
But eventually, what happens is you start seeing it become adopted as the standard tactical uniform of many SWAT teams and other SWAT-like police forces, even when they're in urban environments and suburban environments and all these places where we would traditionally not expect to see police wearing camouflage, and it can create confusion.
CT: Where's the strangest place that you found MultiCam?
WM: For a long time, it was very closely associated with the Azov Brigade, the far right unit in Ukraine. They've been using it since 2015 and they so strongly identify with it that there is an Azov-affiliated metal band called “My Skin is MultiCam.” But more recently, it is the semiofficial uniform of the Wagner Group. But I think probably the strangest is seeing it on the Taliban Interior Ministry Special Forces propaganda videos. I mean, that's incredibly bizarre for me to see.
I have no explanation for this, but I found one photo that shows some [Chinese] government-affiliated Boy Scout-type thing and these little children training on little practice mortars, and they're wearing MultiCam.
CT: What's something that didn't make it into the story you’d want to share?
WM: Well, one anecdote that I'll share that I had in the draft of the story at one point was, I remember being in the Pech Valley in 2010, and the commander in the Valley was a guy who had just come from the Ranger Regiment to command this infantry battalion. So he'd been wearing MultiCam, but now he was in this battalion of regular troops wearing their ACUs, which were so ill-suited to the mountains that they were operating in with all this greenery.
I remember him telling me that he knew that later in the deployment, his guys would be switching to MultiCam as part of the broader fielding of it to infantry forces in Afghanistan. He said to me, “yep, the boys are going to be living large when they get that stuff." He understood the tactical value it would add, but that was not what he was smiling about. He was smiling about just how they were going to enjoy it. They were going to feel special and elite when they got these new uniforms.
Till next time,
C.W.M.
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