Olive Drab

D Vautier
11/2006

When you get in the army all color disappears from your life, both physically and spiritually.  One of the first things you learn is “If it moves solute it; if it doesn’t paint it OD.  So everything is olive drab; the buildings, the barracks, the mess hall, the latrines, the vehicles, the equipment, the uniforms, everything as far as the eye can see for miles and miles is olive drab.  And all you see when out in the field is mud, mud and more mud and it all blends together, olive drab and mud, mud and olive drab into a kind of paste.  Real color no longer exists and has no place in the Army.  It’s a world devoid of color, depressing, despondent, and totally without imagination.

In 1964 the U. S. Army came out with a new color called NATO green.  Wow!  What a change!  To my eye the change was in name only.  We still called it OD, and it smelled like OD, and we still had to paint things that didn’t move OD.  Nowadays they have kind of a camouflage sand and green, which blends in with the dessert as well as the jungle—but it’s still OD to me.

When our platoon pulled motor pool every day at 1:00 PM we did the customary stuff; check oil, gas, water, battery, windshield wipers, spare tire, OVM (tire iron, jack, etc) but that only took 5 minutes or so.  The rest of the time we painted.  It didn’t matter if the vehicle needed paint, which it never did.  The idea was to be doing something when the sergeant came around.

Sergeant:  Vautier, how’s it going?
Me:  Just great serge.  I just thought my truck needed some more paint.
Sergeant:  Keep up the good work Vautier.

So every day I painted my truck, and every day the sergeant came around and asked me how things were going.  He never caught on that I was always painting my truck (he probably didn't care as long as I was doing something).  Every single day I spent about 5 minutes checking the oil, water and gas, and the rest of the time I painted. I had so much paint on my truck that it started looking like a tank.  I bet I used up more OD paint than anybody in the entire Army.  Instead of washing my vehicle it was easier just to paint it.  My most cherished hope was to spend every second of my three years in the service painting my truck and use up all the OD paint in the World and then they would have to switch to something like periwinkle, or mauve, or burnt umber.

But it didn’t happen.  They kept supplying me with OD, and I kept painting my truck.