It’s not camouflage if it doesn’t fit the surroundings, as this story from John Plaster (The Ultimate Sniper) reminds us:
I was flying backseat in an OV-10 armed FAC (forward air controller) bird over the Ho Chi Minh Trail when the pilot and I simultaneously noticed a long line of leafy clumps down the middle of a major road.
We knew the North Vietnamese trained their soldiers to squat motionlessly if caught in the open by an airplane. We flew past, not hinting we’d seen anything, but in fact we knew we’d just seen a 2-mile line of marching soldiers.
Had these men taken one sideward step so their leaves fit the overlapping jungle, they would have been home free.
As it was, we went into orbit just over the horizon and 10 minutes later inserted the first of more than 50 air strikes. We cancelled other CCC/SOG (Command and Control Central/Studies and Observation Group) operations for two days just to keep bombing them, achieving what must have been one of the highest cross-border BDAs (bomb damage assessments) in all of 1971 — and all because their camouflage didn’t fit their surroundings.