Not to dispute Tom, who painted these vehicles, but my memory of observing vehicles on the roads in MERDC is that there were both hard and soft edges, sometimes on th esame vehicles, i.e., the 40% areas being sprayed and the 10% areas being brushed. I double checked over at Global Security and clearly, both soft and hard edged camo patterns are documented.

Much like German camouflage of WW2, before factory NATO schemes, we had to paint vehicles with whatever was handy. Normally we used the paint guns but some patterns were often painted by hand using paint brushes like the type you'd paint your house with.

Wasn't there a wonderful example of the DUALTEX camouflage posted on this site recently?

BTW the Tet scenes in Full Metal Jacket were filmed in East London and Kent (mostly the former Beckton gas works for the urban fighting) so it wasn't the Philippines Army :-)

David

For sure the ones that came from the Depot were sprayed, and those would have had softer, more blended edges. And depending on the resourcefulness of the Warrant Officer in the Motor Pool, it wouldn't be surprising that some units set up a nice sprayer to accomplish the requirement.

My unit just gave us the drawings, large cans of the paint, and standard hand held brushes and said, "Get it done, there'll be an inspection on Monday morning."

As far as the howitzers were concerned, that actually made fairly good sense. At the time we still had the short tube M109s. During the summer of 1974 these were replaced by the long tube M109A1s which came pre-painted from the Depot and were much more professional looking.

In modeling the vehicles from my unit from that period, I typically give the completed vehicle (less wheels and tracks as Gino mentioned) an overall coat of OD, and then apply the pattern colors by hand as the real vehicles were just as "rough".

Bottom line, for that period in Germany (about early 1973-1977), you'd find a total mix of hand painted, sprayed, and black or white bumper numbers.

Tom