Ghillie Suits

Ghillie Suits

A Ghillie, or yowie suit is a type of camouflage clothing designed to resemble heavy underbrush. Typically, it is a net or cloth garment covered in loose strips of cloth or twine, sometimes even made to look like leaves and twigs. Snipers and hunters with extreme requirements for going undetected in wilderness areas use a ghillie suit to blend into their surroundings. The ghillie suit was developed by Scottish gamekeepers as a portable hunting blind. Lovat Scouts, a Scottish Highland regiment formed by the British Army during the Second Boer War, is the first known military unit to use ghillie suits. In 1916, Lovat Scouts went on to become the British Army's first sniper unit. The name derives from ghillie, the Scots Gaelic for "boy", in English especially used to refer to servants assisting in hunting or fishing expeditions. A ghillie dhu is a type of tree spirit that is supposed to disguise itself in leaves and vegetation.

A US Marine sniper wearing a ghillie suit.

Construction

High-quality Ghillie suits are commercially manufactured, but military snipers generally construct their own unique suits. Proper camouflage requires the use of materials used in the area a sniper will operate in. Making a Ghillie suit from scratch is time-consuming, and a detailed, high-quality suit can take hundreds of hours to manufacture and season for use; however, Marine snipers are often required to customize their own suits to the environment in a matter of minutes.
Ghillie suits can be constructed in several different ways. Some military services make them of rough burlap flaps or jute twine attached to a poncho. Army ghillie suits are often built using either a battle dress uniform (BDU), or a pilot's flight suit or some other one-piece coverall as the base.
On the base, rough webbing made of durable, stainable fabric like burlap is attached. A nearly invisible material like fishing line is used to sew each knot of net to the fabric (often with a drop of glue for strength). The jute is applied to the netting by tying groups of 5 to 10 strands of a colour to the netting with simple knots, skipping sections to be filled in with other colours. The webbing is then seasoned by dragging it behind a vehicle, leaving it to soak in mud, or even applying manure to make it smell "earthy." Once on location, the ghillie suit is customized with twigs, leaves, and other elements of the local foliage as much as possible, although these local additions must be changed every few hours, due to wilting of green grasses or branches.
Ghillie suits are essentially impossible to clean. Although the underlying garment (s) is tough and washable, the attachments tend to be too fragile to survive washing. In practice, this is a moot point, as dirt is an essential part of the suit's camouflage. Generally, snipers are unconcerned with being very fastidious. They are rarely inspected for correctness of uniform, and they stay far away from the target.