Rabo Karabekian is captured in Luxembourg and loses his left eye

Rabo Karabekian is captured in Luxembourg and loses his left eye while serving in an Army unit of civilian artists assigned to camouflage. The episode ends his wartime service as a combatant and gives him a permanent physical difference, but its significance extends beyond injury: his later account places the loss beside the ingenuity of the platoon, the family-like loyalty that kept him from seeking promotion, and his difficulty finding a home after the war.

Service and the Camouflage Platoon

Karabekian was not born with one eye. Near the end of World War II, he commanded a platoon of Army Engineers whose members were artists in civilian life. The Army had assembled them on the theory that artists would be especially effective at camouflage. Although their specialized assignment was to deceive the enemy, in Luxembourg they found themselves fighting for their lives as ordinary infantry. The episode therefore joins two kinds of work—manufacturing visual misdirection and enduring direct combat—without making the artists immune to the dangers they were meant to manage.

The platoon’s camouflage was, in Karabekian’s judgment, remarkably effective. Its illusions misled German forces about what lay behind Allied lines and what posed a threat. The unit’s unusual position within the military matched its unusual task: it was not attached to a division or corps, but received orders directly from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force and was temporarily assigned to generals who had heard of its deceptive work. Those generals acted as short-term patrons, permissive toward the artists’ informal dress and lax military courtesies, and eventually grateful for their results.

The unit moved from one temporary assignment to another. Karabekian later recalled that he had been awarded a Presidential Unit Citation because his platoon was so good at camouflage. He also described the work’s lasting uncertainty: some of the things the men concealed from the enemy had never been found again. This retrospective emphasis makes concealment more than a battlefield trick; it is the platoon’s practical achievement and a measure of how completely its constructions could alter what others believed they were seeing.

The Luxembourg Capture and Wound

Karabekian remembered little of the moment he was struck. His recollection begins with the approach of a white German tank and German soldiers dressed in white crossing a snow-covered meadow in Luxembourg. He did not remember being hit. A shell from somewhere knocked him unconscious, and he was taken prisoner while unconscious. The surviving account does not identify the exact weapon or describe the precise circumstances of the impact; it establishes that the combat encounter left him without his left eye and in German custody.

He was kept unconscious with morphine until he woke in a German military hospital set up in a church across the border, in Germany. The wound healed quickly, and he was soon sent to a camp as an unremarkable prisoner. The speed of his recovery contrasts with the permanence of its consequence: the injury cost him an eye, but the physical suffering he recalled was brief. When Circe Berman later pointed out that he had described little pain and rapid healing, he accepted that her account of his words was true, even as he insisted that he had endured an ordeal of his own.

Karabekian’s memory also leaves open a question about what happened immediately before he lost consciousness. He says that if he killed anyone in the war, it would have been during the few seconds before the shell struck. This is an acknowledged possibility, not a confirmed account of a death. The uncertainty marks the limits of what he can remember about the combat that transformed him from a two-eyed soldier into a prisoner and wounded veteran.

The Platoon as a Chosen Family

The service that ended in Luxembourg had been shaped by Karabekian’s decision to stay with his men. He had joined the regular Army and become a lieutenant two years before the United States entered the war. He believed that, had he accepted promotion, he might have risen to at least lieutenant colonel by the war’s end. Instead, he refused advancement beyond captain so he could remain with the platoon’s thirty-six men, whom he regarded as a happy family. It was his first experience of a family on that scale.

The wartime unit thus offered a form of belonging that was more than occupational. Karabekian’s refusal of promotion kept him among the artists whose special talents and unconventional habits set them apart from ordinary military formations. The end of his service separated him from that collective, while his capture and hospitalization put him in the care of institutions rather than among the men he had chosen to lead. In retrospect, the closeness of the platoon makes his later dislocation from civilian life more consequential: a military family had given way to a return for which he felt he had little waiting.

Treatment and Return

At the end of the war, the United States paid for cosmetic surgery to the area where Karabekian’s eye had been. He later named Fort Benjamin Harrison, outside Indianapolis, as the place where the operation was performed, and framed the payment as the work of Uncle Sam. The treatment addressed the visible aftermath of the wound; it did not restore the eye or erase the military experience that had taken it. His account describes him afterward as emotionally blank rather than bitter.

That blankness echoed what he had recognized in his wartime friend Fred Jones. Karabekian said that neither man had anything to come home to. The statement links the Luxembourg capture to a broader rupture: survival and medical care did not guarantee a place to return to, or immediately provide a civilian identity to replace the one formed in the Army. Later, Karabekian remembered loneliness from his youth and the Great Depression, and said that after his first wife and sons left him in 1956 he sought out solitude for eight years. Those later experiences are not consequences that can be attributed solely to the Luxembourg injury, but they deepen the contrast between the platoon’s close-knit life and his subsequent isolation.

Camouflage, Art, and the Wound’s Afterlife

Camouflage remained one of the clearest forms of competence Karabekian could name when challenged about his modest view of himself. He reminded Circe Berman that he had received a Presidential Unit Citation for his platoon’s work. The recollection makes military deception a durable part of his identity: he had helped artists make false appearances persuasive under conditions in which mistaken perception could affect survival.

The connection between that wartime skill and his later life as a painter is grounded in concrete continuities, not in an assertion that combat simply explains his art. He had already been selected to paint a portrait of Major General Daniel Whitehall during Army basic training, and later worked on a monumental eight-panel painting in the long, windowless potato barn he rented as a studio. His Army service and artistic work both involved the deliberate making of images, but the evidence distinguishes their purposes: the platoon’s illusions confused an enemy about threats, whereas painting became his civilian vocation.

The Luxembourg episode consequently resists a simple heroic or tragic account. Karabekian’s men were effective, their work won recognition, and their commander chose solidarity over higher rank. Yet he was captured, lost his eye, and returned to a country where he remembered having little to come home to. He later argued that the brief physical pain did not cancel his right to claim the experience of a survivor. The wound is at once a bodily fact, a boundary in his memory, and the point at which the wartime family that had sustained him gave way to an uncertain postwar life.