Newsweek International

July 15, 2002

Weekend Warriors

Author: Adam Freedman

I was crouching behind a bunker, pinned down by hostile fire. The enemy position was about 30 yards away and heavily defended, but I had no choice: it was now or never. My buddy gave me covering fire while I tried a flanking maneuver. I ran from tree to tree until--thud--a direct hit to the chest.

"I'm hit!" I cried.

Then the ref called a time out.

This was "paintball": the toughest game you'll ever love. Paintball is a battle-simulation game in which adults shoot paint pellets at each other using compressed-air guns. It is immensely popular. Every weekend, rain or shine, scenes like the above are played out in fields all across America.

I was recently drafted into my first paintball game by a friend in Washington, D.C. My friend--a bookish intellectual--did not strike me as the paintball type, but he had played once before as part of a bachelor party and was eager to do it again. He organized a group consisting of two professors, four think-tank policy analysts, five midlevel federal employees and one token lawyer: me. We were the Dirty Dozen, adjusted for inflation.

Early on a Saturday morning we drove out to one of your better paintball fields in the rolling horse country near Leesburg, Virginia. Just inside the entrance, we selected a picnic table that would serve as our "HQ" (amazing how quickly one falls into military jargon). The first thing I noticed was that ours was the only group not wearing battle fatigues. Over at the next table, a half dozen camouflage-wearing paintballers were enjoying a midmorning snack of hot dogs and Dr Pepper. One of them was cleaning his gun; another was restocking the ammo pack that he kept slung across his back. By the time we had set our designer protein bars and bottled spring water on the table, the others had sized us up: "Privates!" they snorted among themselves. The lowest of the low.

After renting guns and helmets, we were escorted to our first game. The referee, a high-school student named Josh, was less than enthusiastic about having to supervise a bunch of privates. What Josh did not know was that most of the people in our group actually specialized in defense and national-security policy. I figured that Josh would soon be exulting in our Clausewitz-meets-Rambo performance.

As soon as we arrived at the starting position, an argument broke out among the defense analysts: what's our strategy? Do we model this on Waterloo? Or Gettysburg? Or Verdun? Do we feint to the right for a bit of the old double bluff? Josh listened patiently for a couple of minutes, then discreetly cleared his throat. "The best way to go is to the left and behind those trees. Try not to get hit, OK?"

I was eliminated early in the first game. A .68-caliber paint pellet traveling at 300 feet per second hit me square in the thigh, causing a sensation that my doctor would no doubt call "mild discomfort." I limped to the "dead zone" and pondered the question of whether I could get to a friendly tavern in Leesburg in time for cocktails. But then came the second game, and I scored my first kill. After that I was hooked.

The skirmishes went on from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. One thing I learned was to carry my gun around all the time, even between games. I'm not sure why, but the real paintballers never seem to let go of their weapons. By the end of the day I was bruised, scratched and covered in paint, but at least I had perfected that pose of relaxed vigilance you see among National Guardsmen patrolling airports.

Paintball is officially coed, and it is supposedly played in 40 countries, but it is very much a game of the American male. It embraces the frontier dichotomies of teamwork and individualism, cooperation and aggression. It's got the swagger of the citizen-soldier--the unspoken conviction that behind these paint-splattered fatigues are the heirs of Lexington and Concord. In these days of beefed-up homeland security, what could be better?

Of course, the game also assumes that there's something character-building about acquiring a set of painful welts--not to mention playing overgrown soldier. The only disappointment came when we had to sign a waiver releasing the paintball facility from any liability for injury. For a thoroughly American experience, it would have been nice to follow up on the day with a bracing round of litigation.

Our group went to dinner that evening. We ordered big steaks, discussed the meaning of the "right to bear arms" and compared wounds--all with a suitable air of irony. We'd had fun and all that, but surely we were not the types to be taken in by this outside-the-Beltway American mayhem stuff. Suddenly, my friend suggested that we do another game of paintball in October. There was a moment's pause.

"October's good," we all said.