Battle Cry

The trailer’s roof, in what would have been the back bedroom, had been torn off. Taking advantage of the exposure, enemy combatants sprayed the inner wall with gunfire. Three men, all members of the Special Forces and all armed with pistols and semi-automatics, framed the bedroom’s back window.

One with ammunition strapped over his chest stole quick glances outside. “Culvert! Watch the culvert!” he said. “Two! There! On the right!”

Another member of the Special Forces unit eyeballed the culvert, aimed and fired. “Down, down, one down,” he said. Gunfire kept ripping against the inner wall, nothing that would do personal damage but constant enough to escalate the terror and distract from the lethal shots peeling through the window.

A dark hallway led from the bedroom to the trailer’s bathroom, living room, and kitchen, all gutted from previous battles. The five other members of the Special Forces unit leaned against pasty walls and barked commands, enemy locations, hits and statuses.

A unit member nicknamed Frodo was reloading, his eyes on his clip, when a shot greased across his helmet, streaking his head with bright red. “They got Frodo,” someone shouted. “Frodo’s down!” Before they could react, the siege began: A full frontal assault.

Gunfire, at 30 rounds a second, battered the outer wall as enemy combatants blitzed toward the trailer’s foundation. The Special Forces mowed down many of them, but a few gained ground. For the next several minutes, Special Forces refused to yield the trailer, even as the unit was slowly picked off. Their constant communication kept key weak points covered, and their dead-on aim kept most of the enemies pinned.

Despite their resilience, soon all voices, rife with cursing and tenacity, fell silent. A lone voice cut above the din. “Time’s up!” the referee bellowed.

The surviving members of the Valley Paintball Special Forces lasted the allotted time and exited the trailer…victorious.

Solidarity

Friends then reunited with friends and hiked along a grassy path that lead back to the “safe area.” While walking, most players relayed the details from that game-their tactics, frustrations, and kills. As soon as they passed a green fence post, they peeled back their face masks. After another clip, they entered the safe area.

At the center of it is a two-wheeled metal wagon, something that looks like it would haul horses. At a side window, players pay fees, rent equipment, and refill CO2 cartridges. Surrounding the wagon are a dozen giant wire spools, serving as makeshift tables.

There, players grab a snack, chug from water bottles, and reload hoppers with paintballs. The more interesting dialogue centers on their own deaths: How they got hit, where, who did it, and why they were left vulnerable. Any hit means death, no matter if the capsule hits the person or the equipment he or she carries. As players theorize about their deaths, it sounds other-worldly.

Paintballers call it a “res.” It stands for resurrection or re-spawn. Players, of course, are brought back to life at the end of a game but can even have a res during a game, depending on the rules. This cycle of death and rebirth in the face of combat has attracted attention. Journals in behavioral science call it “the obscure boundary between counterfeit and genuine violence.” Others call it solidarity.

The Few, The Proud

Although players feign death, the sport is relatively safe. Paintballs are fired at velocities of up to 300 feet per second, but the only injury consistently attributed to the game involves the eye. Paintballs are small enough that they can fit inside the bones that protect the eyes. That’s why full-coverage face masks are required and heavily regulated by players. “Masks on” is a familiar shout-out.

According to a study published in 2000 in the journal Pediatrics, most of the 1,200 eye injuries from that year were the result of people who did not wear the proper safety equipment. Beyond the eye, other physical injuries are less the result of equipment and more the result of clumsy players barreling through the woods or falling out of trees.

The sport’s safety record is regularly touted as better than football or baseball. The number of participants can eclipse those sports as well. Sports Illustrated reports there are 10.4 million players in the U.S. and a 13% annual growth rate. An estimate from the New York Times places 2 million other players in 50 other countries.

With minimal injuries and a high following, paintball fields are becoming regular hang-outs for the U.S. Armed Forces. Surviving “combat” with only a tiny red welt has the Marines using paintball as a vehicle for healing. Many soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome who had been wounded by bullets or explosive devices “were given the opportunity” to use paintball as a means of “physical and emotional recovery.”

As reported in the U.S. Federal News Service, a former machine gunner Lance Cpl. Elmer Ugarte was injured while deployed to Iraq. Like many injured soldiers, Ugarte felt paranoid that “someone was out to get [him].” Ugarte says, “Paintball can be similar to war because of the fact that you’re shooting at each other. The difference is that nobody dies, and one mistake won’t cost you your life. Paintball has helped some of that paranoia go away and has helped me realize that I’m safe now.”

A Walking Contradiction

While healing is one motivation, the Armed Forces also use paintball for a seemingly opposite tactic: Recruitment. Newsweek quotes Army recruiter Sgt. Cory Elder as saying, “This is our target audience. It’s a perfect match.” The Army has been challenged by recruitment goals over the last few years. So much so that they have relaxed standards, which in turn has increased the number of recruits without high school diplomas and with criminal histories.

As an alternative to accepting low standard recruits, the Newsweek article continues, “Paintball may offer a more direct path to potential troops [because] the combat vibe is key.” Many paintballers feel that vibe in its varying manifestations.
Recruiters must see the potential because they aren’t foreign to Valley Paintball. According to Nick, a player there, the Army and National Guard visit often. They scout for recruits, or bring recruits and ROTC members for training.

While the connection to the military disturbs some players, Nick shakes it off, saying, “The Army has to play to their audience. Like advertising, they want to buy a product, and this is a place to find adrenaline junkies.”

A paintball field seems more like a place to find a host of contradictions--wounding and healing, dying and living, training and gaming. But the opposites don’t stop there.

The safe area on this day was filled with opposites-men and women, adults and children, married couples and singles, straight and gay.

One contradiction fell on the purpose/futility continuum. The game was “center flag.” Two teams, each starting from their own base, scramble to the center of the field, find a flag, and attempt to push it forward to the other team’s base.

The first time they played, one team secured the flag and advanced until time ran out. The second game had the teams playing without a flag in place.

After that pointless game, the clear objective of the trailer game was welcome. In the first trailer game, the Valley Paintball Special Forces successfully held their ground.

Before the start of the second, in strolled another contradiction: A bachelor party. A handful of guys dressed in jeans, polo shirts, and deck shoes wanted to play. Their gelled hair and beer cans looked out of place, but the camouflaged paintballers licked their lips. Chris, who has played for 16 years, whispered, “Fresh meat.”

A Lesson in Respect

The palpable excitement prompted Sean, the owner of Valley Paintball, to step from the wagon, stop the beer drinking, and share the rules. The first three: masks on at all times. He was completely adamant as he explained that rule three different ways, just to make sure that it was heard.

He then covered the rules of fair-play: dead men don’t talk by sharing the coordinates of other players; put guns up in the air and walk off the field when shot; and don’t shoot blind by placing a gun above an object and firing willy-nilly.

For the second game, the group decided to throw the newbies in the trailer. This is when the rules of fair play collided with a turkey shoot. As the bachelors sauntered off with nary a clue, the experienced paintballers laid out a plan to swarm the trailer like a plague of locusts.

In many ways the situation mirrored paintball’s origins. Friends Charles Gaines and Hayes Noel wanted to settle an argument. Noel believed that the survival instincts that he cultivated as a stock trader in the concrete jungle of New York City could be applied anywhere and even outperform rural folks, like Gaines. Gaines disagreed.

To teach each other a lesson in respect, as many men might want to do, these two took it to the woods. With camo, goggles, paintball pistols, a compass and a map of the 100 acre course, Gaines, Noel and 10 others played a game much like capture the flag. While neither Gaines nor Noel won, Gaines noted, “It was not surprising that each man played the game as he lived; the bold seeking firefights, the cautious sneaking through the woods avoiding them, the duplicitous perching in trees.”

That’s what paintballers do: They carry all of themselves onto the field, strengths, flaws, skills, contradictions, strategies, and luck. Especially that last one. Dumb-luck often shapes dominance in the game and what results is a strange type of equality. That’s what Laura calls it. As one of two women on the field that day, she said, “It can be weird to shoot people, but you don’t think about it. We all shoot and are shot equally. Paint doesn’t care.”

The bachelors were shot. Decimated, actually. Within a matter of minutes, they lost the trailer; or, on the other end of the spectrum, the experienced players found it easy to take. Finding and losing is another apparent contradiction.

So along a gravel road, Valley Paintball sits as an unmarked stretch of woods pressed against the silty Buffalo River, lost in nature except to the trained eye.