![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/paintball.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
August 31, 1999 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I love the smell of paintballs in the morning.<\/p>\n
Good thing, too, because they were being shot in my direction at a furious pace.<\/p>\n
I was crouched behind a dirt pile, and the enemy knew it.<\/p>\n
I’m not sure how many of them there were. One? Two? Maybe three? But every time I stuck out my gun to rattle off a few shots, a hail of paintballs was sent my way.<\/p>\n
I looked over to my teammate Seth Thompson \u00e2\u20ac\u201d who was in a similar position behind a dirt pile about 10 yards away \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for some advice.<\/p>\n
Thompson, one of the founders of the Northeast Georgia Paintball Club, knows this battlefield well. It’s his parents’ backyard in Cumming. I was to stick with him for this, my first tour of duty in the kill-or-be-killed world of paintball, and use his experience to my advantage.<\/p>\n
As I squatted there, paintballs splatting in the trees and bushes around me, I remembered what Thompson said to our team before the first battle began.<\/p>\n
“Everybody knows what we’re trying to accomplish here,” the 21-year-old told us, each clad in varying levels of camouflage. “Don’t let them get the flag, and don’t get hit.”<\/p>\n
It was right about that moment that Thompson, trying to return enemy fire, got hit. He had been “killed,” and seconds into my first taste of warfare I was on my own and locked in the sights of some snipers invisible in the distant woods.<\/p>\n
I decided to make a run for a nearby tree. Perhaps from there I would have a better vantage point. So I clenched my teeth and ran, pointing my gun out to the side, squeezing off rounds of ammunition \u00e2\u20ac\u201d you know, like they do in the movies \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and I promptly got hit in the head, the back, the arm.<\/p>\n
I was killed, and I realized just how far-fetched those action movies are.<\/p>\n
“I’m hit,” I yelled to stop the assault. I raised my gun above my head and walked back to the base.<\/p>\n
The base, basically the area next to Thompson’s parents’ garage, is where the casualties go to exchange war stories. We sounded like kids after a playground football game.<\/p>\n
Did you see it when I … ?<\/p>\n
How ’bout the time when you … ?<\/p>\n
Only on playgrounds you rarely hear, “That sniper was all over me, man.”<\/p>\n
If the topic of discussion wasn’t the game, it was the guns. Paintballers like to talk about their weaponry.<\/p>\n
You can get a quality carbon dioxide-powered gun for a couple hundred dollars, but as with anything …<\/p>\n
“It’s unlimited how far you can go with the guns,” said Thompson, a Gainesville College student. “You can spend thousands.”<\/p>\n
So, as some showed off their new carbon-fiber barrels, expansion chambers and rear-cocking rods, the others oohed and ahhed.<\/p>\n
How much money does Thompson have in his gun?<\/p>\n
“Too much,” he said with a sly smile. “Too much.”<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/paintball2.jpg\")
\nBut it doesn’t stop with the guns. There are an endless number of accessories to buy. Thompson communicates with teammates through radio headsets.<\/p>\n
But for all the talk of guns and kills, safety is the priority in paintball.<\/p>\n
Facemasks are mandatory. Other forms of protection are recommended. On Thompson’s field all guns must be set to fire at 290 feet per second or less. Paintballs are meant to leave temporary marks, not permanent ones.<\/p>\n
That’s the beautiful difference between paintball battles and real ones. The “blood” wipes off and you’re never “dead” long. Our games, various versions of capture the flag, had a 25-minute time limit.<\/p>\n
Imagine games like war and manhunt from your youth \u00e2\u20ac\u201d only with cooler toys.<\/p>\n
Thompson holds paintball games every other Sunday. The best thing? It’s free. You bring your own equipment, he provides the playground \u00e2\u20ac\u201d nearly eight hilly acres with plenty of natural and artificial cover, including an old abandoned school bus.<\/p>\n
And the neighbor in back doesn’t mind the action.<\/p>\n
“Just as long as we don’t shoot him,” said Thompson.<\/p>\n
There were two teams and more than two dozen participants this past Sunday, with ages ranging from the mid-teens to the mid-thirties.<\/p>\n
“The more people you have, the better it is,” explained Thompson, who started playing three years ago with a couple of friends from Dawson County High.<\/p>\n
“It was awful,” remembers Eric Farley, one of those friends from the “early days.” “We’d be out here for like four hours, until somebody finally got killed or somebody was tired.”<\/p>\n
But low turnouts are a thing of the past. Once somebody comes out and gives paintball a try at Seth Thompson’s place, it usually doesn’t take much to lure them back.<\/p>\n
It’s addicting.<\/p>\n
I know from experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 31, 1999 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I love the smell of paintballs in the morning. Good thing, too, because they were being shot in my direction at a furious pace. I was crouched behind a dirt pile, and the enemy knew it. I’m not sure how many of them there were. One? …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,30,6,33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":379,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions\/379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}