This Sunday saw me joining Sam and his workmates at a day of paintball skirmishes at Action Paintball in Tunbridge Wells. There were four arenas in some woodland surrounded by even more woods. Two other groups were attending on the day and in the mist of the early morning we were split into teams.
It was a lot of fun. Sam and I were, by fortune alone, on the same team. We pledged to stick together, cover one another, and generally help each other out. Of course, in the chaos and noise of battle it was nearly impossible to hear what we were saying to one another, or to coordinate our efforts. My goggles steamed up so much after lunch that I could hardly make out the craven enemy team from the shrubbery.
The first time I got hit was in the first warm up game. Someone managed to shoot up my sleeve. I've still got plenty of red marks on my torso, arms, and one on my neck where the paintballs hit particularly hard. My legs took a pelting but strangely most of the paintballs bounced off them. At one point I walked over to a marshal for a paint check when I was certain I'd been hit in the back, but it must have bounced clean off because he just sent me right back into the thick of it.
During our attack the enemy village scenario I was the only person on my team who had purchased a smoke grenade. Of course, it hit some low lying branches before it got to the village centre as I threw it at the red team scum. It landed in the groin of a tree so I couldn't even kick it back at them (they get very hot so you cannot pick them up once they've been thrown). So it didn't do much good. Unfortunately there were way too many people on both teams who were afraid to do anything but hunker down and shoot pellets in the general direction of the opposition. So I decided to make several suicidal charges towards the enemy so they'd concentrate their fire on me rather than our "flag" carrier. That's when I got the paintball to the neck.
When it came to our turn to defend the village, Sam and I took the forward most bunker with two other team members. Despite not being able to see anything through my misted-up protective mask, I managed to lay down a barrage of shots at the enemy flag carrier and pin the rest of their team. Shouting foul obscenities and cruel taunts, we held the opposition back until a lucky stray shot managed to catch me in the head.
Apparently I put too much effort into the capture the flag game. The flag was at the bottom of a hill and had to be placed in the enemy base for us to win. As the countdown struck nil I raced to the bottom of the hill, arriving with plenty of time to spare before the red team managed to reach it. I struggled back up the hill with paintballs bursting all around me and soil being flung skywards by the impact of stray shots. I yelled encouragement to my team (something along the lines of Come on you apes! You want to live forever?) before sprinting towards the enemy goal, intending to fall gloriously before a battery of red paintball markers so that my team mates behind me could pick up the flag and continue the good fight. Did anyone follow me?
Did they heck as like. I was out on my own, in the middle of no mans land, holding a ragged yellow and blue rag aloft in one hand, and a paintball marker in the other. Alone. Two, or maybe three, red team members burst from the undergrowth and pelted me with ammunition. Then they snatched the flag from my defiant claws and took it back to their base to regroup. I didn't see the final movement but we won that match through the bravery of two fighters determined to see victory.
The day was a blast and I'll definitely consider doing it again. It's quite expensive, and if you take cover for any longer than five or ten seconds you end up using a lot more paint than you might think and can use up five hundred paintballs before lunch.
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