What does one wear to Paintball in? There are several schools of thought. “Something really cool looking” is probably foremost, and of course, that allows for broad interpretation. For the young first-timer trying to impress his friends, a vintage MegaDeth t-shirt and baggy jeans might be ‘cool looking’. For the Paintball hobbyist, who plays weekly and has a second job just to afford this kind of thing, a head to toe leather and kevlar reinforced fatigue suit in sports-team colors. With matching gloves and boots, of course. I got shot up by a guy dressed totally in red once. RED!
The first time I played, many years ago, we were told “Wear somethin’ baggy that’ll sorta flap around when you get hit. Disperses the impact, y’see.” And they were right, as far as that goes. My specialty turned out to be peeking up over a hill so that the opposing players could then shoot me, inexplicably to my mind, in the tiny bit of throat between my face mask and my absurdly flappy military-style fatigue jacket, which was too damn hot.
The fact is, you can’t tell anyone what to wear and what not to wear at the paintball field. As soon as you make any sort of final pronouncement, you’re going to be proven wrong. The guy wearing the wife-beater strappy t-shirt and bicycle pants will walk away with no multicolor bruising at all.
Works the same way for playing style, too.
A couple of visits to Paintball Park ago, there were four of us on some weekday when most people were at work. Four people is not enough for fun. But there was a family of four- Mommy, Daddy, Sis and li’l brother- who were there to play, and we said we’d all play together. We offered to split up our group, all of whom had played before, and their family, none of whom had played before and make teams composed of half group and half family… but that seemed creepy, so both groups just took our places at either end of the field we chose (the western town) and had at it. Experience, even the limited kind that our group had, counts. We took ‘em apart. We didn’t TRY to, either. It just happened. Well, Mom and Sis quit. We apologized and all, but they said it wasn’t us and that this just wasn’t their thing. Having just shot the Mom in what P.G. Wodehouse used to describe as ‘the billowy parts’, and because Sis probably didn’t have more than about 2% body fat and therefore would have felt each paintball impact in every bone of her body, I could understand why paintball might not be ‘their thing’. Dad and Junior kept playing, and so they were on our team now that more people were showing up. Good. Dad was really fit and seemed to be having a good time, but he wasn’t using a lot of paint, and he was getting out awfully fast.
That made less sense when he finally said that he was a Sheriff’s Deputy. Weird. You’d think he’d have strategy and a level head on his side and he’d be tearing up the opposing team.
Then we were both in the Dead Box once, at it came clear. A guy out on the field was trying to improve his position. He jumped up and ran from his hiding place behind a burned-out truck. “Oh, man. He’s dead.” I said, and the other paintballers in the Dead Box agreed. “Well, no, a moving target is harder to hit,” said the Deputy. I thought, “No, a stationary target behind a burned out truck is impossible to hit with anything as fragile as a paintball.”
I thought about it. In the real world, where bullets go exactly where you point the gun, and Sheriff’s Deputies are in firefights where people can get dead, and you have maybe two magazines of ammo before you’re done shooting, and there’s a thousand real-world bad things that can happen, and you’ve got a full blast of adrenaline ripping through you, a moving target must be hard to hit. I shoot real guns at little paper targets and can’t always keep the holes inside the little circles even when only thirty feet away. And the paper never fires a shot in return. Same thing with those orange clay frisbees. I go and release a bunch of those into the wild after making one attempt to stop each of their flights.
Paintball? Different. You got a hopper full of a hundred paintballs, most of which will only fly a drunk’s approximation of straight. If someone is dumb enough to jump out of cover and hotfoot it across twenty feet of scrubby field? The first three shots are just to make sure you’re shooting in the right general direction. You might not get the guy til the seventh shot, and the eighth and ninth shots are just on principle, but since your team-mates are pumping rounds off at the guy, it hardly matters. Dude’s gonna wind up covered in goop.
I told Deputy Dad to shoot more. And as the sprinter, dripping and limping, joined us in the Dead Box, he said he would.
