Weekend Warriors : Freedman is a lawyer and journalist.(author describes experience playing "paintball")(Brief Article)

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.