Red State Reckoning: Playing Paintball in Martinsville, IN

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When the squadron leader gave the signal, we hurried forward, crouching and firing, trying to get to an overturned cable spool where we could find cover. Or I should say they were firing, the other guys on my team. They were plugging away, spraying the field with ordinance, taking no chances. But I was trying to creep along as stealthily as possible, moving up on the enemy’s right flank, using the trees and dead fall as cover, firing not a single shot.

Before long, I was far out on the left, in a position to catch the enemy in a crossfire, just as Gray had counseled. Over there, somewhere on the other side of the heavily wooded battleground, Gray had presumably done the same thing. From our flanking positions we could cut them to pieces as they advanced, riddling them with paintballs.

But I still couldn’t see the enemy. So I kept moving up, crouching and scrambling, and before long I had nearly made it to the fortress, a paint-splattered two story structure with empty window frames and a crude parapet, behind which defenders could shield themselves and fire down. It had not yet been claimed by either side.

I hunkered down and scanned the woods in front of of me. Then I saw it, a flash of red. It was the blonde teenager in the red motocross jacket. He was on the other side. He was the enemy. He was getting into position and he hadn’t seen me. I raised my weapon and drew a bead on him.  Then I pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

At this point my teammates had expended about a thousand rounds of ammo as they’d moved up on the fortress, but I had yet to fire my first paintball, the first paintball of the day, the first paintball of my life. “Shit,” I muttered and dropped down behind a plywood barricade as a dozen rounds came plunking into it. The enemy had seen me.

I pushed and pulled on the bolt. Nothing. I turned the gun over in my hand, frantically trying to discover the secret to unlocking it. It thwarted me. A dozen more rounds came rapping into the 4 foot plywood barricade behind which I hid. I looked around and saw one of my teammates come sliding in behind a fallen tree trunk. He popped up and started firing.

Using his covering fire, I raced across the 30 yards of exposed ground and slid in beside him. “Hey,” I shouted, my voice muffled by the clear plastic shield of my mask. “How do you make this work?”

He took the gun, jerked the bolt back and forth a couple of times, fired off a couple of rounds. He handed it back to me. “Sometimes they jam,” he said.

Great, I thought. Story of my life. Here I was pinned down behind enemy lines with a full magazine, having courageously advanced at great risk, only to be thwarted by a defective weapon.

“Cover me,” he said. I nodded and started firing in the general direction of the blonde kid. My teammate slipped out and ran. And then the most amazing thing happened. The blonde kid stood up and raised his hands, the agreed upon signal for surrender. I had hit him. He was done. In another context he was a dead man.

Hmm, I thought. This paintball thing is sort of rewarding.

 

The Furthest North Southern State

I first got the idea of playing paintball as I was struggling to find something interesting to do in Indiana. When you are writing a US travel blog, it’s feast or famine. Some states are a virtual cornucopia of interesting things to do; others are as thin and flavorless as a rice cake. Indiana falls into the latter category.

Oh sure, there’s the Indianapolis 500, but that’s a once-a-year event that has suffered a decline in recent years as infighting among sanctioning bodies and the rise of stock car racing has tarnished its luster. Other than that, what is Indiana famous for?  The world’s largest rocking chair?  The world’s oldest Santa Claus statue? The Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Museum?

One thing I have observed about Indiana is that it is a reliably red state located far north of its cultural compatriots. Culturally and politically, Indiana is the furthest north southern state. And there are few things a southerner enjoys more than firing a gun, particularly if it’s at another living thing, so I decided that a rousing round of paintball would be just the thing to capture the flavor of Indiana. But first I would have to overcame my fear of being shot.

 

Rehearsing for the Apocalypse

My friend Randy Gray had played paintball before. He was the only 40+ adult I knew who had played it once and was willing to play it again. Paintball is a sport for young people. It involves a fair amount of running, crouching and lunging. Two days after it was over, I was surprised by how sore my muscles felt.

In addition, it’s a tad stressful. Getting shot is never pleasant, even if the projectile bursts on contact, splattering you with water soluble yellow paint. It’s worrisome. And paintball has been known to attract sadistic types who take sinister glee in ramping up the maximum rate of fire from 5 balls per second to 13, and increasing muzzle velocity from 300 ft/s to something higher, so that when the ball hits it stings like hell. Playing paintball is like getting into a snowball fight with bullies who pack rocks.

Of course there are rules against that sort of thing, but violations are hard to detect, and the general feeling is that anyone who is tough enough to participate in a sport that involves shooting each another ought to suck it up and take it like a man, no matter the injustice.

It’s very primal, very high school, the kind of thing most adults are only too glad to put behind them as they get older. Not Gray and I. We wanted to get a taste of what it’s like to be a testosterone-geeked young male in a red state where job prospects are bleak and the future is uncertain, but the opportunity to shoot things is always near at hand. Now all that’s needed is an enemy.

 

Red Dawn Redux

The idea of remaking the 1980’s film Red Dawn was laughable until recently. Based on the absurd premise of a Soviet invasion of the US repulsed by teenage boys, the original film was lambasted by critics and shunned by audiences. Yet 28 years later here we are. Time for a reboot!

The premise has been updated to feature the North Koreans as the bad guys, socialist infiltrators bent on destroying America. Young red state males flocked to it in droves. The current malaise afflicting rural America, a potent combination of boredom, frustration and easy access to firearms, has turned the new version of Red Dawn into an apocalyptic wet dream for those with an itchy trigger finger and an axe to grind.

And it’s not just a dream for some; it’s an inevitability. Egged on by evangelicals with an apocalyptic mindset, many red staters honestly believe that if  the liberals are not flushed from Washington, the country will be taken over by socialists and terrorists, and everything will be destroyed. Time to lock and load. The paintball course is a training ground. And here we are.

 

Training Ground

Paintball Indiana is a 20-acre outdoor facility near Martinsville about 30 miles southwest of Indianapolis. It consists of three distinct game zones each with a unique set of barricades: the concrete battleground strewn with sections of concrete pipes and barriers, the bunker battleground dotted with 5 foot high inflatable bunkers, and, my favorite, the woods, presided over by the fortress, ringed round with short plywood barricades, sections of concrete pipes, and fallen tree trunks.

As a battleground the woods provide the most cover and the broadest field of fire, allowing a newbie like me the opportunity to survive after more experienced players have been cut down.

In fact, in my first battle I held out to the bitter end, taking a position behind a white oak and firing up at the parapet of the fortress where an enemy combatant was striving resolutely to pick me off.  When the referee called the game, I was feeling sort of smug and wondering whether I had missed my calling as a soldier. I had used precious little ammo, notched one kill, outlasted Gray, and still didn’t know what it felt like to be hit by a paintball. That would change soon enough.

The trappings of paintball include an electro-pneumatic semi-automatic rifle (“marker”) with a 200 ball hopper, a compressed air tank attached to the gun, an ammo pack for reloading in the field, and the all-important paintball mask, a sturdy wrap-around face shield that protects the eyes, ears, and face but leaves the top of the head exposed.

You are not permitted on the battlefield without your mask because the greatest danger in paintball is getting an eye shot out. Such an accident would put the whole concern out of business since the greatest cost in running a paintball facility must be the insurance. There is very little else that costs much. At Paintball Indiana, the central command center is basically an open-air kiosk that looks like it was hammered together in an afternoon. The restrooms are Port-a-Potties. And the sign at the entrance is little more than a lawn sign of the kind used by political candidates. Gray and I drove by it three times before we found the place.

 

The Scariest Part of Paintball

After our firefight in the woods, the next venue was the concrete battlefield. In a throwback to grade school, a pair of captains took turns choosing teams. I was selected fairly highly. They must’ve liked the cut of my jib.

Sadly, however, I didn’t last. I got pinned down behind a concrete drainage pipe ten yards from base and was still strategizing my advance when I felt the sting of a paintball on the back of my hand.

If you’ve even been thwacked with a golf ball, you have a fair idea of what it feels like.  It’s enough to cause a welt, but not enough to make you pack it in for the day. The trouble with paintball, however, is that once you’ve been hit you’re supposed to raise your hand, signal your surrender and walk off the battlefield through a barrage of enemy fire, none of which, fairness dictates, should be directed at you. The scariest part of paintball comes after you surrender.

I showed Gray my wound, the red welt dripping with yellow paint on the back of my hand. We both agreed that, if we ever did this again, gloves might be a good idea.  So would a hat, although that hadn’t occurred to me – yet.

 

Domed and Doomed

We moved next to the bunker battleground. This was by far the smallest battlefield, perhaps 50 yards square. A ten-foot tarpaulin had been stretched between two posts at either end to permit eliminated players to take shelter, lest they be peppered with paintballs while trying to leave the field. Only about four feet of space existed between the tarp and the boundary fence behind it.

The choosing up of teams went cruelly against me this time. I was one of the last chosen. I had been exposed as a fraud. What occurred next did nothing to lessen that impression.

At the signal to start, a moment’s hesitation cost me the opportunity to get out to one of the flanking bunkers, and I was pinned down in the center of the field in a grotesquely vulnerable position, taking fire from all sides. And the fire was close. My assailants were no more than 30 yards away. So when the first paintball hit me, splatting against my shin, it stung like a bitch.

I raised my hand, signaling my intention to withdraw and was shot again in the rib cage, just below my raised arm. Figuring it was a mistake, I tried to stay cool and turned to go, whereupon I was shot in the back, twice.

Having learned my lesson, I hurried to the tarp and squeezed in behind it with several other guys, all of whom had been shot multiple times, and all of whom were grumbling and groaning. One guy was rubbing his head and complaining that he’d been “domed”. This was fresh nomenclature to me. It meant that he’d been shot in the head, apparently a painful experience.

A barrage of paintballs riddled the front of the tarp. It shivered and shook with the force of the onslaught. More guys were trying to squeeze in behind it. I put my hand down to shift my position and took a shot on the back of the wrist. I stood to turn and got a taste of what my teammate had been whining about. A paintball struck me square on the side of the head, in the exposed area above the mask.

By now it was getting too crowded back there. Some of the guys had had enough and crawled under the boundary fence and got away. I was contemplating doing the same when the referee called the end of the game.

 

Reckoning

Gray saw the yellow splat on the side of my head and laughed. He asked if I wanted more. I declined. In the course of a few hours I’d gone from being a battlefield hero to a welt covered, paint splattered shmuck. I’d had my fill.

But I didn’t complain about the rules violations. I sucked it up and took it like a man. Paintball is not for blue state pansies who quibble over principles of conduct. It’s for fearless young red state males who know how to handle a firearm and are only too happy to embarrass a potential socialist from a northern American city who is foolish enough to wander into their cross hairs. It’s practice.

As a way to appreciate the culture of a certain type of Indianan it goes a long way.
The red state fascination with guns and shooting things has always been something of a mystery to me. By diving head first into their world it opened my eyes. For a brief shining moment, after I had taken down one enemy and held off another, when I was feeling empowered and heroic, I could see the lure of it.

And then I got shot in the head.

 

Check it out…

Paintball Indiana

3291 IN-67
Martinsville, IN 46151
317-339-7531
Website

 

Previous stop on the odyssey: Cleveland, OH //
Next stop on the odyssey:  Chicago, IL

 

Image Credits:
All images by Malcolm Logan and Randy Gray, except for: Testosterone-geeked red state male, Public domain; Red Dawn poster, Non-Free Media Data (see Fair Use claim below); Paintball Field, Petr Kadlec
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