Saturday afternoon, I went on my first attempt to play paintball. A church member, Terminator Tom, had been organizing the men for some paintball warfare and had gone several times already. I bought a paintball gun, an Army Fatigue jacket and even a ninja outfit. We planned on meeting at 1 PM at a field off of Lake Lanier that’s owned by the Corp of Engineers. I was late getting there, but as I was driving there, it was pouring rain. I was tempted to just turn around. But I decided to go on. I got there around 3 and fortunately another group just got there too at the same time. It was quite a walk from the parking spot to the battlefield, so I doubt I would’ve found the playing field otherwise.
The battlefield was about 2 acres in size and full of trees. There were several “forts” made of fallen trees on top of the hills on either side of the field with a creek in the center. Apparently it was used for paintball fights before, but haven’t been used for a long time. As our group arrived at the “home fort”, they were almost done playing capture the flag. The weather started to clear up as we were waiting and eventually it stopped raining. But, it was still very humid in the forest. Next time, I’ll have to remember to bring some anti-fog for my mask.
After they were done, we all walked to the other side of the valley and decided what to play. We decided on playing capture the flag with one team of 5 defending the flag and 8 people attacking it. So our team went back to the home fort to devise some offensive strategy. As we started the attack, we came across a yellow jacket nest. Several of us got stung by it, so someone went to get some gasoline to pour on the nest. We wait over 15 minutes for that to get done. Then as we were able to restart, a guy comes up and says we’re playing on private property. He had already called the police and they’ll be here in 30 minutes. Though we knew we were on public property, we didn’t want to argue, so we all packed up and left.
As we all got back to our cars, the policemen arrived. They got to see 13 men all outfitted in military gear. But, they were pretty nice to us. We explained the situation and the policemen said all we need to do is get written permission from the Corp of Engineers and we’ll be fine. But also said that having a bunch of guys dressed up in military gear carrying guns is very suspicious. They said a group of 25 people were arrested recently for terrorist training.
Well, that was my first attempt at paintball. Hopefully we’ll be able to get written permission or at least find somewhere else to play.