Shooting someone in the head is more complicated than it sounds, as the first Godfather movie demonstrated so well. For instance, in paintball–the modern adult game version of war–head shots are against the rules. So as Michael Corleone discovered, the victim doesn’t always die neatly and quietly. In fact in paintball he doesn’t die at all. Instead of indecorously losing his brains, he’s more likely to indecorously lose his temper and swear a blue streak. Sometimes it’s just as ugly.
“Wow, you sure got me,” he whistled. He looked embarrassed and waved off my apologies. “No, no, don’t worry about it. It happens. So what do we do now?” I had hit him, so he assumed I knew what I was doing. In fact, we were both new players, “newbies” in paintball parlance. Now that I’d left my cover, we had no idea how to reconvene the battle.
War is merely the continuation of policy by other means. –Clausewitz
Paintball guns are illegal in Chicago, so the game is yet another industry that’s moved to the suburbs. No one knows how many paintball players live in the metropolitan area, but about 5 area stores deal exclusively in paintball and 20 or so other sports and army-surplus stores carry some paintball equipment. Store managers estimate that five to seven paintball fields operate within a two-hour drive of the city. A typical field charges $10 per person for the day and another $10 to rent a gun and goggles.
We pulled up in Dan’s alley to load paintball equipment from his back porch. His huge black dog, Spike, quivered on the end of a chain and barked until his eyes went back in his head like a shark’s just before it attacks. “Watch out,” said Dan, picking his way across the yard. “Bombs.” Despite Spike the shark dog, Dan is friendly and erudite, an industrial designer.
“Well, you could say that of a lot of sports,” Dan countered. “I don’t think it’s a matter of being aggressive. It’s a matter of pitting your skill against somebody else.”
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We dropped that for a while and went over the rules. The most popular game is Capture the Flag, which has a 20-minute time limit. Two teams occupy opposing forts. A whistle signals the start, and each team sends a contingent to the opposing fort to capture the enemy flag, leaving some members behind to defend the home fort. A team must carry the enemy flag back to its own fort to win. If a person is killed while carrying the flag, he has to return it to the enemy fort.
