Putting on the War Paint : Mock Soldiers Play Out Aggressions, Make a Mess in Make-Believe Manhunt

He was a 12-year-old predator, a lean, short-legged war machine with his store-bought camouflage jumpsuit and semiautomatic rifle, muddy helmet in hand as he coolly surveyed the silent woods above.

His boys called him Suicide Mike.

He’s the man, they said. He’s the vicious runt of the litter, a miniature Rambo. On the field of battle, the kid was a force to be reckoned with.

Suicide Mike sighed, explaining why he was the meanest little marauder this side of the Antelope Valley Freeway.

“I like shooting the hell out of people,” he said. “It’s why I live. Pogs are dead. Now the thing to do is fight wars.”

On Michael Daclan’s 12th birthday, a dozen of his closest friends across the San Fernando Valley devised a suitably manic way to celebrate: Run around some wooded slopes in full military gear--hooting and hollering like wild men, firing automatic weapons, maiming, wounding, killing and being killed.

At least temporarily, in a paintball war.

Saturdays and Sundays--and all days in between--they come, the wacked-out Weekend Warriors, middle-aged Marines and wanna-be war heroes, flocking to places like Close Encounters, near the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeway intersection, doing something most red-blooded American workers only dream of: getting a little macho aggression out of their system.

But these are not Natural Born Killers. They’re yuppies and their children looking for a woodsy weekend thrill beyond the reach of the suburbs. They’re married couples, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters. Robert Shapiro, lead defense attorney in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, recently brought his teen-age son to Close Encounters for an apparent break from the stresses of the courtroom drama, said owner Mike Schwartz.

Out here, armed with weapons that fire not bullets, but small, hollow balls that explode on contact into a messy glob of nontoxic, biodegradable, food-based paint, players stalk the woods like guerrilla warriors in half-hour games that many say provide the adrenaline rush of real battle.

“We’ve had cops and Marines and every other kind of soldier you can think of,” Schwartz said. “They all agree this is close to the real thing.

“Out here in the woods, you can enjoy the ultimate thrill of hunting down another human being. And at the end of the day, everyone shakes hands and goes home. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets killed, not even animals.”

Paintball players form two teams, each of which battles to capture the enemy team’s flag. They describe the sport as a combination of dodge ball, tag, hide and seek and kick the can--with the addition of paint pellets zinging through the air.

And although they aren’t lead bullets, the paintballs nonetheless pack a sting. Veteran players, many carrying the scars of battle, liken the sensation to being hit with a sharp rock or stick, or being slapped hard on a sunburned back.

Said one player: “Getting hit in the neck is the worst. It’s like reeling out your fishing pole and having the hook catch you in the back of the neck. Some guys are sicko. They juice up their guns so the pellets hit harder, cause you more pain. And those things can hurt, man.”

Paintball wars have been around for several years, born of a decades-old practice among East Coast farmers and railroad men of marking boundaries by firing paint pellets at trees and telephone poles.

“One day, as the story goes,” Schwartz said, “these two ol’ boys turned the paint guns on each other as a joke. One guy shot the other in the butt and they decided to hunt each other. And suddenly, a new sport was born.”

Today, battlefield owners like Schwartz say, there are more than half a million paintball players nationwide, waging battle on about 500 playing fields. Southern California is dotted with a dozen or so fields. Hundreds gather at Close Encounters each weekend and companies rent the playing field for private games during the week.

Schwartz is a 44-year-old former Navy airplane mechanic who saw non-combat duty during the Vietnam War, sometimes marching in uniform alongside ant-war protesters, he said. Years later, a friend turned him on to a new sport he called the perfect combination of war and peace.

Back in the mid-1980s, though, paintball was still an underground sport played on “bootleg bandit fields” whose location, like those of “rave” parties, would not be made known until the last minute.

So Schwartz went along and played a game of paintball. It changed his life.

In his very first skirmish, Schwartz was posted along a trail, waiting for enemies to come along so he could shoot them in the back. “I was so nervous I could hear my own heart beating. And so I crouched there, worrying, ‘Could anyone else hear it?’ Then I heard someone coming, listened to the crunching of twigs getting closer and closer and closer.

“Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I popped up and shot one of my own guys in the chest at point-blank range. To say the least, I was hooked.”

Schwartz joined a touring group that staged tournaments to promote the sport. He taught Marines at Camp Pendleton to use the game in training, and coached Boy Scouts, church and youth groups to use it to work out their aggressions.

“We all have this inherent hunting instinct,” he said. “Because of advancing technology, we no longer have to hunt and kill to survive. But we still need to unleash those survival instincts. These players aren’t gun-crazed killers. But when they come out here, their eyes glaze over. They enter into another world.”

Schwartz says the game’s popularity increased following the Persian Gulf War. “It used to be, you wore a pair of fatigues and nobody wanted to look at you,” he said. “Now war is no longer looked down upon. It’s not like Vietnam. People believe we did something good in the Persian Gulf. Paintball has benefited from that.”

More than 80% of paintball players are men, statistics show. Most of the games are pickup-style--team members chosen at random moments before the whistle blows.

Still, the paintball field has also been the site of some pretty strange battles.

Like the executive who, dressed in shirt and tie, took notes on the play to observe how workers handled pressure and who would emerge as a leader and who would panic.

Then there are the Pepperdine fraternity battles. Pistol-armed pledges are given two minutes to hide before being hunted down by the frat boys with semiautomatic paintball weapons.

For the most part, however, Close Encounters caters to the beginner. Schwartz prides himself on “turning wimps to warriors,” teaching tactics and strategy to the wide-eyed and wanting. For $35, players are equipped with a single-fire pistol, a mask and several hundred paint pellets. More sophisticated firepower, camouflage suits and ammunition pouches cost more, which can bring a day’s expenses to $100 or more.

At the camp’s three 40-acre battlefields, beginners have other advantages. Their single-shot guns fire farther than those of more experienced fighters. They also get “reincarnation privileges”--if killed within the first 10 minutes of battle, they often are allowed to rise and fight again.

Other rules put a lid on aggressive emotions. Players can shoot an enemy only twice, not 10 times, before he is adjudged dead. Swearing isn’t allowed. And players may not fire from closer than 10 feet.

After one battle, Mike Daclan and his boys were breathless--this wasn’t war, this was work .

They lounged in a rest area reminiscent of the set of “M.A.S.H.”--with camouflage-netted tables and tents nestled just over the hill from the traffic hissing along the Golden State Freeway.

“I’m gasping for air,” said Brad, a 25-year-old advertising salesman. “In this game, you don’t run up that hill to capture the other guy’s flag. You go for an oxygen tent. This isn’t flatland out here. After six games, running up- and down-hill, you’re ready for a stretcher.”

Winded, some suffering sprained ankles from stumbling in the woods, the dozen friends were nevertheless jazzed by the battle. “We’re out here to be little boys again,” said one 16-year-old. “You don’t have to go, ‘Blam-blam-blam, you’re dead!’ You hit them with a paintball.”

Burbank newlyweds Leticia and Spencer Siegel said they appreciated the work of real soldiers after being both the hunter and the hunted in the free-for-all gun battles.

“It’s scary at first,” Leticia said. “They blow the whistle and you feel yourself running for your life. But then you get to shoot somebody. It’s like a real war in that way. You get to say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I wasted that guy. One less enemy to worry about.’ So, it’s pretty cool. It’s a natural high.”

But she tasted death in the same battle.

“It was weird. I was face to face with the guy who killed me. But that’s OK. While I’m here, I want to experience everything. I want to kill and be killed.”

Out on the battlefield, everything is splotched with bursts of wild paintball color: trees, walls, the dirt, even passing dogs. The air, always filled with the zing of pellets, smells of pizza. Somebody on the picnic tables ordered takeout Domino’s.

The whistle blows and the two teams converge under the gaze of a referee.

“Keep moving, you jerks!” someone yells. Zing! Zing! The talking head retreats behind a tree, then pops back out. “What are ya, chicken? We need some help up here!”

Then the field general is hit in the shoulder with a splatter of orange paint. Following the rules, he raises his right arm to show he’s been hit, then treads sulkily off the field.

“I can’t believe it!” he says. “Just like that, I’m dead. It’s not fair, dude.”