They’re Gunning for the Enemy as Junior James Bonds

Swathed in camouflage gear, the Shadow Warriors trudge up the dusty path through the pines to Hamburger Hill. Their mission: to ambush the enemy and cut off his supply line.

Soon the silence is broken by the pop-pop-pop of paint guns. The “bullets”--gelatin-covered capsules the size of gumballs--kick up little puffs of dirt as they hit the ground. Too many have gone astray. Rocky is not pleased.

“Half of you guys must have been asleep,” he tells his troops as they take a rest break. Their target, Butter, had walked through their attack virtually unscathed. “I should have been laid out,” Butter says.

And, adds Rocky, “You lost one of your team members.” A splash of white paint on camper John Schoeman’s goggles means that he has been taken out.

Welcome to secret-agent camp. Lured perhaps by the Pali Adventures brochure--”Do you want to be the next James Bond? How about Indiana Jones in training or a member of Spy Kids?”--about 25 boys have come to Pali Mountain in Running Springs for a three-week adventure.

After being blasted out of their bunks by wake-up music pumped campwide at 7:15, the Shadow Warriors scarf down bacon and eggs and waffles before heading out to the “battlefield” at 9.

“Let’s go, secret agents, hurry up,” said Rocky, dressed for the mission in black T-shirt and camouflage pants, with a camouflage bandanna tied on his head. Rocky has a real name--Deon Wilson--but, in keeping with the fantasy factor of summer camp, he and other staffers are known to the campers only by make-believe monikers. Among these: Cracker, Tank, Twitch, Smiley, Flame and Pickles. The secret-agent campers also choose code names. Among the more notable have been Viper, Virus, Scorpion, Special K, Stirfry, Spitfire, Cobra and Dracula.

The day’s mission begins in a netting-draped shack, where campers don their camouflage and helmets with built-in goggles and grab a paint gun off the wall rack. As a visitor slips into an orange vest (for high visibility) and helmet, one kid warns mischievously, “Be careful. Sometimes the ones wearing orange get shot.”

Paint ball “really gets you pumping,” says an enthusiastic Michael “Anarchy” Joseph, 14, who’s on a paint-ball team back home in Cleveland. “It’s the reason I came to this camp. I looked all over the U.S. for a paint-ball game. This is perfect. It can’t get any better.”

“The best,” agrees Terry “Dodger” Metsch, 13, from the San Diego suburb of Del Cerro. “I like the adrenalin.” And “you learn a lot about yourself” when faced with the challenges of secret-agent camp, which include an awesome rope-climbing course.

Terry, who wants to be a lawyer, learned about this camp from a paint-ball magazine and thought, “Paint ball and camp. What better?” People not in the know about paint ball “think we’re weird,” said Michael. “They think of us as rednecks,” when the reality, he says, is that paint ballers are a community in which people look out for one another.

“I can hate somebody on my team, but we’re on a team. We have to work together ... and get it done.” He explains that he chose Anarchy as his code name “because I’m not afraid to get shot. I’d take one for the team if I had to.”

And do his parents--who forked over more than $3,000 for Michael’s three-week camp adventure--share his enthusiasm? “My parents hate guns.” Most parents, says Terry, are “really shaky about it at first--uh-oh, guns.”

Another big draw at camp is the food prepared by Egyptian chef Sharif Elhadidi, who once cooked in L.A. for a family of Arab royals, whose big hits are the omelet bar and pasta bar. Elhadidi, whose typical fare includes chicken Marsala and Cajun salmon, has learned in three years at Pali that the kids “can only take so much fancy food. You have to throw in a hamburger now and then.” But, he adds, “you can make it with roasted-garlic mayo.”

In the earlier session of secret-agent camp, there were five girls. This session there are none among the 20-plus junior agents. Half a dozen girls had signed up to take paint ball as an elective activity while enrolled in another of the specialty camps such as acting or modeling, but packed up their paint guns and left after the first day.

Though the paint-ball sessions seem more like combat training, secret-agent camp also includes martial arts, coordinated rapid room entries (in which a small team of secret agents enters a room without being seen, grabs a hostage, and gets out fast) and a three-day survival camp-out that includes a 45-mile hike. Kids learn to cook their own food and “bear bag” it to protect the food, and themselves, from the resident four-footers. On Monday, campers will be treated to an on-site demonstration of maneuvers by a San Bernardino County SWAT team.

For these secret-agents-in-training, though, paint ball is the big attraction. For the uninitiated, paint ball is an extreme-sport version of capture the flag. The weapon, resembling a rifle, fires the carbon dioxide-propelled pellets at a maximum of 180 feet per second rather than its potential maximum, in this case, of 280, to minimize bruising on impact. “If they hit you in the arm, it’s not as bad as if they hit you in the gut,” says a paint-splattered John, who’s just taken a somewhat mortifying, if painless, hit square on his goggles. He is Pyro, a code name he says he chose “because I like to burn things.”

Even so, when a pellet goes splat, releasing the paint inside, it stings--even through heavy clothing. Tears are not unknown among secret-agent campers but, says Rocky, “at lunch they’re comparing war wounds” and relishing every moment.

Rocky, 32, an Aussie who served six years in a paratrooper unit with the Australian army--two of those as a jungle warfare trainer--and for the last four years has been a prison guard, is by consensus of the young secret agents “very cool.” If they get rowdy, he quiets them with a repeat-after-me “Yo, yo, yo.” Less than pleased with how the Shadow Warriors carried out this last ambush, he warns that an advanced ambush is coming up, “So shape up or you’ll be shot and we’ll make you be dead for the whole day.”

As Birdcage trots by en route to Hamburger Hill, Rocky is readying his Shadow Warriors for a hostage rescue, with staffer Twitch portraying a terrorist and staffer Gish his female hostage. The terrorist and his prey are in a tent at the bottom of a slope; he is armed and desperate. The Shadow Warriors split into two teams, one gathering at the top of the ridge, the other finding blind spots from which to launch an assault on the tent. “I want to hear lots of fire from the snipers,” Rocky orders. One kid asks, “Do we yell ‘surrender?’ ” No, says Rocky. “Just go in.”

Rocky in the lead, the assault team descends the hill, dodging ammo. As they reach the tent, Rocky yells, “Keep shooting! Drag her out! Get off your bums and move!” “My heroes,” gushes Gish, as they lead her to safety.

The snipers have killed one of their own. Ryan “Riot” Potter, 12, of San Clemente has taken a hit “square on the spine. It hurt a lot.”

Camp staffer Cracker takes charge for the next exercise, which is to take out a pair of the enemy hiding behind a bunker. His secret agents hesitate, dodging behind trees on their way downhill. He warns, “Don’t worry about being hit. Keep going! Keep firing! If you guys don’t move forward, I’ll line you up and shoot you myself. You’re looking at me, looking at your sleeves to see if you’ve got paint on you. That’s not what you do. I don’t want people way back here wasting 200 bullets.

“You need to believe in yourself and the gun and your teammates. Understand?”

Among the secret-agent campers are two Germans, Michael Schramm, 15, from Stuttgart and Alex Grosse, 16, from Munich. Alex’s parents sent him to Pali for ESL (English as a second language) camp, but he persuaded them to let him switch to secret-agent camp, which is much more fun. Though paint ball is played on U.S. Army bases in Germany, Michael says, “it’s not allowed in Germany, actually,” as the country has very strict rules about gun use.

With paint ball, Rocky says, “basically, we’re using army tactics,” but with paint pellets rather than blanks, kids “get the concept that they really do get hit.” He sees paint ball as a morale and self-confidence builder and says he’s heard no objections from parents. “If we are going to have guns, we might as well learn to use them safely.”

Experts are divided on this issue. Beverly Hills psychiatrist Carole Lieberman, who is on the clinical faculty at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, finds the concept of secret-agent camp for kids “revolting. I’ve always been against paint ball because it’s violent, and playing violent games has been shown to cause children to be violent, not just during the game but afterward. We should be teaching our children peace rather than to make war. Basketball is a healthy outlet, softball is a healthy outlet, swimming is a healthy outlook. I think the whole idea of secret-agent camp is sick.”

But L.A. clinical psychologist Robert Butterworth, who specializes in children and trauma, sees it differently. “When it’s us versus them, people tend to coalesce. If there’s a common goal, we tend to forget our differences.” As for kids and gunplay, he says, “welcome to the real world, guys. On the one hand, we are saying kids shouldn’t do this. On the other we’re recruiting them to go into the military.”

If something like secret-agent camp will teach kids to work together, Butterworth says, “and they know the difference between this and real life,” and no one’s getting hurt, “it won’t be anything worse than what we did when we were kids.”

First-time camper David “Thorn” Gasster, 11, of Rancho Park in West L.A. says he came here “to learn how to survive out in the open and learn how to handle guns. I might want to be a soldier.” Christopher Lin, 11, of Pasadena “wanted to learn what secret agents do, how they train.” Showing a bruise inflicted by a paint-ball hit, he says he thinks James Bond is “pretty cool.”

In the afternoon, campers Michael Joseph and Taylor “Snipes” Richards, 13, of San Diego are among those at the ropes course, where campers learn aerial assaults. Both take on and conquer the Crow, a sadistic-looking device consisting of three very long logs stacked tepee-fashion and, at the top, a free-swinging mobile device of log pieces wired together. To conquer the Crow, the climber must make a dicey jump from the top of the base logs onto the footholds on the swinging logs at the top. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done,” says Taylor, who’s just scored on his first attempt. “I cut myself where the sun don’t shine.”

Michael, having mastered the Crow, is determined to try the Leap of Faith, a newly installed and aptly named attraction. The climber, wearing a safety harness, must scale a tree about 60 feet up, then leap from a platform and attempt to grab a bar dangling from a rope about 15 feet away. He misses, twice, but will try again another day.

It’s dusty and dry over on the motocross course, but some days the course is flooded, to create a muddy, slippery surface on which the young agents practice evasive driving techniques in peppy one-seater, all-terrain vehicles. Rocky explains, “It gives the kid that experience they see in the movies” during epic car chases. “They don’t realize those cars are so tricked-up it’s not funny.”

So, as night falls, the secret agents hunker down to watch James Bond movies, right? Not quite. Most of those are rated for the 13-and-over set--something the camp strictly monitors. Rocky says, “The only things I can show them are things like ‘Spy Kids.’ ”

Secret-agent camp is just one of 11 three-week specialty camps offered concurrently during the summer by Pali Adventures. Others include whitewater adventure, scuba, water sports, skating mania, horseback riding academy, acting academy, film institute and modeling. Coming next summer: Hollywood stunt camp, cooking camp, rock star camp and disc jockey camp. Campers pursue their specialty in the morning, then interact with other campers at elective activities in the afternoon.

The 3-year-old resident camp is an outgrowth of Pali Day Camp, founded in Pacific Palisades in 1990 by Andrew Wexler, 33, a young entrepreneur who graduated from UCLA and has an MBA from USC. His wife, Jennifer, runs the year-round retreat and conference center at the 74-acre campsite, which was from 1939 to 1999 the home of Camp O-Ongo.

Wexler, who conceived secret-agent camp, says, “We don’t promote gun use. It’s all fun stuff. We really don’t do anything violent. They don’t shoot at silhouettes. We’re the new cowboys and Indians.”

He emphasizes that the object is not to train future secret agents but, rather, “to teach teamwork. They’re learning skills a secret agent could use in the future, but so could a CEO of a company.” Guns “have never been an issue” with parents who send campers, Wexler says. “There are more complaints that our modeling camp is objectifying women.”