My First Day in Combat

Last weekend was man weekend. In the world of people being married and people having kids and people not living in DC and so on, weekends like this only happen once or twice a year. So when it does, you want to do it up right.

The impetus of this was our fantasy football draft. We've always hoped for all 12 owners to get together in one place, but for grown men with all the symptoms I described above, it's just not a guarantee. Like, ever. So when we were able to get Luke to fly in from the bluegrass and Jack to roll down from NYC, that meant 8 of us were together and that equalled good times.

Besides the draft itself, the highlight was Saturday morning's paintball. For most of us, including yours truly, this was my first time playing paintball, though I've always wanted to play. More than one person was more concerned whether I could survive the outing without an injury. When Luke arrived, he had the brilliant idea to hit up a local Army surplus store and buy some fatigues for the event. Because nothing says oxymoron more than me + camo gear + a gun of any sort. And as you can see, with some knock-off aviator glasses, I was rocking that gear and was ready to throw some rounds down range (apparently that is the proper lingo).

We went to this awesome spot in VA called Hogback Mountain. Big props to our ref Richard who was a cool dude and helped a bunch of us make sure we didn't make total fools of ourselves. Some highlights of the matches:

• Dave was the assassin. He was uber-aggressive and it paid off. There was one match where he took out the entire opposing team while the rest of us were just getting settled.


• Mike was Mr. Clean. That guy barely had a splotch of paint on him. Naturally we all hated him for it.


• Kelly was the hustle man. Poor bastard rolled and ran all over trying to be the best soldier he could. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it went poorly.


• One of those times allowed me to capture Shot of the Day. In one map, I threaded a paintball shot through a tiny window in a wall and nailed Kelly right in the mask where his left eye is. It was an awesome shot and made the whole thing worthwhile.


• On the flipside, I probably took the hardest shot of the day. In just our second match of the day, Kelly sent me on a suicide mission where I got destroyed by the four members of the opposing team. After I took a shot to the scalp and was eliminated, Dave ran up to me and accidentally shot me in the stomach from about 3 feet away. Holy shit that hurt.


• Dan and Jack nearly vomited about 14 times during the day. Maybe drinking a ton of bourbon and smoking cigars the night
  before was a bad choice considering everyone had a 9 a.m. start time an hour away from DC. It was awesome watching them turn white after a couple matches where running and gunning were important.

All-in-all, an awesome time. And we definitely plan on hitting it up again, just when the weather is a bit cooler and we don't all feel like we've lost 25 pounds in sweat weight.