Mike calls out helpfully. La Femme will get them in the next game. It traces its origins to cattle-marking with pellets launched by slingshots, to New Hampshire survival training or to the U.S.Forest Service, depending on which source you believe. Being hit by a shot from paintball blast can sting, but it's dangerous only if you take your goggles off. Mike the paintball ref yelled at us whenever the goggles came off prematurely, and made sure we put our fluorescent plastic plugs in our gun barrels when we weren't in active play.
Teams spread out in roped-off wooded areas and sneak around, trying to steal each other's flags.
But now the game is legitimizing. Read the paintball promotional literature, and you're invited to play something that's part extreme sport, part family fun, part EST retreat. Catering to a clientele of whelps already bored with their latest Playstation and high-salaried teams of top salespeople, paintballers have discovered the joy of Human Resources department vocabularies. Simulations once used only to train our military for war now train the white-collared for professional battles. Paintball is just one part of Aviation Challenge's Top Gun -esque training retreat, and the outfit's full workshop program is fairly new.