COMBAT: when reality stings you in the buttock, you listen JOHN POSATKO

   
 
 
When I was nine years old, I told everyone that I would be a storm chaser as an adult. More specifically, that I would chase tornadoes. There must have been a moment for that realization to take shape, and all I can think of is that I saw a weather documentary on PBS. The dark, conical structure of a tornado, much like the plume of an atom bomb, still elicits a strange, warm feeling in my gut. I realized at that age it would take at least a formal high school education to master the art of chasing tornadoes. Science class was my favorite, and I hadn’t been intimidated by math yet, so the possibility of pursuing a formal education geared towards weather was not as crazy a proposition as it seems to me now. I was also fairly adventurous, or at least I thought I had the bravery needed to stand down an F-5. Some years later when I was a teenager the movie Twister came out, and there was Bill Paxton strapping himself to an underground pipe in the climactic scene and the first thing that came to mind was, “Yeah, I could do that.”
 
This reaction I have, the instant belief that I can fully accomplish a task I get a brief taste of, or even the simplest whiff of, has not diminished one bit as I’ve entered adulthood. I wouldn’t say I’ve become more delusional, just that I’ve maintained a nine-year-old’s sense of delusion. Throw me into a pool to swim some laps, and I’m wondering if I’ll need the same caloric intake to train like Michael Phelps as I chase Olympic gold. Come with me to see “The Fast and the Furious” and I’m racing you home from the theater, in my Prius, swinging across five lanes of traffic. Take me to a concert, and I’m mentally scrolling through the different venues in town which would best host my first live show.
 
These flights of fancy usually last as long as my attention span, which has always been a tad short. A good night’s rest will shake off the magical dust of wonderment and bring me back to reality as I chew on a granola bar for breakfast, drive in the third lane on the highway, and boot up my work computer for emails. I’m happy with my life, content to get adventure in small bursts. The older I get, the less frequent these tangents become, and with age comes not the digression into boredom, but the satisfaction of being right where I’m supposed to be.
 
At least, I was starting to believe that.
 
When your cousin tells you that he’s organizing a paintball tournament for his 50th birthday, a “no-holds-barred woods battle” between family members up in the forests of north-central Pennsylvania, he has your attention. When you go online to research paintball techniques and find forums dedicated to war strategy, you find yourself shaking a little with excitement before you go to bed. When you ask a former semi-professional paintballer for his best advice and he gives you his top three tips for success (make sure your sight is between the goggles, stay off your knees, and keep your elbows tucked in), you start to know inherently that you are going to dominate this firefight, that nobody will leave the woods unsullied by your red blotches of mayhem. You have zero experience with a paintball gun, yet you are going to wield it like Thor’s war hammer.
 
The irony of all this is that I live in a big city, do not hunt, and rarely play video games. I would be going up against cousins who either hunt, live in or near the woods, play video games like Call of Duty, or do all three. The only experience I’ve had with guns before this was a stint of clay pigeon shooting with my step dad. Thanks to me, the clay pigeon population of Delaware is thriving. Combat-wise, I was in shape from running and other forms of exercise, but there’s a major difference between running along the beach to podcasts of This American Life and running from someone trying to shoot you. I secretly prayed for small chihuahuas to pursue me as I ran through residential neighborhoods, at least for the experience of having increased adrenaline flow. As I’d be fighting in the deep, green woods of PA in the middle of June, I wondered what the best outfit would be, and conceded that I didn’t own nor would ever purchase camouflage shirts and pants. I had a matching camping outfit I purchased from North Face, which I claimed would help me blend in with the darker, magenta-toned brush, to which my cousin Beth politely quipped, “John, you look like you could be on the cover of GQ.” So if I hid between some scantily-clad male cable TV actors, I’d be set.

 
 
The morning of the battle, I dined on a true warrior’s sustenance of several cups of coffee, checked my smartphone for any new texts or to see if anyone had responded to my Words with Friends moves, and finally started to don my war gear. Once I had sealed the mask around my face, I instantly transformed into a laser-focused soldier, albeit a soldier that gets a little panicky when he can’t breathe right and doesn’t like the Darth Vader sound of his own exhaling and wishes his mask didn’t smell so much like a playground slide. I had my sister take some pictures of me holding my gun like just so, convinced I was instilling fear into the hearts and minds of all my cousins. Having since reviewed the pics, I look more like a follower of the Insane Clown Posse, which may have instilled more confusion than fear. In war, though, confusion can be your ally.
 

My cousin Stevie, the one whose birthday celebration this paintball war was commemorating, led us into the woods and laid down the ground rules. “OK, this is basic capture the flag. First team to either cross this line with the other team’s flag or kill everyone on the other team wins. You shoot someone in the face and you’re out. Now let’s test our guns to make sure they work.”
 

Thus ensued a good five minutes of us lighting up trees with our guns, holding our guns sideways, shooting off multiple rounds at the same tree, yelling, “Get some!” The forest around us roared with the sounds of CO2 canisters exploding in short bursts. We were emulating every shooting style that had been depicted in an action movie in the last 35 years, while spouting off dialogue from the same movies. I prefer Schwarzenegger lines, but any lines by Bruce Willis will suffice in a pinch. We then divided ourselves by age into two teams and took off into our zones to hide our flags and determine “strategy”.
 
At this point, I mentally morphed from “Citizen John” to “Seal Team Six John”. I was aware of several combat techniques like flanking, ambushing and funneling, all of which I learned watching the last scene of Saving Private Ryan, and I began to suggest to my team that we start doing all three. Everyone else, though, had their own combat techniques that they learned from other movies, and began implementing those independently. Realizing that I was on my own, I began walking on my toes lightly and took the safety off the gun. I saw several dark shapes moving in my periphery. Crouching behind a skinny tree, I repeated to myself, “Stay off your knees, keep your elbows in and shoot from the middle of the goggles.”

Seconds later I was being shot at by three separate enemies. All focus and discipline went out the window at that moment. I took off running with my gun flailing wildly in the air, me shouting nonsensical warnings to my teammates and tripping over logs and getting caught on thorn bushes. I managed to find another tree to hide behind, but noticed the same three enemies approaching smoothly and stealthily through the woods towards me. I let loose a barrage of poorly aimed shots, and was answered by three shots that hit the tree, and one that stung my left buttock. I was out within the first 15 minutes of the first game.

 
 
Sitting down in the neutral zone, my mask off and my head between my knees gasping for oxygen in the thick, humid air of the late afternoon, I wondered what the hell had gone wrong up there. Where was my steely nerve? Why did I let myself get boxed in by three separate enemies, when there were only seven total spread out among three or four acres? How did I leave so much of my frame exposed behind that tree? These thoughts occurred to me as naturally as if I had been training all my life for this moment and had let myself and my team down. I vowed to prove myself the next round, and to never forget the sacred Three Tips I had learned.
 
What happened in actuality was that not only did I forget the Three Tips, I outright defied them. At several points throughout the day, one could have seen me doing the following:
 
1) Crawling on my belly to avoid being sighted and/or shot, contemplating covering myself in sticks and mud a la Schwarzenegger in Predator.
 
2) Shooting wildly from the hip, over my shoulder and one-handed a la Sylvester Stallone in Rambo.
 
3) Flailing my arms wildly, screaming, running and shooting simultaneously a la…well…no action hero ever does that.
 
What seemed at first like a good test of what real combat is like, you know, the combat that Marines undergo in Afghanistan, turned into a harsh lesson in how little I knew about fake combat between cousins. I was honestly terrified watching my 15 year-old cousin advance towards me, convinced she was going to riddle me silly with paintballs. How would I have stacked up against an Iraqi insurgent? Against the Viet Cong in the jungles of Vietnam? Against German machine gunners on Normandy?  These thoughts did little to boost my confidence throughout the day, and any notions I had previously about joining the FBI or CIA were dashed.
 
Later that day, after the many, many rounds of battle, changing teams, trying out different strategies, and ultimately losing to the gigantic mosquitoes that dwelt throughout the woods, I discussed what worked and didn’t work with my cousins. I determined that if you weren’t sure you were a good soldier, you probably weren’t a good soldier. Some of us had the innate sense to stay calm in the line of fire, to take accurate shots, to patiently wait until the enemy was close enough to ensure a direct hit. Those are the kinds of people that may make it in the armed forces. I chalked the experience up to discovering yet another job that I would no longer be able to pursue, like President or jockey or cellist.
 
A month after I returned from the trip, I was called in to serve on jury duty. I made the round of cuts and ended up serving on an actual trial. I couldn’t help myself. My hands opened my laptop, typed in “Netflix” in the search field and scrolled through the titles for A Few Good Men. How hard could the bar exam possibly be?
 
 

                                                       

John Posatko writes anecdotal blogs and reviews. When he was two years old, he accidentally swallowed a cup of kerosene. You can follow him at http://throwingrocksatsquirrels.blogspot.com/.