Frozen free-for-all

The tat-tat-tat of paintball guns can be heard as paint balls break on tree branches short of their intended targets.

Fluorescent spray from paintballs hitting branches highlights the winter forest browns and grays, appearing and vanishing like miniature fireworks, turning the trees five different unnatural colors.

Blue team commander Dirk Westphal is leaning against the side of a slightly muddy gulch in the middle of the woods. Minutes earlier, he led two of his men past a rusty Jeep chassis laying on its side into the valley where the Red team has men trying to outflank his squad. Now, seperated from his teammates, he is in the middle of the action.

The gulch is at the foot of a large leaf-covered hill and at the top of that hill is the objective the Red team is trying to capture. Five Red players are moving in on Westphal, who is outfitted with a green vest, extra tubes of paintballs and a black paintball gun. A furious firefight ensues. Westphal fends off his attackers, and then mysteriously, the Red players withdraw.

“I thought for sure that I was pretty much pinned down,” Westphal said. “But I looked for any way out, and I took it.”

Westphal waits. A handful of minutes pass, and he scans the landscape, checking the trees and bunkers and wondering where his opponents have gone. Then Westphal makes his move. He scurries up the bank and quickly sees that the Red players are attempting to bypass him and get behind his squad.

But he doesn’t let it happen. Westphal jogs through the forest, almost serenely. He heads directly toward the players that were targeting him earlier. Those players are now laying behind a few bunkers and in another gully. He has completely escaped detection during his run. The Red team’s men are focused on a few of Westphal’s teammates toward the rear.

Westphal pops up from behind the bunker and aims his paintball gun at the other team. His finger twitches on the trigger as paintballs fly toward the completely surprised Red team.

“I really just, at that point, thought they had no chance,” Westphal said. “I knew they had no chance. They had no where to run.”

Seconds later, five paint-splattered members of the other team are calling themselves out while raising their hands over their heads in the universal paintball signal meaning, “I’m out.”

Another five minutes and his teammates have eliminated the remaining four or five Red team players.

This is just the beginning of the competition.

Paintball is something Westphal, a 30-year-old graphic artist who lives in Columbia, has become good at in the past 17 years he has played. He was one of about 75 people who turned out in 40 degree weather to play paintball at Operation Frozen Arse IV on Saturday at Battle Creek Paintball Field in Kingdom City.

Westphal brought his 12-year-old son, Forrest, along to the game as a member of Westphal’s eight-man team Team Mercs.

Westphal was hooked on the game when friends brought him to an abandoned hangar in Charlottle, N.C., in 1989 to play his first game. He said his first game was “wild.”

“It’s just all adrenilene and excitement,” Westphal said.

He introduced his son to paintballthree years ago when Forrest was old enough. Forrest said the best part of playing with his father was being on the same team.

“He always shoots me whenever we’re playing against each other,” Forrest said.

Despite that possibility, Forrest said he enjoys playing.

“We just get to spend more time together out here,” he said.

Westphal takes the sport seriously. He said he plays 50-60 times a year. But his devotion to the sport even goes beyond that. On the underside of his right forearm, his team’s insignia is tatooed in black ink.

He said he was proud of the way the Mercs played over the weekend.

“My individual team did (their) best,” Westphal said. “I’m really proud of them. They did an excellent job.”

Saturday’s game was different from regular paintball games. This game was a scenario game, a themed game that involves teams, goals and points. Instead of simply eliminating all of the other team’s players to win the game, the winner is the team that scores the most points by completing the missions on time.

Forrest said he likes that element.

“There’s more of an objective, like, there’s more of a reason to play,” he said.

The event’s coordinator, Perry Singleton, said, “It’s more than just ‘bang-bang shoot ’em up.’ You have a puropse and you have goals. I think you do with the others, but (those are) just simple games. A scenario’s much more complex.”

In this game, the objective was to capture a briefcase and defuse a “nuclear warhead.” Both teams had an opportunity to do so, because after the lunch break, the teams switched roles. To add to the difficulty, the briefcase was moved further back into the defensive team’s side for every half hour the defensive team held on to the briefcase. Members of each team were allowed to re-enter the game every 15 minutes, after they were eliminated, with the exception being the last half hour of each game. Points were awarded for eliminating the opposing team’s commander, capturing the briefcase, stepping inside of the defending team’s base and defusing the warhead. Also, the nine fields of Battle Creek were combined into one large field.

Singleton, the owner of Battle Creek, studied other scenario games and used them as examples to form the basis of his own game. He said he had played in more than 50 scenario games and commanded more than 20. The game’s theme relies entirely on creativity, he said, but the themes make scenarios attractive.

“It’s a faster-paced, more intense game,” Singleton said. “It’s not a mundane capture-the-flag with people going in every 15 minutes, you don’t have to sit and wait. This is continuous and it never stops.”

The objectives mean that teams without direction lose quickly. Westphal has played the role of commander at scenario paintball games for years. He has commanded three teams at Frozen Arse, including last year’s event that took place during sleet. Singleton said Westphal is a capable leader. Although the position of commander requires a rudimentary grasp of tactics, in scenario paintball, strategies are best when they are kept simple.

“He just tells people where to go, and they go there,” Forrest said. “And it ends up being the right place to be.”

Not only that, but the commander usually finds himself fighting on the front lines. Westphal spent much of his time commanding his team from a forward position, instead of hanging back where he can’t be hit by well-placed paintballs. When his team was playing defense during the first game in “The Compound,” a collection of connected trailers that proved impervious to attacks, he was constantly moving inside the base. He was crouched over, ducking from shots coming into the trailers from the windows, while at the same time locating the weak points in his defense.

While on offense, Westphal led an all-out assault on a hill to capture the briefcase. His plan had been to send all of his teammates to the hill, so the other team would be overwhelmed. It worked, but not because he had spent a lot of time thinking about it.

“It was kind of spur-of-the-moment,” he said.

The final game of the competition ends explosively.

This time, the Red team is defending from the Complex, and Westphal’s Blue team is attacking. Three times, the Blue team led charges out of a creekbed surrounding the Compound. Three times, the Blue team was stopped in its tracks. The trailers that make up the compound gave the defending team great angles to take shots at the Blue team, and each time when they left the protection of the creekbed, paintballs flew thick and fast. Using an orange smoke grenade for cover had little effect on sheilding the attackers from the onslaught. The sound of paintball guns reached a crescendo every time the Blue team tried to rush, and it proved to be too much.

As the Red team knocked out the last group of players, Westphal crouched along the bank of the creek. Again, he was alone. But this time, there were many more opponents.

“It’s a split-second opening. You have the chance, you have to seize the opportunity.” Westphal said. “If I saw an opening on any one of those guys, I took it... I was surrounded.”

As the members of the Red team crawled up behind bunkers between the trailers and the creek, Westphal held his own. One, two, three Red team members went down. The Red team’s paintballs struck increasingly close, but somehow he remained unhit. A Red player rushed up to the other side of the bunker he was in. Westphal shot him through a crack in the bunker. He kept firing, and hit another couple of players, but in the end, he was overwhelmed.

“I knew I was going to go out blazin’. At that point, I actually wish I had another gun in my hand,” he said. “Two guns. I think I would have just used them both. It was awesome.”

He was eliminated as the Red team captured the victory.

In scenario paintball, unlike higher-pressure tournaments, there is less pressure to win.

“I don’t really mind (losing), because I had a great time,” he said.

He seemed to pass that attitude on to his son. Forrest smiled as he walked back with his father and a few other players.

“Well, that was fun.”