Booming Business : Making War for Fun: It’s a Direct Hit

Donny Osmond has played it. So has the crew of TV’s “Moonlighting,” which recently played against the crew from “Hill Street Blues.” Even Disneyland employees play it regularly.

In fact, Magic Kingdom employees, who originally teamed up last November to challenge Knott’s Berry Farm, now play twice a month at a playing field in San Bernardino County.

Clad in green camouflage uniforms, they can be found running through the underbrush and sneaking around trees and boulders in an attempt to capture the enemy team’s flag at the opposite end of the field. In the process, they must avoid being shot by enemy paint balls that splatter water-soluble paint on impact and which, if fired at close range, can leave a welt the size of a quarter.

Like Capture the Flag

Known as air-pistol combat or air-gun games, this adult version of the traditional game of capture the flag originated on the East Coast in 1981. But five years after the first colorful volley of paint balls was fired in the woods of New Hampshire, the game is more popular than ever--particularly in Southern California where a burgeoning number of playing fields have sprung up in recent months.

Indeed, from San Diego to Malibu, the hills are alive with the popping sound of paint balls being fired in what promoters proclaim to be the “the sport of the ‘80s.”

“This is a booming business--there are places cropping up all over,” said Pete Shomler, a former Orange County sheriff’s deputy-turned-entrepreneur who started the Combat Connection eight months ago on 16 rugged acres three miles north of Lake Elsinore in Riverside County.

“We get 70 to 150 people a day on weekends,” said Ruben Cendejas, co-owner of the Fullerton-based Scenarios of Orange County, which also operates a playing field near Lake Elsinore.

And there’s no shortage of recruits.

‘Spitting Paint’

Donny Osmond became hooked after playing the game with friends several months ago. And despite being hit on the lip with a paint ball (“I was spitting paint for 15 minutes”), Osmond, who lives in Irvine, said he’s “dying” to return.

“I want to get my whole company out there,” he said, “I think I’ll call it ‘The Donny Osmond Entertainment Corp. Assault Squad.”

Air-pistol combat, in fact, is giving many company bowling teams a run for their money as the employee recreation of choice.

Employees of such Southland corporations as Rockwell International, McDonnell Douglas, Hughes Aircraft, the Marriott Hotel, Sears and Gemco have formed teams.

Corporate team members praise the camaraderie-building benefits of playing air-pistol combat with co-workers, and now corporate officials are even beginning to view the game as a “unique team-building experience.”

At the Duquesne Systems’ national sales meeting in May, for example, 37 sales people spent an afternoon playing the game. The Pittsburgh-based computer systems software company had recently acquired its chief competitor, and national sales manager Bill Gossman was faced with the task of integrating both national sales forces, which had been “archenemies” for seven years.

Promotes Team Spirit

“I couldn’t have asked for anything better from a morale standpoint,” said Gossman, who is considering doing an encore of the game for his company’s upcoming international sales meeting. “By the end of that day, any signs of ‘you’re from a different company’ were completely washed away.”

In Southern California, the expanding popularity of air-pistol games has caused a run on camouflage uniforms, hats and face paint at war surplus stores.

It also has spawned the Huntington Beach-based Front Line magazine, an ad-laden, 20-odd-page monthly featuring a pastiche of player profiles, articles on strategy, safety hints and game results. Ten thousand copies of the magazine are distributed free to war surplus stores, air-pistol fields and private subscribers, who, according to the publishers, increased by more than 3,000 in the last five months alone to about 4,000.

Although some fields offer players not much more than dirt, a portable toilet and water set out in jugs, others are more upscale, providing such enticements as shaded picnic areas, hot and cold food and drinks, even licensed baby sitters and glassed-in observation booths so families can watch their beloved commandos in action.

Competition Fierce

Competition among the playing fields is fierce, with many now offering such twists to the standard game as villages, stuccoed urban-style structures, sandbag bunkers and spotlights for night games.

Sat Cong Village, which opened last August on 35 acres of jungle-like terrain in a river-wash basin five miles south of Chino in San Bernardino County, is one of the most innovative. It offers players a mock POW camp for teams to attack or defend, complete with bamboo huts, watch towers, a bamboo jail cell and a dock with moored sampans.

Run by a Los Angeles police officer and a West Covina firearms salesman, Sat Cong Village graphically advertises “a sense of adventure the protected will never know. . . . At Sat Cong Village you rescue POWs, assassinate a VC officer and take his ear, capture documents, blow ammo dump and knock out comm shack.” (The “VC officer” is actually a Ho Chi Minh look-alike mannequin with a plastic ear attached with Velcro.)

Another field near Corona, Sad Sak’s War Zone, even provides two mock tanks (off-road vehicles locked in low gear and covered with plywood and fiberglass to resemble the real thing), in addition to “hand greneggs” (camouflage-painted egg shells filled with flour) and booby traps (fire extinguishers filled with flour and set off with trip wires).

“People want more innovations, so you cater to the people,” said War Zone owner John Hanna, a former industrial safety engineer who opened the field four months ago.

Weekend ‘Extravaganza’

Beginning Saturday, the War Zone is hosting what is being billed as “the largest organized Paint War Game ever,” with a total of 500 players splitting into two teams that will face off in two three-hour games. The response to this “end of summer extravaganza” has been “phenomenal,” said Hanna, who said teams are coming from as far away as Nevada and Arizona.

The air-gun game, which has been criticized by the National Coalition on Television Violence and others for its simulation of war, was created in 1981 by three New Englanders--Charles Gaines, author of “Pumping Iron”; Hayes Noel, a New York City stockbroker, and Robert Gurnsey, owner of a retail ski shop--who had a continuing debate about the nature of survival and whether a person with city skills could adapt easily to the woods.

When the three men saw an ad in a farm magazine for a cattle-marking paint pistol, they figured that they had the ideal tool to help them settle their debate. They invited 14 friends to the wilds of New Hampshire for the weekend and, so the story goes, the group found the experience so exhilarating that three of the friends, who happened to be magazine writers, wrote articles about it.

The resulting public interest was so overwhelming that in late 1981, Gaynes, Gurnsey and Noel formed the National Survival Game, a New London, N.H.-based corporation which, according to a company spokesman, quickly became a $2-million-a-year business whose gross sales have doubled every year.

Sold Internationally

The National Survival Game is now being marketed internationally in England, France, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. And, to date, there are more than 250 authorized National Survival Game dealers operating playing fields throughout North America, with approximately 30,000 people playing every weekend.

Those figures, however, do not reflect the thousands of people playing on fields not affiliated with the National Survival Game.

When Los Angeles firefighter Michael Jasperson and his two brothers started Front Line magazine last August, they found only about eight air-pistol combat fields in Southern California.

Today, Jasperson said, there are 39 fields scattered between San Diego and San Jose, with the majority in Southern California and most bearing such war-like names as California Commando Games and Weekend Warriors.

Southland players who have formed teams have adopted equally macho -sounding military monikers such as Devil’s Brigade, Grimm Reapers, the Mad Dogs, Sudden Death, Vendetta and Saigon Psychos.

Hourlong Games

For about $20, players 18 or older can spend half a day playing three hourlong games in which they attempt to capture the enemy flag at the opposite end of the field and return it to their home base. (An honor system says that when you’re hit with a paint ball, you’re out of the game. Referees ensure that the rules of the game, including wearing protective goggles, are followed.)

The activity, its devotees say, offers a chance to vicariously live out the teamwork, strategy and the adrenaline-pumping thrill of hunting down an enemy--and being hunted--that real combat provides.

Of course, this is combat on a purely fantasy level--more like the movies than the real thing--and some players play their parts to the hilt.

One group recently arrived at a field riding on the hood of a ’67 Pontiac, with Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries”--the stirring music played during a helicopter assault in “Apocalypse Now”--blaring over the car tape deck. Grinned Tim Hebert, 20, a truck driver from Westminster: “We’re big on entrances.”

As a sweaty but beaming Sam Wright, 45, of El Toro, told his wife at the end of one pitched battle recently, “During the week I’m this three-piece suit. . . . You didn’t know I was this macho paint killer in camouflage on the weekend!”

All Walks of Life

Despite the stereotype many non-players have of air-gun game aficionados--warmongering survivalists whose idea of a role model is the flex-and-grunt super-hero Rambo--players come from all walks of life.

Many are professionals like Wright, West Coast marketing manager for Hitachi’s broadcast division, who views his monthly outings as a way to vent the stresses and pressures that build up during the workweek.

“It’s just a bunch of guys blowing off steam--it’s the same experience as jogging four miles,” Wright said.

Said another player, Drew Heederik, a 34-year-old sporting goods salesman from Los Angeles: “I play war games instead of golf on Sundays.”

Disneyland employees joined the fray last November when they played their first game--against a group of employees from Knott’s Berry Farm.

Play Twice a Month

The 40-plus Magic Kingdom contingent now plays twice a month and has formed two teams: Danbo’s Commandos (named after team leader Dan Visnaw, a chef on Main Street) and Mickey’s Jihad (that’s Arabic for holy war), led by jungle cruise ride operator Jerry Whitfield.

“It’s a lot of fun when you play with your friends,” said Whitfield, 24, after a recent intra-park skirmish. “Part of the fun is going to work the next day and talking about who you killed.”

Although air-pistol combat is a predominantly male pastime, women are not an uncommon sight on the fields. And the women apparently get as much a kick out of it as the men.

“It’s great,” said Dina Norbury, 19, a culinary hostess at Disneyland and one of four women who turned out for the recent skirmish. “My boyfriend plays and he just said it was fun, so I thought I’d give it a try. I loved it. It’s challenging, trying not to get shot and trying to shoot other people.”

Such mimicry of real warfare has led to charges that air-pistol combat is violent. Players maintain, however, that it’s all in fun and a lot less violent than football or other contact sports.

‘Like Playing Tag’

“It’s like any kind of game: someone’s going to get eliminated one way or the other,” said Lori Hess, 24, a Disneyland ride operator. “At first, I thought it was kind of vicious. But if you look at it in the proper perspective, you’re not killing people. It’s like playing tag. I had a good time. It’s a good way to take out your anger and frustrations and not hurt anyone.”

Although the ranks of players include current members of the military and Vietnam veterans, most players have no illusions of being real-life Rambos. When one young player was asked if he would like to participate in actual combat, he laughed and said, as if surprised to even be asked, “Oh, hell, no.”

Despite players’ enthusiasm, Dr. Thomas Radecki, a psychiatrist and chairman of the National Coalition on Television Violence, charges that “hour for hour,” the air-pistol games are “probably worse than actually watching a war movie because you’re actually going out and participating in it yourself.”

“They’re getting off on the thrill of hunting down and pretending to kill another human being,” Radecki said. “That’s a dangerous way of getting your excitement. Having fun playing war is very desensitizing, very likely to teach values that are compatible with supporting war and very likely to teach violence as a way of dealing with problems. When we need to be taking a less violent direction in our society--toward peace and nonviolence--this merchandising of war and murder is a great concern.”

Not for Everyone

Bob Duncan, a readjustment counselor at the Vet Center in West Los Angeles, said he would never recommend air-pistol combat for someone who was in the advanced stages of post-traumatic stress disorder.

But Duncan, who walked through more than 1,500 miles of jungle as a machine-gunner for the First Infantry Division in Vietnam, sees nothing wrong with playing the game for someone not experiencing war-related emotional problems.

“I think it’s an appropriate way to release anger for anyone because it offers exercise and you’re also making a ‘kill’ without really hurting anyone. It’s an adult version of cowboys and Indians is what it is.”

Duncan, who hasn’t played the game, said he “wouldn’t have any problem playing it. Just as a lot of people say ‘Rambo’ glorifies combat, to me, it’s so ridiculous. I leave it where it should be: entertainment, because most Vietnam veterans don’t take it seriously. It (the game) has nothing to do with combat as far as I’m concerned. . . . Nobody could ever prepare you for real combat.”

Although it may be hard to imagine air-pistol games being as big a phenomenon in the 1960s when anti-military sentiments were at a peak, Debra Dion, public relations director for the National Survival Game, believes that the game’s popularity has nothing to do with a pro-military mood in the country.

Avoid Military Trappings

“In the beginning we were asked, ‘If there was another Vietnam, do you think that would be the end of your business?’ ” said Dion, whose response is, “We (the National Survival Game) spend a lot of time and money marketing this game as capture the flag or hide and seek. We have tried to stay as far away from the military trappings as we can.”

“If people want a real serious military approach they can go somewhere else,” Dion added. “We really see ourselves as an outdoor recreational activity for mainstream America.”

Jasperson, who believes that Hollywood stars such as Sylvester Stallone (star of the Rambo movies) and Chuck Norris have made “wearing camouflage and shooting guns OK,” estimates that the game will not peak in popularity for several years because “there are so many people who have not played and there are so many things left to give the games new life.”

Peter Clecak, a University of California, Irvine, professor of comparative culture, said he does not view the popularity of air-pistol games “as any great signal of trouble in society.”

“It is, in some sense, a takeoff of the Rambo phenomenon, and everything that’s said about the Rambo phenomenon critically are points well taken,” he said. “On the other hand, it seems to me that in some strange way the Rambo phenomenon is one in which people are trying to imagine violence reduced to an individual scale once again, because one fundamental fear we have now is of nuclear annihilation . . . so that an exercise like (air-pistol combat) gives us the illusion we have control over things.”

‘An Antisocial Edge’

Although acknowledging that the sport “does have an antisocial edge to it,” Clecak said, “it’s often within the context of a kind of sociability. There are nostalgia elements, a sense of control, a sense of letting off steam, of doing on the field things you can’t do in the office, and there’s the camaraderie. So I think there’s all that to be said for it.”

Jerome Kirk, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at UC Irvine, views the air-pistol combat phenomenon as “a step back to childhood,” a return to “little boy fantasies.”

“I think the people who are having the most fun at the war games are not really violence prone or pro-military,” he said. “They tend almost to be the opposite. It seems to me most of them are professional problem solvers in their work and in their lives.”

And air-pistol games, Kirk said, “involve a lot of thinking, scheming and a lot of computing. My guess is your typical player is somebody who is not particularly a physical person in his work, not particularly athletic. But most of them are smart, especially most of the ones who survive.”

“I think what we have is competent nerds, to be frank,” he added. “This is the world’s ideal nerd playing these games. He’s sharp, fast, not physical. . . . He’s got the kind of mind traits we think of as nerds.”

Just tell that to the Mad Dogs or the Saigon Psychos.