Un razboi distractiv

Standing in a five-foot ditch, hiding behind some grass growing at the top of the hole. My semi-automatic in my hands. Searching for the enemy creeping around this deserted half-constructed office building. Every few minutes, a round of gunfire in the distance. The enemy is invisible.

There! A glimpse of camouflage sticking out against the cement background, 30 yards away. Crouch. Hide. A friendly or the enemy? Can't tell. Just looked back at me. Must have seen me. Grip the gun tighter. Be ready.

There! Yellow on his arm. The Enemy. Kill him. Three shots off before he can even react. Don't stop shooting. His hands go up. He's dead.

My first paintball kill of the day.

Yes, paintball exists in Moldova. I was invited to play it last Sunday with some Moldovan alumni from American Councils, a U.S. government program that sponsors foreigners on exchange trips of various lengths to the States. Their programs include business development and the FLEX program, which allows foreign students to spend a year in an American high school. Sunday one alumna, Marina, organized a trip for a dozen alumni (and a stray American) to play paintball at Attiss, a site on the outskirts of Chisinau.

Even though Moldova's attitude toward safety is nowhere near that of America's, I was still surprised when we arrived at Attiss and saw what looked like an Afghan terrorist training center. The staging area was on the second floor of an office building that had only been half-constructed and was already on its way backward toward dilapidation. No interior walls had yet been built, creating a single room out of the 40 foot by 100 foot space. There were two large piles of rubble at different corners of the building. Just 15 feet away from the spectators and new arrivals were fully armed men shooting target practice against a wall, nothing standing between the firing guns and the unprotected masses except the men's discretion.

We put on paintball gear that the company provided: a camouflage jumpsuit, a fabric flack jacket to cover our chest, stomach and back, an athletic cup, a cloth hat, cloth gloves and a plastic face shield. Lilia, my date from the previous night's wedding who had invited me paintballing, wanted to play. The worker she approached about equipment gave her what I perceived to be as a "This isn't for little girls like you" speech in Russian, then had her hold a piece of cardboard at arm's length from her body. He shot the cardboard from 10 feet away, and the paintball went clear through the cardboard without breaking. Despite my continued encouragement, that was enough to make Lilia sit out for the day.

The men working there gave us some directions in Russian (it was the language of choice for the day, but a guy named Vlad translated for me), telling us that the most important rule was to always wear your mask when you went into the playing area. The objective of the game is to grab the flag from the other team and bring it to your own flag. The flags in our game would be cardboard boxes. After the explanation, they gave us our guns.

At an American paintball range, you must insert a plastic plug into your gun barrel whenever you are not in the playing area. There were no such plugs for us, but each gun had a safety. But as various Moldovans waved their guns around a little too carelessly with their fingers on the triggers, I would have preferred something plugging up the barrel, assuring me that a paintball wasn't going to explode my eyeball out of the socket at any moment. No such assurance came.

We then split into teams, and I was impressed with my Russian when they pointed at me and said, "Красный," and I knew that I was on the red team. This meant I was part of the Red Army. In Moldova. How apropos.

We went downstairs and outside onto the playing field. We toured the field and the buildings it encompassed and prepared ourselves for urban warfare. The lecture we had received about putting on our masks as soon as we went downstairs was not very seriously enforced; one of the employees told me that I could take it off until the game started.

Because of my lack of Russian, I was left out of the mission planning. I was told to stay with Vlad, wherever he went, and that the two of us would be on defense for the first game.

The first game went well, although after we had already secured a perimeter around our flag that included an easy-to-defend building, Vlad told me that we should collapse in toward the flag. Five minutes later, when I wanted to investigate a sound I had heard, I was ambushed by a yellow player who was standing in the exact hallway that I had been protecting earlier. Follow orders, get killed. Ain't that how it always is.

In between games, the locker room talk about who had shot whom was all in Russian, so I felt a little left out. A Russian-speaking Peace Corps volunteer can walk up to any Moldovan, even if the Moldovan is speaking Romanian at the time, and know that he can converse with them in Russian. A Romanian-speaking Peace Corps volunteer like me can never be sure that someone speaking Russian will know Romanian, and my experience has been that they often don't. Thus, I decided that any attempts at locker room talk would be poorly received, so I just drank water and, as we left, proclaimed in English, "Come on, Red Army. Let's go out there and defend the Soviet Motherland." The ones who understood it laughed.

For the second game I stuck with Vlad again, but this time we went on offense. At one point, while standing in a ditch on the side, I killed a guy. Shooting someone instead of being shot was a good mood-improver.

The second game ended, and I decided that if I wanted to get back to my village that evening, I wouldn't be able to play a third game. So I changed my clothes, with the exception of my t-shirt, which was soaked through and for which I had brought no replacement. I had some more ammunition, so I got Lilia to take a few shots. She wouldn't make a good marine.

While talking before we left, I found out Vlad and his wife, Cezara (who has her own organizational development consulting site), had lived in Santa Cruz, CA for two years, only 30 minutes away from where I grew up. They had even met a high school friend of mine because she was dating a Bulgarian guy they know. Small world.

I returned home that evening, my shirt still sweating, after a weekend full of love at a wedding and violence from paintball. From the wedding, I have a videotape. From the paintball match, I have a welt on my upper thigh that, as of Thursday, has not yet gone away. I'll treasure both of my mementos.