Deconstructing Paintball Fraserstyle

Deconstructing Paintball Fraserstyle

A few years ago while I was playing in a band with Robbie, our keyboard player Bill had his Stag Do and all of the rest of us bandmates were invited along.  Our pre-piss up activity that day was paintball, which for me at least was the first time i’d experienced it and I suspect there were quite a few others in the same position, including Robbie.

A few ‘games’ in and we were all starting to get the hang of it when the stewards announced that the next game would be bit of a ‘bloodbath’ so we would need to elect a ‘medic’ from our team.  The purpose of which was to ‘revive’ any player that was knocked out, by means of donning a white lab coat and wiping the paint covered player down with an old towel they’d be given, in order for the player to hastily return to the killing….

Or being killed was more likely, as it would appear that the next mission was to storm a very narrow bridge, behind which the other team was occupying very heavily protected firing positions, like an open air pill box!

No sooner had the briefing ended had Robbie leapt to his feet and started questioning the 2 stewards.  He returned to us a few minutes later with a broad gin on his face and a plan.  He was also wearing the white lab coat.

He had asked the stewards to elaborate on the mechanics of how the medic was supposed to work, the answer being given was that as soon as the medic had wiped off the paint and touched you on the arm you were ‘revived’ and could go back into the game again.  What Robbie had then posed to them was; IF you remained in constant physical contact with the medic and IF the medic wasn’t shot… would that make you invincible?

The bemused stewards could see no obvious flaws in his logic and had to agree that any player in contact with the (not dead) medic was afforded ‘invincibility’, by now they were curious enough about where this was all heading that they came over with Robbie to overhear the plan that he put to the rest of us.

Which was…. that he would crouch down and we would surround him as closely as possible whilst we approached the bridge, effectively creating a ‘Man-Tank’ round him which couldn’t be killed!  We would rotate slowly so that everyone took their turn at being pelted with paintballs and we’d just be able to walk straight across the bridge! 

I could see the stewards barely able to contain their excitement at the prospect of seeing this actually take place.  

A few minutes later as we were walking towards the bridge in tight formation and into the range of enemy fire I was still stunned by the fact that Robbie had actually managed to convince the group that this was going to be a good plan… AND that we’d had all actually gone for it!… Take what you will from that!

A few minutes further on after the whole team had dispersed and retreated, the plan having gone hideously wrong, I found I had learned a valuable lesson in life.  If you’re standing at the front of a Man Tank being twatted from all directions with hard little balls of luminous liquid and you’re expecting your fellow team mates to follow the fine details of an utterly lunatic plan, voluntarily rotate and take some of the heat off you… then you’re probably expecting too much!! 

Later that day Robbie’s interpretations of the rules scored us a win during a ‘Capture the Flag’ match… he’d asked whether the Blue armbands we were wearing to distinguish our team HAD to be worn on the arm… the stewards were clearly already aware of where Robbie was coming from after the events of the morning and told him that so long as they were ‘visible’ that we could wear them anywhere.

That game, on Robbie’s suggestion, we all wore our ‘Armbands’ around our ankles and successfully managed to walk directly into the enemy camp and nick their flag! If anyone there on the day can corroborate that it was actually Robbie himself that did the flag stealing i’d be grateful! (Even if not that’s the way i’ll always choose to remember it anyway!)