The fightin’ Quakers arrived with the morning dew to the field of battle dressed in a motley assortment of army surplus jackets, worn jeans, and old sneakers and surveyed the opposition.Some fights you just shouldn’t take people up on, like a land war in Asia, a football game against incarcerated felons, or a game of paintball against a gang of kids from Burlington. An army of red-uniformed ten-year-olds sat field-stripping weapons, polishing barrels and tightening laces under the watchful eyes of their fathers.

Catching the cool stares of the diminutive veterans as I tried to figure out how to line up the dovetail sights of my cheap Chinese rental gun, I realized the seven of us were about to step into a world of pain and paint.

Down twenty bucks and filled to the brim with gas and paintballs, we lowered our facemasks and poured out from our gate into the woods. Sprinting twenty yards then landing belly-first in the leafy peat behind the cover of young oaks, wooden pillboxes and piles of sticks, we opened fire.

The odds were against us as senior Noah Collin, outing organizer and by far the most experienced player among the college students, had been drafted to lead the middle school minions. He led a charge of three down the valley to our left, but two of Guilford’s own held their ground behind an old wire-wheel as a team led by mighty Lorenzo took a bunker on the right.

Caught in the valley, Collin’s team was cut to ribbons from the high ground and Guilford’s team took the field without taking a single casualty.

Our victory was short lived. We received a savage beating the next round, and everyone received fresh coats as the day wore on and more high-voiced killers joined in from other games to swell the enemy ranks.

Despite never having played paintball before, I was drafted as the team officer chiefly because I was the only person wearing full digital camouflage and boots. My troops eventually fragged me for selling them out when, after ordering my team on a suicide rush up the right side of a tire field, I ducked around the back left and took out most their attackers.

Paintball Central’s guns, fields, and refs came cheap but the pirates only allowed their own brand of overpriced paintballs on their fields, at $70 dollars per 2000. Fortunately, group rates cut the price for everyone on Guilford’s team by a third, and the excessive cost kept our opposition from using full-auto fire to pin us down.

The end of the day found all of Guilford’s people reunited, guarding a hilltop Alamo, outnumbered three to one by highly armed preteens and their obsessive fathers. Selling our lives dearly, we whittled down their numbers from our pillboxes, but one by one my teammates fell until only two of us remained, low on ammo, our outer perimeter breached.

We managed to snipe two more until a pudgy sixth grader opened up with a fully automatic gun, wasting at least a hundred dollars in an ineffective and expensive barrage that whizzed over our heads. His hail of paint had failed to hit us, but it created a fog of bright orange paint that hung in the air and smeared our masks. Effectively blinded, we became easy prey to a dad who snuck behind us.

Drenched in sickly sweet smell of biodegradable paint and sweat, the bruised, footsore Quaker warriors checked their guns at the door and turned for home, vowing vengeance at next semester’s Guilford Paintball Outing.