Massacre at Heartbreak Ridge

It's a good day to let out some steam. The past few days I've been stuck in Mascot doing integration and SAT for Flexi-ISN, and things are not going smoothly. Mainly IP connectivity, firewall rules, and hardware redundancy. Anyway, it's an hour's drive to Heartbreak Ridge along Richmond Road. I got there half an hour late. Fortunately, I was still able to catch up. Each one of us is given a camouflage overall, a JT protective mask, a Tippmann Model 98 fully-loaded paintball gun, and four full bottles of paintball pellets. The ladies get extra gloves, vests, and neck protectors. That's what I call unfair advantage.

For starters, we had our first engagement on a flat terrain with lots of triangular metal structures for cover. The mission is simple: reach the enemy territory without getting hit. I tell you, getting hit is almost a certainty, and it hurts pretty bad. Imagine a small plastic pellet the size of a big holen hitting you at 300 feet per second. Managed to get a guy right smack in the goggles, which made my day. After two games, we moved on to a forest terrain with lots of tree cover and wooden barricades for protection. The objective is retrieve a "nuclear bomb" in the middle of the field and plant it in enemy territory. Managed to score a few hits, but that gave away my position, and I was eliminated before the game finished.

We had a group rest, bought a few more bags of ammo - these pellets are expensive!, and came back for more. Our next game is on dry land with lots and lots of grassy mounds and hills. Objective is simply to eliminate the enemy troops. Gameplay became slower and more intense this time because visibility is very limited, and everyone's trying to conserve ammo. To make things more interesting, there's a hill in the middle of the field, and each team is supposed to keep their flag raised at the end of 5 minutes. Of course, the guy who goes up the hill to do that will surely be hammered with pellets. We could've won the game, but at the 10-second mark, the other team made a rush for the flag, and even when we sprayed them with bullets, they just kept on instead of falling back. Oh well, as they say, it's just a game.

Our last match was played out in this massive forest terrain complete with a dividing small stream with three bridges. 30-on-30 all-out war. Objective is to storm the enemy fortress. Pull on this cord that will set off an explosion to signal a win. By now, everyone's pretty good with the gun, so it's long drawn-out battle. I managed to nail a couple of guys, but I didn't see them raising their arms to signal a hit. Some sneaky son-of-a-paintball-gun flanked me and got me in the shin. Ouch! Not sure what happened afterwards, though I think it was declared a draw.

Lunch is one Domino's pizza (supreme or meatlover's) per person. First time I managed to finish a pizza in one sitting by myself. A special game was arranged after lunch, and it's called mangers vs. the others. Now we're talking. A lot of the managers chickened out, so it became a one-sided shoot-out of 10 managers against 20 engineers. Talk about a massacre - they never had a chance. It was all over in a matter of minutes.

I did a quick count when I got home. Aside from bruises and scrapes on the knees, I got two hits on the shin, one on the kneebone, one on the thigh, and two on the arm - all of them red, black, and blue. That was fun.