Let’s Roll Play

U.S. Army Ranger Josh Warren searches the landscape for insurgents. Two of his men have just been hit. They're lying on the ground, moaning, unable to walk. As a medic tends to one of the wounded, a young soldier not yet out of his teens, Warren leans over to him. "Did you see where they went?" he asks.

"I saw three guys moving on the right," the young soldier says. "They were carrying AK-47s."

"That means they're operating somewhere out there," Warren notes grimly.

They are indeed, only they're not the kind of insurgents Warren used to fight during his five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're Vietcong, or rather people pretending to be Vietcong. Warren, actually no longer a Ranger but a ROTC cadet attending Seattle University, is leading a team of men engaged in a Vietnam War simulation. Some 20 guys—as young as 12 and as old as 42—have come to a thickly wooded, privately owned parcel of land on Fox Island, just west of Gig Harbor, to pretend they're in the Vietnamese jungle, on a mission to win the hearts and minds of the locals while training them to battle the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Their weapons: BB guns that look so realistic, even police can't tell they're not the real thing.

That resemblance has fueled the popularity of these "Airsoft" guns, a name given them by the Japanese, who first produced them, presumably because the BBs shot by these guns have a relatively soft impact. They're made of plastic or compressed vegetation, rather than metal, as are traditional BB guns. What Airsoft guns lack in ferocity, they make up for in coolness, as gun lovers see it. They precisely replicate real models, whether current, like the A4 submachine gun used now in Iraq; a historical gun, like the M16 of Vietnam days; or the ever-popular AK-47. So while traditional BB guns were the exclusive domain of kids, grown men take up Airsoft as well, and it's gaining ground on paintball as the way would-be—and even real—soldiers like to shoot at each other.

Critics attack Airsoft as dangerous, but enthusiasts present it as an activity as wholesome as the Boy Scouts. Either way, it has evolved from a few guys shooting at each other in the woods to, at times, elaborate events that can draw hundreds.

The Fox Island event, put on by a Tacoma company called Battlesim, is small but intense. The guys, who have paid $40 each, show up in Vietnam-era fatigues, "tiger-striped" or monochrome "olive drab," some with helmets decorated, '60s style, with peace signs. Among the assembled are Hunger Wilcutt, a 12-year-old whose father is in the National Guard and who finds Airsoft "the closest thing you can get to war"; an Air Force plane electrician named Cameron Shoenberger who sits around a maintenance facility all day and appreciates the chance to be "outside in the dirt"; and Greg Hamilton, a military-history buff who is a sergeant in the National Guard and runs a nationally known firearms school in Bellevue called InSights Training. There also are assorted teens and young men who have no connection to the military.

Then there's Warren, who helps run these events for Battlesim. A dark-haired, wisecracking 26-year-old, he's got to be one of the few combat veterans with a theater background: He grew up doing summer stock at a Colorado theater run by his parents. He says he plans these events as he does his plays, asking himself "What's going to make people step away from their regular life?"

"All right, guys, bring it in!" Warren shouts at the beginning of what is to be a 24-hour event. He's standing in front of a long tent that's been set up to look like an Army camp, underneath which the guys have spread their sleeping bags and gear. After explaining the mission, dubbed Operation Somerset Plains after a real mission in Vietnam's Thua Thien Province, he has them practice military formations and the hand signals for them. With dead-serious expressions, the guys move as a team in a straight line or at a 45-degree angle. "Contact, 12 o'clock, 20 meters," Warren shouts, as if the enemy were ahead, and they dive into the grass, guns cocked.

Then they head out on "patrol." They're ambushed almost immediately, sprayed with BBs by Battlesim employees playing guerrilla soldiers, hiding in the woods. After dealing with the "wounded"—a smoke can sends a plume of orange into the air to tell an imaginary rescue helicopter where to land—Warren's team continues deeper into the woods.

Eventually they come to a mock Vietnamese hamlet, complete with huts made of Ikea bamboo shades and supposed villagers wandering around in cone hats. "G.I., G.I.," one exclaims, coming to greet them. Warren calls for a "translator," who proceeds to speak Vietnamese-sounding gibberish. The putative American soldiers offer "peace beer" (i.e., a can of Budweiser) and medical care while they gather "intelligence." They stay in character all the while—looking carefully at a villager's broken leg, taking out an inkpad to get fingerprints, questioning the men under the cone hats about the whereabouts of the Vietcong. They're all improvising without a script, aside from the rough outline of events that only Battlesim employees know.