Deep South Radio

(Fake) Embedding in a (Fake) War

May 1, 2009

I am wearing a huge facemask and green thick industrial grade plastic goggles, with a Darth Vader-like breathing apparatus over my head. It is severely limiting my peripheral vision, and I’m breathing so hard that I keep fogging it up. I can’t take it off, though; I could get shot in the eye.

I am going to try to describe what is happening without banking off into some other dimension. Surreal is a word that is overused for situations one can’t quite feel comfortable in, and my discomfort is coming from a variety of different places. Imagine:

When a bullet is coming toward you, you don’t even realize it.

It’s four in the morning and the squad hasn’t slept. They realized quickly that in order to survive, they would have to give up on that luxury. They are about to stage an ambush, on a building close to their base. The sun is not up yet, and they crawl on their bellies through the dark over gravel towards the building, some forty-five feet away. To their left are a series of smaller whitewashed buildings, visible in moonlight, the only illumination. The sound of gunfire is ripping, staccato, as it has been for almost eleven hours.

The squad’s objective is this: to take back the building, a red, sloping warehouse. Visible through the open doors on its southern side are some loose stairs. This is the avenue of approach. The attack will be a surprise.  Every minute of the preceding eleven hours has been in preparation for this one. The men, serpentine, keep their hands on their guns. This is what they have been waiting for.

In the southeastern quadrant, their commander issues a directive. Their orders and objective have changed, they must suck up the effort they’ve made thus far and move on. They crawl back in the night’s cold. Mud is caking on their vests and boots. The squadron, 12 men, is now being asked to remove a wounded officer to the main road, several miles away. In the military, one soldier’s life is worth the effort of everyone else in his company. Reaching the wounded officer, they place him on a gurney to begin the arduous foot trek to the road. By morning, they’ve reached the road, miles away, the gunfire in the distance at a steady clip, like the sharp end of a stick punching holes in the night. No sleep. No food. Only as much water as they could carry.

The body on the gurney isn’t real though, and they know it.  It’s a dummy, like the kind rescuers use to practice CPR. The dummy is in full military regalia. This is a game.

Elaborate doesn’t even begin to describe it. 

Special Agent Brian Liebelt leans back into the standard- issue office chair in his office at Fort Hamilton, on the southern tip of Brooklyn under the Verrazano Narrows bridge. In the daytime he is active duty Army Police, a cop for the military.  (“It’s not like what you see on CSI,” he warned me earlier as we made our way to his office. )

His dark hair is slightly longer than a military crew cut, and he’s wearing khaki cargo pants, tan combat boots and a fleece, something between a uniform and civilian clothes, a sartorial limbo. Here at Fort Hamilton, he lives a self-imposed Spartan existence in the land of plenty, mere miles away from DiFara Pizza and Madison Avenue. There is nothing to decorate his office except a framed magazine cutout of John Wayne. “It used to be Donald Rumsfeld,” he says, with a sharp, testing look at me.  “Now, I think John Wayne is a better hero.”

He is the tactical captain of the Green Mountain Rangers, an elite squadron of war gamers. “It’s difficult to explain to people, and so I usually don’t try. We just say we are an airsoft team.” The problem with that explanation is that they are and they aren’t.

Liebelt’s Green Mountain Rangers are a squadron of 12 men who use Airsoft guns to stage military simulations. Sometimes the simulations  are re-enactments of historical events. Sometimes the historical events are battles from the Cold War. Sometimes they are battles from recent military history, like the U.S. Armed Forces occupation of Somalia in 1991-92. Sometimes they are battles from the Iraq War, of which four of the twelve Rangers are veterans.  And for them, reliving their war can be much more than a game.

Airsoft is a sport, like paintball, and it had its origins in Southeast Asia, where in the 1970s it became illegal to own firearms for personal use. In the intervening decades, it evolved into a slightly more realistic combat simulation game, and sometime in the early 1990s, when paintball began to grow popular in the United States, airsoft began to take on its own life as paintball’s more serious, more sinister cousin.

The guns look like real guns, but they shoot pellets, instead of real bullets. They can still do real damage, as I learned when I was unceremoniously pelted in the backside by a pranking gamer, but obviously not the kind of damage real semi or automatic weapons can do. At most they can break the skin and cause bleeding. The name signals the less lethal impact of the airsoft gun’s bullets.

“I felt like I needed a hobby when I got back from Iraq,” Liebelt says.

He returned from his tour of duty in Al-Anbar province in 2006, and weighed his options while living in his parents’ house. He assembled and painted toy models, the minutiae of the work giving him great comfort. But it wasn’t enough to keep his mind busy, and he doesn’t know why exactly except that he had a lot of energy, and nowhere to put it. He found out about airsoft through a friend. Since he started playing, he drinks a lot less. It gives him something to do with his hands.

Liebelt, like all of the other members of the Green Mountain Rangers,  doesn’t talk much to non-gamers about what they actually are doing when they get together in Tolland Massachusetts, or Coram, Long Island and practice with their guns. They don’t want people to get the wrong idea.

“What would the wrong idea be?” I wonder aloud, on a misty morning in an abandoned Chinese vegetable farm in New Jersey, where the men have set up their arsenal for drills in close quarters combat.

Brian Douglass, 24, rests the blasting end of his M-4 against the tall grass: “We don’t want people to think we’re gun nuts. People don’t exactly understand why we like to come out here and do this.”

The Green Mountain Rangers seem to think that’s perfectly understandable. Their brand of extreme airsoft is a recent invention. The first major games  got underway in 2002, around the time the U.S. began preparing for war in Iraq.

Levi DiFranza, a Ranger, signed up with the army on March 14, 2003, a week before the start of the Iraq War. Having begun playing airsoft  in the late nineties, he was a gamer before he was a soldier.

“After playing for two, three years, we had our first really big game, called OpFor1, 80 or 90 people. It was the closest thing to war I’d ever seen at the time, I was all excited I was like this was what I wanna do when I get older, when you’re a kid you play Cowboys and Indians and all that, and this was much higher stakes. “

By the time DiFranza came back from his first tour of duty, the game scenarios had grown increasingly elaborate, and the Internet forums that players used to communicate with each other had grown exponentially. In 1999,  about 50 people had been playing in the Northeast. Ten years later, there are more than 9,000.

The Internet made it possible for people who wanted to play war to find one another. And for those men who may have been interested in tactics but were afraid of the commitment of combat, the Iraq war was the deciding factor in choosing to stay behind and shoot pellets instead of real guns half a world away.  

An exact number is hard to hazard, but anywhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people  play competitive airsoft in the United States, if the number of different users and attendance rolls at countrywide events are any indicator.  Based on the rolls of the participants  who show up at the major ops every couple of months to fight one another in the shadow wars that mirror the ones raging in less fortunate parts of the globe, about 5,000 engage in the kind of extreme Airsoft that the Green Mountain Rangers and other top-tier, highly regarded teams play.  

The day we ended up in the Chinese vegetable garden was a Saturday. Four men in full camo arrived at my home in Brooklyn in a White Chevy Trailblazer to pick me up. There were only first names, except for Brian Douglass, the team’s communications man. In his regular life, he is a video and commercial editor. On the weekends, he is a warrior. The driver is Paul, call sign “Ronin. In Japanese, this means “samurai with no lord or master.”The other two men are Bill, call sign “Kurtz,”  the name of the demented  white trader from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, and Rich, call sign “Bushwick,” after his part of Brooklyn. Paul (Ronin) is quiet the whole way from my home to the vegetable garden in central New Jersey, except for a few whispered expletives and a phone call in which he blames me for the group’s tardiness in getting to their practice field. He calls me a “narc.”

Rich and Bill, both in their late thirties, are photographers, the former in fashion and the latter a freelance photojournalist who has done work for PBS. Rich is a dark bear of a man, with a full beard. He hides his face under his thick knit cap and speaks with a slight Texas twang. He’s reluctant to admit what part of Texas he’s from. Bill brightens when he tells me that he might get to go to Palm Beach to report a story on Bernie Madoff. They can’t tell me their last names because they worry what their colleagues might think of their hobby. It is seven in the morning on a Saturday after all, and the back of the trailblazer has enough guns in it to arm a SWAT Team.

As we pass New Jersey state cops on the way to our destination, the men tense up, and the car slows down. Everything goes quiet except for static from the radio. The guns, it turns out, are realistic enough to raise eyebrows. Some have real gun parts. If we were stopped, they would be in some kind of trouble.

By the time we get to the field, fifteen acres bounded by woods on all sides, there are already ten other SUVS parked near a rocky outcropping, and men are clustered around, Velcro-ing and tie-ing and assembling their guns, and their uniforms. We clamber out of the car, late. It takes a while to gear up.

The civilian members of GMR couldn’t be more different, at least superficially, from the military veterans on the team. “Strike” has been on the team for ten years and was the initial operator of the Northeast Airsoft Group or NEASG, the internet sounding board where all practice and play information is posted. Like Brian Douglass, he works in video production.  “S2” is a graphic designer, responsible for designs relating to Hello Kitty and HotWheels. “Wawa, ” a Japanese-American member and one of the initial founders of the team, is a fashion designer. He is in charge of textiles for the Gap.

“You would think this would be the most left-leaning group of guys,” S2 says as his voice trails off toward the sound of a grenade in the vegetable garden. He seems acutely aware of Manhattan media stereotypes.  For the non-veterans, it really is “all the excitement of war without the danger,” says Bill, aka “Kurtz.” He photographed combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and might be going back for the summer. In this situation, the visual artists defer to the expertise of Liebelt, DiFranza, and Jon Goldman, a former Ranger, taking instructions from them, asking specific questions about tactics and postures. It’s clear that it makes the vets feel good. It feels good to be able to use their tactical skills without being afraid.

So, just to clarify, here we are in the middle of the a field, forty men, 11 of whom are part of an elite reenactment and military simulation team, in full camouflage, preparing for a fake battle that noone will witness except for the men involved (and it is only men). Amid all the hemming and hawing over how “difficult it is to explain” what they are doing, there are a lot of things to consider. One is the whole idea of war reenactment, which is a major pastime for an estimated 50,000 Americans. The other is the way in which this very specific sport,  the surreal war game the Green Mountain Rangers are masters of, is a product of both military policy and a change in the way we think about violence as a culture.

Americans are very familiar with the idea of war reenactment. It is a hobby that has twin aims of devotion to historical accuracy and education and commemoration of certain historical conflicts. Airsoft is not that. One important difference is the degree to which the U.S. military is thickly intertwined with airsoft.

One popular yearly op is called Operation Irene, staged at a military training facility in upstate New York in Fort Drum. This one is run by Danny McKnight.  McKnight was one of the US Rangers who survived the Battle of Mogadishu, the failed culmination of the United States occupation of Somalia during that country’s Civil War. Nineteen US soldiers lost their lives. In the training field at Fort Knox, in Kentucky, with buildings in various states of disrepair, Airsofters from across the country can convene to re-imagine McKnight’s ordeal, rescuing American soldiers from a raging Somali populace. Everything is restaged, from the burning helicopters to the negotiations with local Somalis. Stephen Cusano calls the Op “totally epic.”

 The Green Mountain Rangers aren’t exactly the kind of guys who re-do Gettysburg on the weekends but what they’re doing is something similar. It has been, especially in the past century, a phenomenon that crops up after every war. More recently, World War II and Vietnam reenactors have been coming out of the woodwork. It’s a sensitive subject because the motivations aren’t always clear. Rationale is often provided in the form of honoring history, but what the guys are reluctant to talk about is the ways in which, if they are vets, the act of redoing it makes them feel…better. And, if they’ve never been in a war, its an opportunity to engage in a defining act of manhood.  Paul, the quiet, brooding “Ronin,” has a backstory like this. S2 tells me his parents wouldn’t let Ronin join military until after he’d completed college. By the time he graduated, joining seemed like a death wish. “He missed his chance.”

And the Airsoft events are promoted among members of the military, with some bases going so far as to field their own teams for major ops.

In January of 2009 an uproar arose from the revelation that an army recruiting station in Franklin Mall outside of Philadelphia Pennsylvania was using army video games as a recruiting  tool in a 15,000-foot space called the Army Experience Center. What people didn’t seem to realize was that the United States Army had been using video games as a means to hook a young video-game oriented population since shortly after  9/11 [ before Operation Iraqi Freedom had even begun. The game used at the Philadelphia Mall and sponsored by the United States Army is called America’s Army, and is based on single-person shooter games like Doom and Counterstrike. The United States Military Academy reported that more than 30 percent of the incoming freshmen in the class of 2005 had played America’s Army, a game that simulates the war in Iraq. After I interviewed Brian Liebelt for the first time, he left me saying that he was off to his room to play America’s Army. Airsofters make constant reference to COD, or Call of Duty 4, a hyper-realistic video game that uses the war in Afghanistan as the template for play.

For someone who has never seen a war but has an idealized vision of what it might be like, an airsoft battle is a devastatingly effective advertisement for the United States Armed Forces. The armed forces know this. Military personnel at army bases like Fort Knox and Fort Drum often play the role of the insurgency at operations. When its all over, the National Guard sets up a recruiting stand to bring in the converted. The Rangers themselves are stuck on the idea of the camaraderie that it brings them, the kind of bonding possibly absent from everyday life.

It is kind of fun. I’ve never shot a gun in my life, but I admit feeling an itch at the team’s practices to hurl the grenade into an abandoned building foundation, or shoot the gun, just to see what it would feel like. It wouldn’t hurt anybody. “Bushwick” held up his gun for me, an AK-47. It cost him 1100 dollars. I was shocked at how heavy it felt in my arms, and had an instant recognition of the kind of power it would take to shoulder something so large for 18 hours in day. It must have weighed 20 pounds. “Go ahead, reporter,” he teased, “shoot it.” I did. It was thrilling.

They are really into the gear. Buying it, talking about it, touching it. They all own more Airsoft guns than they could possibly use, sidearms, semiautomatic weapons, machine guns.

Think of all of the materiel that belongs to the army: the satellites, radios, uniforms, bulletproof jackets, and above all the guns. In the military, your tax dollars pay for those items, expendable, broken, tossed off, and blown up, replaceable because the flow of cash is reliable. For the Airsofters, who devote entire weekends to realistic warfare, the expense is entirely out of pocket. According to Brian Douglass, the Green Mountain rangers’ director of communications, in one year the average airsofter will spend about 10,000 dollars  on the weapons, ammo, and gear, not to mention the transportation to and from various events,

No one wants to tell me where they get the guns.Some of the players build the guns themselves, a hodgepodge of real gun parts and airsoft gun parts. For the Green Mountain Rangers,  the super-secretive Ronin is the arms dealer. From what I can tell, he buys real guns and has them shipped overseas and hand-modified to shoot BBs. He tends to the broken guns, putting them back together on the field. He works quickly.

 Paintball guns or regular airsoft guns have orange tips and canisters that show they are battery powered. Extreme airsoft guns look exactly like the real thing, though. Green Mountain Rangers want their guns to be as close to the real thing as possible. They will pay more than the price of a real gun for their fake ones, as much as 2,000 dollars.

They execute their training for the ops with extreme gravity. On the way to their practices and to the ops they are all jokes, gross jokes, cutting each other down with their homophobic jibes and their good-natured teasing. There are no jokes when they’re practicing, and the old take orders as well as the young.

Airsofters carry real grenades and real magazine holders, and they wear all of the uniform gear of a private in the US army. Flak jackets, helmets, boots, in the light colored camouflage meant to blend into the desert surroundings of the Middle East regardless of whether the op is taking place outside of Pittsburgh or in the forests of Florida. Uniform specifications change depending on the scenario, and are determined by the teams’ placement as enemy or friendly forces. Brian Douglass tells me they buy their gear from army outfitters like the recently renamed Blackwater and other supply stores that also outfit the army. DiFranza noticed that once he came back from his first tour of duty, the gear for airsoft had gotten more sophisticated. “By the time I got back, the scenarios were a little more realistic, and more scenario based because of what was going on in Iraq. Instead of just fatigues, the guys were wearing Molle gear: gear that military used in Iraq, with straps, modular equipment. Before we only had suspenders and crappy tactical vests. The new stuff cost us each like 2 300 dollars. The war started and that stuff came to the forefront with companies like Blackwater and Black Diamond tactical coming out with new types of gear, cheaper gear, and gear and equipment were easier to come by.”

It isn’t enough perhaps for the curious to read or hear about what it was like to be alive in a moment of great historical importance. It is more satisfying to engage with history on a number of sensory levels.

            Although an airsoft game at home cannot be a perfectly accurate restaging of an engagement in Iraq, the men who run the major ops would say that superficially, it is as close as one can get. Members would be assigned tasks that closely mirrored what he’d done in places like Ramadhi: “ Win over the local populace, win over an oil field, have to go on all these different missions to win popular support, so its more complex, and they try to play more civilians on the battle fields and stuff like that.” On some operations he and his team members tried on other roles, “like local tribesman, kind of like an Afghan tribesman.” He’s been a UN Peacekeeper in Kansas, and a member of NATO in a game in Sweden. Most of the members are reluctant to specify the ways in which ops mirror Iraq. DiFranza says the ops are based around scenarios that happen all the time.

“It goes something like this: Basically you take the buildings and win over the support of the locals. They have their own agenda. They [civilians] role play, and you role play back. They say, there’s this guy we don’t like, if you assassinate him we will work with you. Or they’ll say that we need food, and supplies.”

Liebelt and the other men are aware of the ironies involved in the way they control death within their ops. A quick glance at a tac sheet or announcement of an upcoming op almost always lists the requirements for play; gun types, uniform, ammo specifications. There’s also almost always a specific request for a colored death rag. Red, typically. This is exactly what it sounds like. Milsim operates via the honor system. Even though the BBs “hurt like a bitch” when they catch you on bare skin, and can sting even through winter gear, there is no way to know when someone has theoretically sustained an injury that would kill or seriously wound  him in a real combat scenario. Although Brian Liebelt has an “I brake for IEDs” bumper sticker on the back of his jeep, there is nothing, mercifully, that approaches the impact of an Improvised Explosive Device in the world of Airsoft. When a man is hit, he is on his honor to pull out his brightly colored death rag and lie down.

In every Airsoft combat unit, one soldier functions as a medic, usually a highly imaginative role for an Airsofter since there are no wounds to  heal. The medic arrives when he sees the death rag and pretends to attend to the injured party’s wounds. But during practice Ranger Stephen Cusano trips over the entrance to one of the abandoned rooms the men are training in, and pulls a tendon in his right ankle. Brian Douglass was the medic at the team’s last big op, and he runs over to Cusano, elevating his leg and wrapping it with an Ace bandage. Cusano  lies back in the tall grass on an abandoned lawn chair as Brian tends to his foot. “I’ve got more medical knowledge than this guy does,” he jokes, and Douglass turns his face up to me in earnest, explaining, “I’m not medically trained or anything, but I do pick up some information from being the medic.” Indeed. At one op, Douglass administered an IV drip to a hurt player. He carries a suture kit and knows what to do when someone has a seizure. “Technically, you could say that I’m qualified to be a real medic” he says.

Medics  are on their honor  to assess whether or not a wounded  party is dead, which means a removal from the rest of the scenario and the loss of the chance to continue playing, or whether the injured soldier can be “doctored” and removed to the battlefield. The doctoring is pantomimed, if it is called for, and it is a task carried out by the designated medic with extreme gravity. It can determine which team wins or loses the game.

It is impossible to ignore the death rag, perhaps the most obvious element of a game that stakes its reputation on its realism. It is not as if the Airsofters are ignoring death altogether; they are just attempting to control it. The Airsofters have a radio station they listen to for podcasts on battles, and summaries of ops, called after-action reviews: the station is called “death-rag radio.”

In the vegetable garden, I think about the way the men behave in front of each other as I sit back and watch. They practice each maneuver over and over again, in 100 pounds of gear. Liebelt lords his military training over the men like a little Napoleon, a thick wad of tobacco gummed in his right cheek. At his day job, he wears glasses. On the battlefield, they’re gone.

Even in the winter, like clockwork, the men gather themselves on weekends for eight to twelve hours of training. It would be a mistake to assume that simply because the scenarios are unlikely to end in death the process isn’t grueling, as close to a simulation of the conditions of combat as is possible. In the simulation named Pine Plains, in which the Rangers were responsible for the removal of the dummy  officer, conditions were as bad as they could get. The op, run in the first weeks of the New Year, was subject to the vagaries of cruel weather. Other teams slept, but the Rangers are professionals, and in real combat, sleep is a luxury. The men would do anything to stay awake, including “everything short of an eight ball of coke,” says member Douglass, who is chewing the inside of his cheek as he tells me this. Over-the-counter diet pills, caffeine drinks, tins and tins of Skoal. Whatever it takes. For a lot of them, even Kurtz, the former combat photographer, this is far from unusual. The difference between the Pine Plains op and a skirmish in Iraq is that after Pine Plains, the men can pile onto the Amtrak or into a car and sleep it off, in the comfort and relative safety of their various homes.

One weekend I follow them to practice at an undisclosed or “classified” location somewhere in central Long Island. I hide, to observe without distracting them, alone in the snow. I’m waiting for a fake battle to begin, but the mind-numbing cold, and my fear of getting shot, are real. Just then, I can’t imagine why anyone would do this. Blowing on my hands to keep warm is a failure because of the elaborate facemask I’m wearing. I remember that the video clips on YouTube of the rangers and other Airsoft teams are never more than a few minutes long at a time. I am stunned to think of operations that last upwards of forty-eight hours. The fear of not knowing if I’ll be shot is enough to gnaw at my insides, And I’m in a field on Long Island.

Liebelt deployed to Afghanistan shortly after September 11^th. He’d already enlisted, and he was really excited to see combat. That was then. During a conversation in his office, I had asked him why he plays, and he recited his bit about the army models and being bored after he got back from Iraq.

“But you spend so much time on it,” I wondered.

His face fell and he twitched a little bit, pausing to spit out a mouthful of chewing tobacco into a Gatorade bottle before he mentally reentered the territory of uncertainty, particular only to that combat.

“When you play, you know who the enemy is, because it’s assigned beforehand. We never knew who was playing for both sides there. Some of the translators you know they were there for the money. We knew they were going and doing the same thing for the other side.” His favorite translator was ‘Lloyd,’ a Playstation buddy and a poker aficionado. “Lloyd was cool as shit,” Liebelt laughed.

“We knew he was a good dude. But because of that, he was scared. He was always worried about his family.” As he talked about Lloyd, about Afghanistan, his hands rested on opposite forearms, less a posture of resistance than one of total discomfort. His right hand rested on a green tattoo on his forearm, a lightning rod with a date around it; men who engage in hand to hand combat receive a patch with this insignia on it. “When you first get shot at for real, he  said, “it’s like that feeling you get when you get mugged. Its just…total helplessness. And then you get mad. The first time I was shot at I got really fucking mad.” I asked what happened to Lloyd, almost as an afterthought.

“He died,” said Liebelt, turning away from me and toward the computer screen in his office. “I heard he died in Fallujah.”

Later, during an op, I remember this moment of total vulnerability. The tattoo is covered by his fatigues here and the video editors who are his comrades-in-arms mesh with the military man. There is no difference anymore, and they are united by a common purpose.

Levi DiFranza is a short healthy-looking guy, his face open and bright. He wears his hair in a crew cut, odd because he has two bullet wounds in the back of his head. He wouldn’t dream of wearing a hat to cover them.

He was in Ramadhi, Iraq at the same time that Brian Liebelt was in Al-Anbar province, what the men used to call the “Sunni Triangle” because for that brief moment in history, men would enter the Bermuda Triangle of the Middle East, and never come back out.

“It was the worst city in the country, right around the same time as Fallujah. It was the worst city in Iraq. It was voted that by Life magazine. The whole city was a hostile city. Basically it was the wild life, constantly we got shot at, constantly we got bombed. In our camp we would get mortared five to ten times a day. Get shot at constantly. I can’t remember how many times I got shot at. And you think to yourself, this fuckin’ sucks, completely exhausted. You’re just completely exhausted. That’s the kind of mood you get into.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” I press. He sighs a little bit,

“You just sit there and you chain smoke, when you should go inside and hide from the mortars.”

He wants to tell me about his head injury, and his voice quickens.

“I took a 762 round. On the outskirts of the city, there’s a main road that leads into the city. Before we got there, insurgents would be leading weapons into the city.” His battalion set up a checkpoint on the main road.

“It really pissed off the insurgents. This time there were 300 insurgents who attacked 40 of us on 2 different rooftops. I was going through my last bit of ammo, standing up pointing out targets, pointing out where the bad guys are. And I drew fire. It was like uh, five to one ratio. I was shot in the head.”

He goes on without pausing,

“One guy was shot in the leg and the intelligence agency said 90% casualty rate on the other side. We lucked out ‘cause we had air support. Weapon for weapon, it was about the support.”

“So you got shot in the head, and you were still awake,?” I stammer.

And then I want to know, “what does that feel like?”

“Physically or emotionally?” he asks. Well, clearly, I’d like to know about both.

“Physically, think of a baseball bat and soldering iron, and someone ramming the  soldering iron through your head, and then hammering it in with a baseball bat.”

He says the bullet entered at the base of his skull, skipped along the bone and exited on the other side. The bullet wounds look like two eyes in the back of his head.

“I was in utter and complete rage, and just swearing and telling all the insurgents I was gonna kill them, I was just trying to get back up.”

“And then?”

“They took me to the battalion aid station, and they med-evaced me, I passed out cause I was so fucked up on morphine, they med-evaced me to Baghdad. I didn’t know I was in Baghdad, until I was roaming around the hospital and I see a big sign that said Baghdad. A day later I got back to my unit. I was still fucked up. I took two or three days off.”

“And emotionally?” I ask. “What did it feel like?”

And he tells me this, gingerly, reflectively:

 “Before I got shot, I had a superman complex, but I never thought I would actually get injured or shot or anything like that. I used to think I’m gonna be super delta one day, I was annoying and over the top. And then after I got shot…

It was probably the best experience of my life.I went from 90 to zero, just cooled down became more calm and collected. I grew like ten years older.”

I tell him that Airsoft seems really real to me, and that I would think he would be scared, to do it over again. But he says no. Its hyper-realistic in so many ways, except the most important one. In the same way that we turn to World War II vets for advice on the verisimilitude of battle scenes in movies like Saving Private Ryan and find ourselves hopelessly out of our league when we attempt to recreate the experience of war, there is no way that an Iraq-modeled scenario can ever feel like the real thing, says DiFranza. A staging of the battle of Bull Run somewhere in Virginia can be as close to the real McCoy as a reenactment could be: timing, costumes, weather. A perfectly orchestrated drama so close to history as to be mistaken for the thing itself. Except for the problem that the drama, without the threat of death, is never the same. Reenactments, for those attempting to get as close to history as possible, are never the same as the thing itself. For some, that’s a good thing.

After DiFranza was shot, he didn’t want to go home, “so they sent me back to Ramadhi, going and doing combat missions… about a month and half later.” He didn’t draw fire again, but he saw more combat.  “I remember, We had a tank blow up and burn and they sent a few of us out to secure around the tank so it didn’t get a wrecker out there. Have you ever seen Black Hawk Down?” he asks, rhetorically. 

“The whole city came alive. For nine-and-a-half hours, I sat in the turret watching the tank get burned.  I saw a shit ton of little things. What happens is like, when the first round goes off or whatnot, this RPG goes flying three four feet above my head. I was kind of panicking and then my sergeant tells me to calm the fuck down. When that first round went down, I was scared.”

“ Near the end, I’d be able to get shot at. I did shoot people and see them get hit, and die and all that. At the time, it didn’t really bother me, because it was either them or me. Them or one of my fellow friends. You disassociate them with being human, or you associate them with being an object rather than something living. And it’s something that you have to do to keep yourself alive.”

“It was hard for me. It was harder for me to see my own guys get injured, and then like you’d hear over the radio that someone else got hurt. You kind of play that game, as long as it’s not your guys it doesn’t matter. You’re just more relieved it wasn’t someone you knew personally.”

DiFranza struggled when he got back from Iraq the first time, but he came back to airsoft almost immediately.

“The first big game I played was operation Irene. That was crazy because it was super realistic with all the explosions. The fire and all that, and at the very beginning of the game we’re walking as a squad and all of a sudden I hear an RPG going off and I dive for cover. They heard it as a firework. Everyone was like ‘Ahh don’t worry, he just got back from Iraq.’”

He brushes it off. “Yeah it’s just muscle memory. I have to calm myself down. I have to say it’s not real, it’s just airsoft.”

In his office, away from the battlefield, Liebelt refuses to discuss the deaths of friends, and the gap between that experience and his daily engagement with life since his return is palpable, even in the three feet between my chair and his in the seedy office at the bottom of Brooklyn.

When he returned from Al-Anbar province and the Sunni Triangle, he went to college. The naïve, self-referential world of the University of Connecticut was a breeding ground for fights with young men his own age who would probably never see what he had seen. He was proud, and hurt, and angry; all things he can’t articulate but which play across his face in the space of a minute as he tries to decide how to spin a decidedly unheroic chapter of his life. He picked fights with frat boys, narrowly avoiding arrest on more than one occasion. He spent hundreds of dollars a week on alcohol.

“You think you’ve been to wild parties,” he shudders. “You haven’t seen wild until you see a party with ex military guys. They got a chip on their shoulder. Parties turn into an excuse for feats of strength.”

Similar fight anecdotes are spilling out of his mouth faster than I can write them down, and he is, by turns, pensive and jocular. “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I guess, looking back on it now, you could say I was borderline alcoholic.”

Men become Rangers by invitation only, through an intense tryout process that smacks of secret society. “We all get along with each other really well,” says Brian Douglass, and we watch someone play for more than a year before we ask them to be part of the team.” Bushwick nods, generously. These men spend every weekend together, relying on each other, talking war, making war.

Many of them echoed the same sentiment to me, that they have reputations as “intense” among other airsoft reenactors. It’s not hard to see why. I ask the men about the Rangers’ track record in combat, and Brian Liebelt looks at me askance:

“We’re like the U.S. military. We don’t usually lose.”

That confidence is part of a sort-of denial. They are hesitant to admit the truth about what they are doing to each other, because it might have less to do with hobbies and guns than with a sort of deep need that each of them is willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to satisfy. But it’s not just like having a midlife crisis and buying a yacht. This takes up weekends, weeks, whole days of their lives. For a lot of them it is a secret they keep from everyone but their closest friends. The physical discomfort alone makes it a sacrifice. For the guys like Bushwick and Wawa, it is a way to take part in a life that is closed off to them by societal expectation. For the vets, it’s something else. 

In the car on our way home from the last practice, I feel a vague sense of satisfaction, in the backseat wedged between two serious wargamers. I have a thick coat of cold mud rising up toward my knees, but I blend in. I had met Paul and Bushwick only that morning, and they are teasing me the same way they tease the other guys. I feel like I’ve earned it. I want to know why they do this, but I can already start to feel it.

In my last interview with Levi DiFranza, I barely had to ask any questions. He, like all of the rest of the team members, drifted away from talking about particular ops, or types of guns and uniforms. He had funny memories from staged battles all over the country, but now in the retelling of them, they were tinged with memories of shellshock, of his inability to function at home after the war was over. He says being with his team members helped him feel right again. It’s a big admission. I’m ready to hang up the phone with him and think about the reasons he plays this game, when he pauses on the other end of the line, and keeps talking, in a gentle stream of words.

“When I first started playing Airsoft, I played it ‘cause I wanted to be a soldier. Then I became a soldier. Then I went to war, and I continued playing Airsoft because it was something familiar. It helped me remember the rush and high I got when I was in combat, and fighting and killing and dying without having to worry about killing and dying. In combat, you get the biggest rush of your life, just the supernatural ability, with your eyesight and all your senses going crazy. It’s just the biggest adrenaline rush, better than alcohol, sex, drugs, anything. Airsoft is like, a tenth of that, it’s just enough to kind of like remind me what it was like, kind of like the methadone to my heroin.”