After running around in the woods with Capital Offense at Fulda Gap 2008, I took a break to head to the main battle where my Warsaw comrades needed some help getting a push going against entrenched Nato forces. Most of the time, I’m up to lead the charge when it needs to happen, and often that results in some nice additions to my welt collection.

Here’s some highlights of four attempts to get the line moving - four out of eight attempts. The other four simply involved me ripping on my gun, running at the enemy, getting shot out, then jogging past my guys on the way to the insertion point to try it all again. In two of the charges I even got eliminated by anti-tank rockets, which I’ll wear as a badge of honor. If I’m enough of a threat that they’ll waste a rocket on me, I’ll take it as a compliment.

For those of you who have played the excellent field at Command Decisions, you know that the terrain there is varied and challenging. In 24 hours you’ll face charges across open terrain, gun fights down trails, low crawls through tall grass to get to trenches, base defenses, creeks, thick woods, thin woods - except for dry southwestern creek beds and Arctic tundra, Command Decisions has it all.

Their biggest event of the year, a game that’s now included on the must-play lists of many of the best east coast (and beyond) teams, is the Fulda Gap Mega Game. This year I ran with my teammates on Capital Offense as special forces for the Warsaw Pact. We inserted early, trekked to one of the remote corners of the field, and hid in the leaves while NATO troops set up around us. After running recon for the first few minutes of the game, we sprung our trap and took Fort Apache, one of the harder-to-take spots at CD. With some help we held that, and battled, off and on, over the course of the first phase of the game to gain control of the fort at Hamburger Hill with some minor forays into the area around the Chemical Plant. With a NATO dead zone near both of those locations, we saw plenty of action.

Here’s a short montage of this phase of the game - all footage taken with the gun-mounted Advanced Tactical Camera.

Fulda Gap 2008 has come and gone, and oh what a game it was. I’ll be posting a full-blown review of the event along with pictures and videos in the near future, but for those of you planning your end of the year calendars, there are some excellent games in the near future. For those in my neck of the woods, the next big game to play will be the MPP event at the excellent Paintball Charleston field.

MPP at PBC

And one game that I absolutely can’t miss each year, no matter what else is going on, is Line-of-Fire’s Santa vs. Grinch bash. If you’ve never made the trip to LOF for this game, mark it on your calendar immediately! It’s a fun day of intense paintball, nice presents, and madcap antics.