Most people don’t know what airsoft is.

Worse, these commoners

are under the impression that the airsoft community is populated by elderly
men whose minds have reverted to childhood and who wish to dress up as
soldiers. They could not be more wrong.

Airsoft is considered to be an extreme sport, where players shoot replica

firearms at each other. Think paintball, sans the unrealistic paintball guns
and space suits. It started in the late 1970s, when gun nuts in Japan were
pissed off since they couldn’t own real guns due to their strict postWWII anti-firearm laws. In fact, they got so pissed off they made replicas of
the real thing to satisfy their gun-loving passion. Those gun nuts were
happy for a time, but after a period of just staring at their replicas they must
have thought, "Hey, why don’t we make these guns shoot plastic
pellets?" Then the gun nuts started shooting each other with their replicas,
and airsoft was born.

Here in the Philippines, the airsoft community is steadily growing. Perhaps

this is due to the fact that in the past, only the upper class could afford to
own an AEG (Automatic Electric Gun). Now, one can purchase copies of
the AEGs made by Japanese airsoft companies like Tokyo Marui. These
copies of airsoft guns, constructed in a certain communist land of persons
with unusual pirating ability, used to be of terribly poor quality. However,
recent products have proven to be on par with the original Japanese
manufacturers. Those Chinese must have really disciplined their qualitycontrol officers well. A certain China-made AEG copy of an original
Japanese airsoft gun costs only P4,000 as compared to P12,000, and
performs just as well, if not better. Our airsoft community is mostly
populated by guys aged 20 to 30, with a small contingent of females out for
blood.

Airsoft revolves around a system of honesty and honor. Unlike paintball,

which leaves a mark (although devious paintballers may sometimes wipe

off their paint stains and continue playing), sometimes there is no true way
to tell if someone’s been hit or not. This means that, whenever
you’re hit, you shout out "Hit!" at the top of your lungs, raise your gun
up high over your head to show your defeat, and walk off to the safe area.
The scenario possibilities are limitless, from plain vanilla skirmishes to
respawns, medics, downed pilots, defend the hill, and countless others.
Sometimes, there arises a notorious breed of player that the airsoft
community classifies as a "zombie." These zombies just don’t want
to die. You can shoot them over and over again, but if a marshal (airsoft
referee) doesn’t see it, they won’t call hits. I hate ‘em.
We all do. These despicable, rotten dregs of the airsoft community have no
sense of fair play and honor, and are unworthy of the right to be called
airsofters. Entire teams are known to have this unsavory characteristic;
they would be better off if they disbanded and devoted the rest of their lives
to bullying small children.

While playing airsoft, safety precautions must be observed, especially

when facing particularly rubbery opponents who simply refuse to
acknowledge their demise. You don’t want to get shot in the eye by a
burst of plastic pellets, so you absolutely must wear adequate eye
protection. You also don’t want to get shot, period, so you wear
camouflage to disguise yourself from those who wish to remove you from
the round by means of shooting the crap out of you. A BB, as these plastic
pellets are commonly called, can actually hurt depending on the power of
the gun it’s fired from. The pain can be as weak as me flicking you in
the forehead with my finger, or in extreme cases of highly upgraded guns,
can result in a BB imbedded in soft areas of the body, such as the nose,
the forehead, or the ear. Cases like these are very rare, but like the
renegade motocross biker who seeks to viciously bump into opponents with
the intent of causing them to fall headlong into a ravine, every now and
then you get a bad apple whose only purpose in life is to cause enemy
airsofters as much pain as possible. I’m paranoid about getting shot
by one of those nasty individuals, so in addition to the standard facemask
and BDU (Battle Dress Uniform) I wear a helmet (no painful skull shots),

and a rubber vest (no excruciating nipple shots). Most of the airsofters
I’ve seen go without those two items. It’s a personal choice
whether to wear them or not.

There are many different airsoft sites in the Philippines, but I’ve only
personally been to one: Camp Masada, home of Team Apocalypse. (Fun
fact: Apocalypse has more female members than any other airsoft team.) A
four-hectare jungle site where the foliage is thick and the mosquitoes have
a penchant for pinpointing any exposed skin areas (when fully equipped for
airsoft, my only exposed skin areas are my fingers, which poke out of my
half-finger gloves; they still get bitten), playing in this site is a fantastic
cardio workout. It’s got a huge hill that is positively lined with
bunkers. Visibility is pretty low, since the plants grow everywhere. It’s
also pretty impossible to locate the snipers once they’ve got a good
position; sometimes what appears to be a bush swaying in the wind is
actually a short guy in a Ghillie suit aiming his sniper rifle at your face. By
then, of course, it is too late.