Israeli Paintball

When I was 14 years old I visited Tel-Aviv, where I stayed for a night with my friend Ben. Though I a Jewish and I speak Hebrew, American Jewish and Israeli Jewish are not the same. At 14, I was Jew-froed, pimpled, and gawky, Woody Allen in pint-size form; Ben, with his olive skin and easy confidence, was the Zohan. He spoke of fighting in the army in the years to come, about what an honor it would be. I was afraid of the big kids at Hebew school.
That afternoon we went to play paintball with a few of Ben’s friends. Israeli paintball is not the same as American paintball. The arena we went to, a few blocks off the main roads of take-out falafel and outdoor bars, looked like a screenshot from Call of Duty: barbed wire, rusty metal sheets, and ugly slabs of concrete. The bright, inflatable blockades and plastic walls of New Jersey paintball yards had been replaced by Chernobyl.
A staff member spoke to us. “This is not a game,” he said, his Hebrew coming out as a growl between cigarettes. “This is training. You are training. Do not make mistakes.” I looked at the ten Israeli teenagers sitting next to me. Some already wore dog tags.
The rules were established and we began. Ben and I rolled behind one of the rusted sheets, sticking our guns out on either side. “Go over to Ari. Back of the head,” he whispered to me.
“That’ll hurt,” I said. “I can hit him from here.”
“It’s supposed to hurt,” he said.
I ran out, cradling the gun like a quarterback running the ball, jumped over a line of barbed wire, and then I was there, but I hesitated and—ahh!—a hiss and then the pain. I was shot in the leg. At halftime, the staff member (of the cigarettes and drill sergeant motif) pulled me aside. “That was stupid. Blew your cover,” he said. “You would’ve been killed in Gaza. Butchered in Lebanon. Take a headshot. Easy kill. Boom. Dead.”
We ran out again and I hid behind a concrete slab. We began and I was out, ducking behind a row of metal until—tsss!—I shot another boy in the head. He spun backwards and hit the ground. I was five feet away. He cried.
When we finished, everyone, even the kid I had hit, patted me on the back. “Nice job. Kol hakavod.” We went for ice cream and watched girls jog by the beach. We made jokes, quoted TV shows. We didn’t talk about paintball, about training. We didn’t say that in four years, when I went to college, they’d be drafted into the military. We ate our ice cream. Israeli ice cream and American ice cream are exactly the same.