Tankball

This ABC News report from Tuesday looks like too much fun.

It looks like a typical battle scene — tanks charging, overhead artillery fire, missiles exploding; so why, suddenly, are soldiers coming out of the tanks smiling and laughing as if they are having the time of their lives?

Well, it's not exactly Iraq or Afghanistan. It's Leicestershire, England, and the battlefield is Southfields Farm, the new Mecca for war games.

Southfields is the birthplace of tankball — paintball taken to a whole new level. People come from all around the world to race around in tanks, launch paint-filled missiles and, in turn, avoid a tank round of green or red splattering ammunition.

Too bad it's in England.

The Tankball inventor, farmer Stuart Garner, found an engineer to adapt the former-military equipment he had, so it can fire paint, and he helps teams re-enact battles like D-Day or fight in jungles like Vietnam.

Joe Harris had the time of his life. His uncle took him there for his 21st birthday. "It was sometimes overwhelming because it's very dark inside the tank and you can clearly hear the hits," Harris says.

Harris and his uncle managed to win the battle. "It was fantastic!" Harris says.

The first task teams undergo is to learn how to drive a tank with the hatch open and then with the hatch closed. Next, is firing practice. The gunner does the aiming with two handles, one for raising or lowering the barrel, the other for spinning the turret. Meanwhile, the loader has to stuff a ping pong ball (of paint, of course) into the breach, seal it, charge the air and press the fire button.

During the battle, the driver must maneuver the tank to a set of different positions, while using the periscope with the hatch closed, past the cattle and sheep that still roam the farm, apparently unperturbed by the enactments going on around them. "They're used to it now," says Garner.

Here's another write-up over at Retro-Thing, where the photo above came from.