By Samean Yun, Rocky Mountain News
May 16, 2005

Recently, as part of my fellowship at the Rocky Mountain News, I accompanied a reporter while she was doing a feature story on a paintball game.

While taking part in the game, I encountered excited people who wanted to shoot as many people as they could. I too was very excited, but I was also afraid that I would be shot. In the middle of the battlefield, I saw one guy kneeling down near a tree and thought he was a member of my team. But I was confused. He shot me three times in my bottom. It was very painful.

What surprised me most was seeing people in Colorado wearing soliders' camouflage uniforms to play paintball. The people who wore these uniforms looked serious. I thought they were real U.S. soliders who had come to train people to play paintball. In Cambodia, civilians are not allowed to wear a solider's uniform. A person who is caught wearing the solider's uniform can be fined, stripped of the uniform on the street or even imprisoned.

In my country, parents educate young children not to play with toy guns. Every year, government officials also collect old weapons from previous wars to be destroyed.

When I was playing paintball, I was thinking of my own country. The paintball war reminded me about the civil war in my country. The Khmer Rouge genocide and civil war ended more than two decades ago but Cambodians still feel the effects of the war.

The Khmer Rouge regime forced my parents to flee from Cambodia to Vietnam, where I were born. I returned to Cambodia when I was 1 month old, right after the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled.

Because of the war, I lost a chance to have a good education, I did not have enough rice to eat and I lived in a hut, under a thatched roof.

Although, the government restricts people from wearing the solider's uniform, the government does not restrict their soldiers and officials from using guns. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has ruled the country for more than 20 years, is still using his soldiers and weapons to control the country. In 1997, he took power in a coup from Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. We want a new prime minister, but because of Hun Sen's weapons, Cambodians have to stay under his control. My country is a victim of the weapon, so I do not want a game related to the gun to be played in my country.

I understand that the idea of playing paintball is for fun here in the U.S., but I am afraid young Cambodians will find it too much fun and might become addicted to shooting. When they grow up, they will imagine how fun it is to shoot, so my country will sooner or later have another war.

People enjoy the paintball war after they finished the game, but by the time the war in my country was over, more than 2 million people had been killed.

If I have another chance to play paintball, I do not think I would play because the game reminds me of the tragedy that my country suffered.

Samean Yun is an associate editor at the Cambodia Daily. For the next five months, he is working at the Rocky Mountain News through the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship Program.

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