A LOOK AT HOW THE PUBLIC VIEWS AIRSOFT!
December 9, 2005:
LIFE - America's Weekend Magazine: (Page 18)
THIS MAN IS NOT A SOLDIER - A new breed of
weekend reenactors bypasses the Civil War and takes
its cues from Iraq. By Chris O'Connell. Photographs by
Alec Soth.
NSAT Airsoft's comments of LIFE Magazines Airsoft
article:
The article released on Dec. 9th '05 by LIFE Magazine
was quite the break through in Airsoft exposure. This is
the first major publication (to my our knowledge) to ever
cover a major Airsoft Event. LIFE Magazine covered a
Black Hawk Down event in a closed Military Station in
TN. We were EXTREMELY pleased to see this article
which supported our great sport. Below you will see
some of the article which was in the LIFE Magazine and
is under copyright by LIFE Magazine.
" This man is not a soldier. But he plays one on the weekend".

While most of us wake up on Saturday ready to watch football or the mall he and hundreds of men
and women like him slip on their cameos, load up their fake weapons, and re-create battles they’ve
seen on CNN.”

Saturday morning. Eight a.m. Pacing in front of 150 soldiers during a pre-ops briefing, John Lu
drives home the need to follow the rules of war, especially in the sorts of murky dangerous combat
situations his company is likely to encounter over the next two days.

“Don’t kill an unarmed civilian. That’s against the Geneva convention!” Shouts Lu, a squat man with a
Brillo-pad crew cut and head to toe desert fatigues. He pauses to see if his message is sinking in
then adds, “It’s also a 10 point deduction!”

There’s a more look of disappointment on more than a few camo-painted faces. These men and
women (and even some couples) haven’t paid 90 $ and traveled hundreds, if not thousands of miles
to the former Joelton Air Force Station outside of Nashville this weekend just to abide by some treaty
signed in Switzerland decades ago.

Welcome to the new world of weekend war reenactment, where the soldiers aren’t just biology
teachers and insurance salesmen dressed up like stonewall Jackson and Ulysses S grant. Many of
them are real, recently retired soldiers with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. On any given
weekend hundreds of combatants like these in Tennessee do battle with $2,000 military-spec Airsoft
plastic pellet guns- along with actual and improvised combat equipment, such as a grenade launcher.