IT’S A CHILLY Wednesday morning, and I’m crouched in the corner of an abandoned jail in the center of a ghost town. Outside, somebody is trying to kill me. Actually, there are a dozen of them — a dozen fatigue-clad fighters creeping about, closing in, unleashing a storm of semiautomatic gunfire in my direction.

Ah, I love the smell of paintball in the morning.

Every semester, the Paul Revere Battalion of the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) sends its recruits to Paintball Heaven — a 160-acre, paint-splotched battlefield in Bridgewater — on a sort of live-fire drill. The exercise is meant to teach cadets how to keep cool in combat conditions. If keeping cool means quivering and cringing rather than screaming and running, then I’m doing just fine.

"The reason we do training like this is to put cadets in leadership roles under stress," says Major Robert Curran, the officer overseeing the exercise. "It puts you under a certain pressure."

No kidding.

Before the battle, the cadets are split into two platoons — one to attack the town and one to defend it. The chaotic door-to-door fighting that ensues is eerily reminiscent of the battle scenes in Black Hawk Down. My role is to hold the jail (a "suicide mission," I’m later informed), and I immediately come under withering fire. Mock combat this may be, but I am genuinely scared.

A paintball shot from a distance, we have been told, feels like being snapped with a towel. Being shot from close range feels like being snapped "with a 50-foot towel." As the walls of the jail crackle under an intensifying hail of pellets, I am suddenly very aware of my testicles. And then — thwack! — I take a shot in the face mask, and for the next hour I am spitting red. War, I have discovered, is not for me.

In truth, few of these cadets will see battlefield action. Of the 25 youngsters training today (the average age seems to be about five), only 15 are expected to pursue Army careers. The majority of those will specialize in such areas as accounting, law, human resources, and medicine. This, after all, is not your average boot camp — this is officer training, a military elite in the making. The Paul Revere Battalion — which encompasses Tufts, MIT, and Harvard — is not in the habit of turning out cannon fodder.

ROTC used to be a dirty word on many college campuses. The slump began in the ’60s, when antiwar sentiment led to the recruiting agency’s ouster from such Ivy League institutions as Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard (whose cadets train at MIT). The ROTC suffered another setback in the mid ’90s, when the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy infuriated campus gay-rights groups. In 1990, there were 413 ROTC units nationwide; today, there are 270.

Yet the ROTC seems to be making a comeback. This year, the Paul Revere Battalion recruited 56 cadets, its highest number in a decade. Since September 11, even the agency’s most vocal detractors have eased off. "Clearly, there is a greater knowledge that the ROTC is linked to national defense," says Curran. "The stereotype is being torn down from the Vietnam era. Instead of a stigma, it’s being seen as an opportunity to better oneself."

When discussing his cadets, Curran — a 36-year-old Gulf War veteran — often sounds more like a motivational speaker than a military officer. He is given to using terms like total quality management. And he stresses, over and over, that ROTC grads who eschew the Army often go on to careers in the corporate world. "This," he says, "is going to open a lot of doors for them."

There is certainly financial incentive to enlist. For cadets who are willing to commit to four years of service after graduation, the Army will cover tuition — up to $120,000 for Harvard students. But this does not come without sacrifice. Even for an officer, four years in the Army is no walk in the park — particularly if the cadet graduates in a time of war. As remote as it may be, the possibility exists that some of these guys will face ordnance far more perilous than paintballs.

This is particularly true of George Morris, one of the stars of the Paul Revere Battalion, and one of the few who has opted to enter the Infantry after graduation. A 20-year-old Harvard sophomore, Morris is one of the first to get "killed" during the exercise. "You learn from your mistakes," he says. "It’s better to make your mistakes early."

In the heat of combat, mistakes are frighteningly easy to make. In my platoon’s assault on the town, I am given the job of covering the rear. As we move in, I see an enemy soldier coming up behind us and let loose with a volley of gunfire, not stopping until the soldier looks like a Jackson Pollack canvas. "That," the soldier says, disgusted, "is friendly fire." D’oh.

But there are no hard feelings. In fact, my victim and I laugh about the incident afterward. In a real battle, of course, there would have been no afterward. As George Morris says, his fatigues mottled with pink blots, "If those had been real rounds today, I wouldn’t be speaking to you now."

And I, far from spitting red ink, would not have had a mouth with which to spit. Permission to turn tail and slither away, sah!