“In this case what we have to do is go all out. I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.”
“And we’re just the guys to do it.”
--Animal House

I could lie to you and tell you that the plan we concocted in the dorm room that day was a brilliant military scheme that would make Napoleon proud. One that would make Peter the Great quiver in his stockings. But it really was nothing like that. Perhaps a better way to describe it is that a few of us had a vague notion of an organized assault, and then the other 20 guys were planning what they would be doing, regardless of what the rest of the group came up with.

Oh, in the weeks prior to this day, the Friday afternoon before the Cave Party, we had created such detailed plans and organized ideas that Fort Knox would not be able to withstand the onslaught that we were ready to provide. But after the heads of the war committee had been abducted, and good ‘ole Charlie was still MIA after nearly 24 hours (he was, we later discovered, hitchhiking in the wrong direction), a lot of the finer points had fallen by the wayside. It became more of a pissed vendetta then a pure endeavor.

Don’t get me wrong, spirits were high. The pledges had just successfully, against all odds, broken out the captives in a house full of actives. A near unfathomable victory to be sure. But it had taken more then a little effort and resulted in quite a few bruises and burns. Morale was soaring, but the problem was that in the euphoria, in the rush and the thrill, all organization had seemingly been shattered.

Still, we kept to the plan as best we could. Basically, at that stage, the pledge-class-house-takeover idea had become something akin to how a republic works. A few ideas and directions were centralized and permeated throughout, but the individuals all had their own ideas in mind as well.

It was already about 7 PM Friday night, and we had three pledge sentinels standing watch over the frat house, camouflaged. And we also had many other pledges in various areas getting ready. For the most part, however, we were all busy arming ourselves.

I had decided to keep myself as streamlined and ready for combat as possible. Other men were burdening themselves with backpacks full of fireworks and suspenders covered with water balloons filled with piss. I, on the other hand, decided to keep it simple, as I suspected that close-quarter combat would in the end win or lose the day. I had two high-powered super soakers, each of which I strapped to my back like Samurai katanas. Instead of filling them with water, however, I decided to fill mine with laundry detergent. This had, in theory, two effects. For one, if you have ever spilled any laundry detergent on yourself, you know that the sensation is unpleasant at best. It doesn’t burn or cause permanent injury, but it leaves a sticky film all over your skin that lasts for days, and a strange and irritating slimy sensation that counteracts that oh-so-fresh feeling. But secondly, if you get a head shot, you blind the target (basically like getting soap in your eyes). Also, the fact that it probably wouldn’t kill anybody was a plus in my book (the same couldn’t be said for Stimmel’s .45). In retrospect, the laundry detergent super soakers probably made the most effective weapons that anybody in that frat wielded that day, for a variety of reasons that I will get into later.

I also made sure that I was wearing steel-toed boots, black leather gloves, a black sweatshirt, and my trusty corduroy pants. In those days, I could fit a total of six beer bottles in the pockets of those pants, a unit of measure that is only valid in fraternities and Ireland. I had two cap guns in my pockets that served no other purpose really other then to make loud noises. I also stuffed a bunch of bottle rockets in my coat pockets along with my trusty zippo (I had a khaki trench coat back then), a Swiss army knife, and I, like the rest of the pledges, donned face paint (I mean come on, you can’t do something like this without bad-ass face paints!). I chose to go with the quarterback look, while more then a few went with the Braveheart motif, and one guy dressed up like the Ultimate Warrior.

When the sun went down, we set the gears into motion.

Two other guys and myself had crept up to the back of the frat house parking lot. The parking lot was a big one, but it ended on one side right at the frat house, and at the other side, where I was hiding out, it ended in forest, that pretty much surrounded the entire lot. The front of the house had several trees in the front lawn, and then the lawn ended at the driveway on the side and the street at the front.

In any case, it was about 8 PM at this point, and all the actives from all over town and campus were steadfastly drinking in the house and setting up their defenses. The back door could easily be barricaded from the inside with a gigantic plank of wood that we kept there to keep out uninvited guests from our parties and social functions. The front door that lead to the porch would be extremely difficult to barricade due to the architecture of it, but it went right into the first-floor main room, that by this time would have 40 actives and a few kegs. By this point, most of the actives were more then a little buzzed, and morale was high among them. From my vantage point right outside of the glare of the parking lot light, huddled in the snow at the end of the forest, I could hear the bass of the techno music and the many guffaws and loud snippets of conversation.

At 8:10 PM, a mini-van full of pledges zoomed down the block towards the frat house, honking the horn and whooping and hollering. I could hear the actives suddenly turn down the music and pound up and down the stairs towards the front rooms that faced the street. Then the van full of pledges screeched in front of the frat house, hopped the curb, and drove up right into the middle of the front yard. Immediately, the van doors opened and about 10 pledges jumped out and began shooting off bottle rockets and roman candles and cap guns and whatever, aiming at the front of the house. All the actives went to whatever front window they could and started throwing water balloons and fireworks back at the pledges, who all quickly scattered behind the van and trees and continued the diversion.

Meanwhile, in the back, when the ruckus had caused all the actives to go to the front of the house, myself and the other two pledges with me hurried out of the forest and into the parking lot. The other two guys quickly went about hiding explosives and fireworks along the perimeter of the parking lot, while I went and jimmied the locks on as many of the back windows I could. After about five minutes, I had three windows unlocked. I didn’t open them, I left them shut, but I made sure they were unlocked.

After I did that, still listening to make sure the ruckus out front was grabbing the attention of everybody else, I took out my super soaker full of detergent and began to hose down all the cars in the lot, the ones that belonged to the actives. In a few hours the detergent would freeze and leave a shell casing over the whole car. This had no real strategic value as far as I could see; I simply did it out of malice. Motherfuckers kidnap ME!?

As I was doing that, the other two guys were still furiously planting fireworks on all the rocks surrounding the lot, and making sure they were all fused together. Once there were about 20 or so caches of hidden fireworks all along the parking lot, they ran the fuse discretely to a spot right next to the back door. It was fairly well hidden, so that you would only be able to find it if you looked for it, and even on the happenchance that an active did come across it, they would most likely think nothing of it (we had our doorbell and music systems so jury-rigged that there were wires and cords everywhere anyway).

When all that was completed, we went to the side of the house, to the windows of the big front room. This part was tricky, as there were a bunch of actives already in the front room, but since the actives were so caught up with the ten pledges in the front yard who were lobbing fireworks and water balloons at the house, we were cool. We then dragged the five mattresses out of the bushes and put them under the largest window of the house, a big sliding-glass window that looked out from the main room. This was coincidentally also the window that I had earlier in the day leapt out of to escape my captors, and it faced the concrete driveway. We were putting the mattresses over the concrete. We then very quietly shoveled as much snow as we could on top and in the vicinity of the mattresses as we could, so after five minutes it looked only as if a large snowdrift had formed under the window. The mattresses, by the way, were about six feet below the window (I told you it hurt like a bitch when I jumped out of that mug and dove onto the driveway below!).

When we finished with that, the three of us stole back into the forest and headed to the dorms.

After another 10 minutes or so of pointless noisemaking, the Diversion Squad finished their assault, piled back into the van, and screeched off.

Well, here was the plan, and it worked very well I must say. The actives had no idea when to expect us, and each time we showed up they would all assume it was our full assault. So every time that van would pull up, or every time six of us would start pounding on the back doors or the side windows or whatever, the entire house would jump up, start running around in a tizzy, get all pumped up on testosterone and adrenaline, and generally just make a huge ruckus trying to find us and shoot things at us.

So, our plan was to do this about every 35 minutes.

And so we did. At about 9 PM a bunch of us came back and started pounding on the front windows, screaming, “GET THEM!!!!” or “STIMMEL MADE IT INSIDE!!!!” or “I GOT THE BASEMENT WINDOW OPEN!!” or whatever. Then immediately all the actives would flip out and start running around trying to find Stimmel (who was, by the way, safely back in his dorm room doing shots of Jagermeister), and they would open up all the windows and start shooting fireworks at anything that moved, and would run up and down the stairs pounding on doors shouting, “THEY’RE HERE!!,” and then all the people who had been trying to sleep or drink or whatever would also freak out and start doing the same thing. And while all this was going on, the pledges outside were already on their way back to the dorm rooms to watch Ren and Stimpy for another 35 minutes, leaving only a few people behind to constantly shoot bottle rockets at the house.

All through the night we did this. And all through the night the actives were pounding booze, freaking out, running around, and just generally expending all their energy. And we were rotating who was doing the diversion, so that no single person had to do it for more then two hours and then could go get some shut-eye. At one point, maybe about 2 AM, that big Texan who had the day before been one of the captives (name of Parks) actually jumped in a first floor window, ran around the house screaming and shooting off fireworks, and then jumped back out and ran away before anybody could catch him. That lead to another round of the actives that were still up and drinking running around the house looking for more pledges and waking up all the actives that had already passed out.

This occurred about a dozen times all through the night.

At about 4:30 AM, the entire pledge class (save for a few who were still running around on the frat property throwing things at the house) all went to an all-night diner to grab some breakfast. We must have been a strange sight, the lot of us dressed in black and camouflage, wearing war paint, eating eggs and hash browns and drinking coffee at Denny’s. But oddly enough, this didn’t seem to bother the waitress any.

After our breakfast, the real onslaught began.

We all starting sneaking around on the property, getting into various positions, being flanked by six or seven other guys who hung back with bottle rockets and other fireworks. Our last diversion had just ended about 10 minutes ago, so the house was all quiet and 95% of the actives were exhausted and hung over, passed out in their locked rooms or on the floors of the halls. Luckily, two of the back windows I had earlier in the night jimmied open were still unlocked. Parks (who was a football player, a huge guy, and thus was going to be the first to enter) got under the window, and I lifted him up. Due to his girth, though, he is less then graceful, and more or less fell inside, landing on the linoleum floor with a thud. At that point, an active who had passed out in that room (a skinny prick by the name of Lund) awoke, rubbed his blurry eyes, and saw Parks’ fat ass struggling to get up under the immense weight of a duffle bag on his back carrying about 70 pounds of duct tape. Needless to say, Lund jumped to his feet and started howling bloody murder, and Parks, finally standing, ran for him, checked him against the wall, and then ran for the back door barricade to let us in.

The next site was one of sheer beauty. Lund ran to the open window that Parks had entered in, the one I was directly below, screaming some sort of war cry. I had not seen what had happened, as the window was directly above me, but I had heard it. Next thing I know, Lund’s upper body appeared in that window. One hand was holding the windowsill, seconds away from slamming the window shut and locking it. The other hand was holding a super soaker of his own, filled with piss and aimed right at me. I flinched and prepared to get drenched when ,at the exact moment that Lund let out his war cry, one of the pledges who was on point lit his roman candle and aimed. All I remember seeing was the barrel of this super soaker, and then seconds later Lund get hit square in the chest with a brilliant green ball of roman candle fire. His expression was fucking priceless, and he dropped his soaker and fell backwards into the room, at which point I leapt for the still open window and got inside.

It was pretty much around then that my memory of the events that followed gets a bit hazy, as the entire house pretty much erupted into chaos. I had jumped in the window and starting running around unlocking all the other windows I could get to so more pledges could get in. Lund was on the floor howling and tearing his shirt off. I heard a few actives upstairs begin to pound their way around the house in an attempt to wake up all the other actives most of whom were either too exhausted from last night’s drinking and escapades to move or didn’t believe that it was for real, thinking this another diversion. In any case, pledges started popping in from the windows I had managed to get open, and Parks had succeeded in getting the back door open.

In the main room, the one that I was running around in trying to get more windows open, there were five or six guys passed out on the couches. They were weary and dog-tired, but when they saw me running around, and then saw a trickle of other pledges popping in through windows, they all got to their feet.

I turned and saw the first guy come at me, a rugby player by the name of Jason. I was in a corner of the room with nowhere to go other then out the windows, so I leveled my super soaker at him and shot him square in the face. He stopped dead in his tracks and immediately fell over screaming, “GAAAAHHH!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT STUFF!?!?” At which point I opened the main window that overlooked the mattresses on the driveway, and with the help of another pledge who had just climbed in a different window, picked up Jason and threw him out the window onto the mattresses. He was still screaming, “I’M BLIND!!! I’M BLIND!!!”

Next out the window was Lund, shirtless with a big smoke stain on his naked chest. He was still flailing in panic when we picked him up, and though he had no idea what we were doing, he starting shouting, “ACK!!! THIS IS FUCKED UP!!!! THIS IS FUCKED UP!!!!" Out the window he went.

See, the thinking on the window thing was that the normal way of getting them out of the house would be to wrestle them to a door, deposit them outside, and then get the hell back inside before they came back at you. Needless to say, that was a pain in the ass to say the least, not to mention dangerous, as they could get right back inside unless you locked the door, and even then could sit there and wait for you to come back out with another active in tow, at which point you would be suddenly outnumbered and outside. By throwing them out the window, and with the six foot drop to the mattresses below, you wouldn’t run those kind of risks. And besides, there are few things in life as satisfying as throwing a man out of a fucking window.

So we looked out, and Jason the rugby player was still running around blind and hollering, dunking his face in snow piles to try and wash out the detergent. Lund was sitting on one of the mattresses, not saying anything, just sitting there with a pissed-off expression and rubbing his chest wound with snow.

In any case, in the back stairwell a helluva fight was going on between six or seven actives and 10 or so pledges. The actives were furiously trying to push the bottleneck of pledges back out the back door, which was at the bottom of the stairwell. Meanwhile, the pledges, in one gigantic pile of people, were pushing back and smashing water balloons into the faces of the actives. In the main room, the five or so pledges who were now awake were quickly being surrounded by the 10 or so of us who had popped in through various windows all over the house and were now beginning to advance on them as they grouped together wagon train style in the middle of the room. They were shouting for help, and the other actives in the house were beginning to finally awaken out of their haze of dead brain cells.

And, as they had just seen two of their brothers thrown out of the goddamned windows, they were not going without a fight.

So, I shouted a war cry, and then all us pledges ran for them in the middle or the room.

Two of the actives went down quickly in the fray and while the other three were trying to wrestle their way out of a swarm of pledges, two of them were being pinned down and duct taped, at which point the pledges who had wrestled them down joined in on the other three. One of those morons with water balloons filled with piss attached to his suspenders jumped on top of the dogpile, the balloons all burst at once, and we were all suddenly wrestling in urine.

I was on top of a tall skinny hick named “Smokey,” who was known for being a hell raiser in bar fights. I had shimmied myself around his neck and had him in a chokehold, and he managed to get to his feet and started flailing around trying to shake me off. At that point, another pledge knocked his feet out from under him, and both Smokey and I fell to the floor, he was on top but still on his back. I then kind of scissored my legs around and dug them in around his knees, rendering him basically immobile, at which point two other pledges jumped onto him and started duct taping his arms and legs together. One of the pledges was singing “On top of old Smooooookeeeeey!!!!,” at the top of his lungs in a rather disturbing tone. In any case, out the window went old Smokey.

We had managed to throw the four actives out the window, which was a sight unto itself, seeing four grown men in a dogpile on a pile of mattresses on the driveway, writhing this way and that to try and free themselves from the duct tape while a skinny shirtless guy was trying to help and a rugby player was furiously dunking his head in piles of dirty snow. In any case, there were five of us inside in the main room who were still wrestling on the ground with a giant of a man called Lang. The back-door fray appeared to have been won by the pledges, the door was re-barricaded by us, and a pledge guard was left there to un-barricade it when we had to throw a new active out of it.

However, four of those actives who were in that fray had escaped, and, as we were in the front room, they exploded out of the back stairwell and came running for us to try and free Lang. They were running in through the kitchen, so I leveled my super soaker once more and sprayed the linoleum floor in front of them. One guy slid smack into the refrigerator, one guy into the cupboards, one guy into the closet (ironically the closet that contained the cleaning supplies), and one guy just plain fell on his ass right in the middle of the floor. It was fucking beautiful. We got them out of the house in no time. Lang was a bit trickier, as he was close to 300 pounds, so we duct taped him real good, dragged him to the back door, and opened it. There were some actives running around outside, trying to climb back in windows, and they saw the back door open and ran for it. Luckily, we had the foresight of having two guys behind the four who were dragging Lang, and those two guys started firing bottle rockets at the actives, who quickly retreated. We threw Lang into the snow, went back inside, and barricaded the door once more.

At this point, most of the remaining actives in the house were barricaded up in their individual rooms, with about 15 actives running around outside, and all the pledges were now inside (save poor Charlie who was by now somewhere in Missouri in the bed of a farmer’s pickup truck surrounded by chickens). So, we started going room by room, posting sentries around the house at points where actives might try to re-enter, including two guys who were working on their engineering skills trying to barricade the front corridor that led to the porch with a combination of bungee cords and miscellaneous furniture.

The first few rooms we went to were astonishingly easy. We picked the locks with credit cards and then stormed in the rooms menacingly brandishing cap guns and water balloons. What we kept finding would be a room full of five or six of the most hung-over and exhausted men you could ever come across. Remember, they had been up for about 12 hours now, drinking steadily and running around trying to defend themselves from our perceived onslaughts until they had all finally passed out from the exhaustion of our diversions. So what was happening was that we would enter a room, shoot off the cap guns, and the actives would groan and roll over. Then we shouted some more, and they would whine about wanting to sleep, at which point the “shhhhhhkkk” of us taking out duct tape would cause them to sit up and say ,“Okay, okay, let me get dressed,” and they would leave quietly. A few would try to put up a fight, shouting, “Come on guys!! They’re here!!! Help me!!! What’s the matter with you guys!!?!?!,” but it would fall on deaf ears, and they would be quickly wrestled to the ground, duct taped, and thrown out the window.

Some of the rooms were a lot trickier, and we would literally have to pound ourselves into these rooms. We would unlock them, the actives inside would try to put all their combined weight into shoving the door shut, and then 10 or so actives would push back. When we would finally shove our way inside, a wrestling match would ensue, everything in the room would get knocked over, people would get faces full of laundry detergent, and in the end, since there were about 15 pledges that were going room to room in one big group, we would outnumber the actives, and they would end up duct taped and throw out the window or dragged out the back door.

When we got to the second floor, I set up flattened cardboard boxes on the front stairs and hosed them with detergent, forming a slide that we would throw duct-taped actives down. Sounds harsh, but it was either that or have three pledges carry a flailing man down a flight of stairs. Besides, it was pretty funny to watch them roll down the slide and then knock into the wall at the bottom.

On the second floor, we started meeting more and more resistance. One room, for example, was well barricaded and the occupants kept shooting bottle rockets from under their door into the hall, which really freaked us out at first, as there were fireworks coming at us through a closed door. We got into a room next door to that one and an active dumped a vat of Crisco and a bucket of flour on us. That motherfucker got MUMMIFIED with duct tape, but it left five of us looking albino, or like escapees from Pompeii, for the day.

There was one room that we couldn’t get open for the life of us. The Beach. It was the one that had a window that opened up onto the porch roof, so we were worried that they would throw some rope or something down to the actives below. What we didn’t know is that the occupants of that room, a beatnik and a stoner, had shoved the entire bunk bed in front of the door and passed out.

In any case, we posted a sentry there, probably the strongest guy among us, name of Crazy Carl, who had a reputation as being “bad crazy.” He would get drunk off of grain alcohol at parties, and we would find him somewhere in the house in the middle of the night staring at a blank wall, holding a knife in his hand with a crazed expression on his face. It looked like a Mexican standoff, only with a wall instead of another person. And sometimes, a few of us would get lawn chairs and sit in the hall about six feet away and drink rum and just watch Carl with his knife fronting on the wall all night. On more then one occasion, this would last for hours, with Carl not moving or speaking except to pull from his bottle of Everclear. And then, every once in a while on these occasions, we would be sitting there talking and watching Crazy Carl, and out of the blue he would smash his head into the plaster wall, leaving a gigantic fucking hole. And he would then pull back and continue to stare evilly at that fucking wall, as if nothing had ever happened.

But he was strong as an ox, so we left him there, and he hid out in the bathroom directly across the hall from The Beach. So we expressed sympathy for the poor souls who ever dared come out of that room, and went on with our room by room sweep.

Some difficult rooms, some easy ones. On the third floor there were two rooms. In one room, called The Observatory because it looked directly out at the sorority house across the way, there were six guys who we thought would give us a lot of trouble. But the night before, they had at 8 PM gotten a keg for only that room, took it up there, and barricaded themselves in. By 8 AM, they were in no shape to fight.

The problem was, it was well barricaded, and the only way to get to it was by getting into the other third floor room across the hall and then accessing the crawl space (the one the actives didn’t think any of us knew about). That room, though, was a helluva fight. It was the biggest room in the house, and contained about eight or nine guys, all ready to fight. About 20 of us went after that one together, and once we pushed our way inside, it took about 30 minutes of wrestling to start getting the actives under control. At one point, the Mexican dude that lived in that room, name of Hijenio, starting screaming, “YOU MOTHERFUCKER BROKE MY FAMILY PORTRAIT!!!,” and was acting very genuinely enraged at this as he was trying to wrestle his way out of a dogpile of three pledges. As he was being duct taped, he continued to inform us that we were “fucking going to get it” and then he would start ranting in Spanish. We all were genuinely worried, as most of the others were just pissed in a playful way, but Hijenio seemed honestly enraged. Only later did we find out that this is kind of a tradition as well, every year one active that everybody in the pledge class likes and respects will pretend to get enraged in blind hatred over some offense that never occurred. Like “YOU BROKE MY WATCH!!!,” despite the fact that they wouldn’t be wearing a watch, but leaving all the pledges confused and frightened all day. A few of us spent most of the day on and off looking for this nonexistent family portrait of Hijinio’s to see if we could fix it.

In any case, we finally got them all out of the house. We used the crawl space and dug out the Observatory. It was directly above the mattresses, so there was some debate about whether or not we should just throw the fucking guys out the third story window onto the mattresses below, but we finally decided against it and dragged them down two flights of stairs anyway. But in any case, we finally got them the fuck out of the house and the only people left were whoever were holed up in the Beach, but we finally gave up on getting them out for the time being. Carl was on watch in any case; they weren’t going anywhere.

So all the actives were now in the back parking lot in a large group, plotting how to get back into the house and wondering what the fuck that film on all their cars was. Some of them were shooting fireworks at the house, but most of them were in a large huddle, talking under their breath as they hatched various plans of re-entry.

Meanwhile, the pledges inside had begun to get all the building materials for the caves. It was, after all, around 8 AM and we had a cave to build. Parks and I were put on patrol, meaning we didn’t have to do jack shit but be sentries, looking for actives. I sat my ass down in the Observatory next to that half-full keg with about three pounds of bottle rockets and a bucket of piss. Life was good.

Meanwhile, a pledge named Smitty, about 5 foot 3, who was a helluva shot with a bottle rocket, had decided to get the actives the hell off the property to allow us at least a moment’s peace as we re-barricaded the house and tied up all the loose ends. So, Smitty took the big plank that was leaning on the back door off, opened it up, and reached over to light the fuse we had set there earlier that night.

From my perch in the Observatory, that was on the side of the house, I could only make out about half of the back parking lot. I saw the group of actives in the dead center of the parking lot, and when Smitty stuck his head out of the back door, a few of them shouted his name and ran for him, but he had lit the fuse and ducked back inside before they could get to him.

After about a minute, all of a sudden the fuse reached the first caches of fireworks hidden around the parking lot, and the morning EXPLODED in bangs and flashes, coupled with a few pledges opening up back windows and shooting off bottle rockets at the actives. You should have seen it. All the noise and the very sudden explosion of activity from all around them caused them to panic, and they dispersed with great haste in every direction. They almost literally jumped out of their fucking boots when those firework caches started to ignite. For all they knew, the entire pledge class had surrounded them in the forest and was preparing to take all the actives captive like poor ‘ole Charlie. They had had enough of that for the time being, so they all fucking took off. It rocked.

We knew, however, that they would be back one more time during the day, to try to get inside and fuck up our caves. It wasn’t a matter of "if"; it was a matter of "when". Sometime during the day they would launch their own massive attack, but I swore I would be ready. Parks was wandering around the house, watching everybody else do the hard work of setting up an entire cave system out of cardboard, while he was simply looking out of windows and checking locks and crawlspaces. Smitty perched himself on the third floor in a big room across the hall from the Observatory, and he trained his bottle rockets on anything that looked suspicious. I sat in the Observatory with a pair of binoculars and a box of bottle rockets, drinking from the keg that was in there, awaiting their return.

Guh, I had intended to finish this all at once, but it just keeps getting longer and longer, so tune in next week for the (hopefully) exciting conclusion to Patton CHiPs!

Oh, and as an afterthought, I would like to dedicate this one to escape_artist and tack. May The Force be with you both.