However, we knew damn well that this was not yet the end. In fact, the stated rule is that nothing was over until the pledges had successfully completed full construction of the cardboard cave system. Until then, the actives were bent on getting back into the house with the express purpose of stomping the shit out of anything under construction they could find.

But I was drinking in a room with a terrific view of the perimeter, I was armed and ready. And I had face paint on. I was unstoppable.

In any case, the pledges in the engineering core (everybody but me, Parks, and Smitty) were that morning busily going up and down stairs, dragging cardboard from the basement stockpile and placing it all over the house where it would later be turned into a gigantic cave system. The massive amounts of cardboard we had collected over the semester had all been stored in a large room in the basement, right at the bottom of the steps that lead up to the back stairwell (the one that contained the back door and its barricade). You should have seen how much cardboard we had down there. It was literally like a gigantic cardboard floor had been placed in the basement, one that raised the elevation by about six feet. Most of the cardboard was in the form of large broken down boxes for things like refrigerators or washers and dryers. The boxes for any major appliance that was shipped into Des Moines during the 5 months of our pledgeship ended up in that basement.

So, in any case, the first job for the people not as lucky as Parks, Smitty, or myself, was to drag most of these boxes and place them all around the house to prepare for the construction.

About 30 minutes into digging through that stockpile, two pledges noticed that there was some sort of burrow in the cardboard, like a foxhole. Kind of like a sofa mattress fort. In any case, they tore it apart in their routine, and to their surprise found another active. He was huddled in the fetal position around a bottle of Captain Morgan’s rum, totally passed out. His name was Ptazak, an Australian bloke, and also, like so many of us, crazy as a loon. A cool guy though. Apparently, his idea was that he would hide out in the cardboard of the basement while the house takeover was taking place, and when the pledges were through getting most of the actives out, he would then creep out and steal around the house, unlocking windows and dropping rope ladders and whatever. So at 8 PM the night before he had came down with his bottle of rum, a pack of smokes, and an ashtray, and tried to wait us out. Unfortunately, he failed to account for his sloppy drunkenness, and Captain Morgan had his way with him before we could get to him. The only thing he really accomplished that night was to pee on a large portion of our cardboard reservoir. Well, two pledges picked him up, like carrying a drunk out of a bar, took him up the stairs to the back door, and then threw him out with a foot in his ass for good measure.

Also, not too long after that, Smitty and I were the only people on the third floor as construction on the caves on the first floor had begun. Smitty would come over from his third floor window every once in awhile to grab a beer from the keg sitting next to me that the actives had so kindly provided for themselves. He was sitting there on one of these breaks, we were smoking in one of the few rooms in the house that smoking was expressly prohibited in (The Observatory, which was Lund’s room that he shared with 3 others, each of whom were AVID non-smokers and two of whom claim to get nauseous when they smell smoke), mostly out of spite, when all of a sudden we hear the shower in the third floor bathroom come on. The main bathroom was on the second floor, and Carl was hiding out in there waiting for The Beach to open up. The third floor bathroom just had a toilet, a sink, and a shower with no curtain. In any case, Smitty and looked at each other quixotically and then proceeded down the short hall on the third floor to the bathroom.

We open the door and see, bare-ass naked, an active in the shower. He was a short squat really muscular dude name by the name of Fuller. In case you are wondering, by the way, in our fraternity you were generally either known by your last name or some crazy ass nickname like Paint CHiPs. Well, Fuller was just standing there washing himself, and then he sees enter two pledges with super soakers, duct tape on their belts, and war paint, dressed in all black. He blinks his eyes a few times, obviously trying to recollect what the fuck was going on (in all fairness, sights such as pledges with super soakers wearing war paint was not all that uncommon in my frat), then all of a sudden it dawns on him, and a look of frightful determination came across his face. "Awww shit, I forgot. No no, you motherfuckers ain’t getting me!!" It seems Fuller had suffered a similar fate as Ptazak. He had holed himself up in a crawlspace with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and had, as the night wore on, ended up passing out. And, as finding yourself waking up with all your clothes on next to an empty bottle in a utility crawlspace was also not all that uncommon in my frat, had figured this was just the result of another night of heavy drinking and had gotten up to shower. Well, he hadn’t lost his resolve, only forgotten it briefly in a drunken haze, and once it all came back to him and he saw us standing in the bathroom doorway, he got in a football crouch and bare-ass naked, tried to barrel through us to safety.

Smitty and I grabbed him, but as he was naked and wet, it was hard to keep a hold of him. We started shouting for assistance and somehow Fuller slipped by us and started running down the hall for the staircase. Right before he reached it though, Parks was in front of him, having come up the same staircase in response to our cries for help. Parks tackled him and knocked him to the floor, at which point we duct taped him as best we could, trying hard to avoid his genital region. Once we got him sedated, we dragged his naked ass down the stairs and threw him out the back door.

This lead to another pretty funny site, a completely disheveled looking still drunk active name of Ptazak, still standing by where we had thrown him trying to figure out what to do, being knocked down into a pile of snow as we threw a duct taped naked man at him. I am not entirely sure how that situation was resolved by the two, as we quickly closed the door and re-barricaded it, muttering "sucks to be you" under our breath.

For awhile the morning progressed uneventfully. Good progress was being made on the caves by the poor schmucks who had to do all the hard work. Smitty and myself, on lookout on the third floor, were starting to get slightly buzzed, and were sitting on our asses by windows on opposite sides of the house. Parks was going around and bothering the pledges on work detail, asking them which actives they could remember getting out of the house, trying to figure out the whereabouts of the 4 who nobody had remembered seeing. When all of a sudden, at about 10 AM, we hear a gigantic crash and a ruckus coming from the second floor. Smitty and I immediately run down, and we see Crazy Carl, with his arm lodged in the doorway of the beach, throwing all his weight on the door trying to push it open. The sounds of a few actives on the other side, desperately trying to get the door shut once more against the force of this beast. Apparently, figuring the coast was clear as the only sounds that could be heard were the pledges on the first floor working on their caves, the three guys in The Beach had decided to peek out and see if they could make their way down to the back door to let in the actives who were lurking around outside (there were still a few). However, after opening the door not even an inch, Carl had barreled his way across the 3 or 4 yards from the bathroom to the Beach and had literally thrown himself against the door, throwing one of the actives on the other side across the fucking room as the door suddenly smashed into his chest and nose. The other two guys in that room then immediately lurched into the door in an attempt to shut Carl out. When we saw what was going on, we joined the fray.
Carl though really didn’t need our help. By himself he was already quickly pushing the door open, even against the force of the three actives in the room trying to shut it. It looked like a man pushing a truck, digging his heels in and gradually getting the thing to move his way. But with Smitty and I throwing our weight in, we finally shoved open the door enough for Carl to squeeze in, and that was pretty much that.

Carl, once inside, immediately grabbed one of the actives and got him into a half nelson. Another active ran for him, at which point Carl grabbed the guy by the shirt collar and threw him over a coffee table and into an entertainment center. There are no "acceptable rules of engagement" to a guy willing to bash his head into a plaster wall because it is looking at him funny. And the third guy was already on the floor holding his bloody nose after having been knocked back when Carl had first thrown himself on the door.

When Smitty and I got into the room, our first job was to calm Carl down and tell him to please not kill anybody. It took some doing, but we finally convinced him that bashing the guy in the headlock’s head into the nightstand a few times for good measure was probably not a good idea. Secondly, with Parks’s help (who had finally arrived), we took to duct taping the three and dragging them down the stairs. Parks, Smitty, and myself carried two of the guys. Carl himself had picked up the third, thrown him over his shoulder, and was already on his way to the window.
A job well done, we thought. The Beach had been secured, we had been able to lock the windows that lead to the porch and no longer had to fear the actives getting in that way.

The rest of the early afternoon went about pretty uneventfully. The caves had been coming along nicely, and now the only way to get around in much of the house’s interior was to crawl about in a complex series of cardboard caves. Most of the third floor was still clear, but the first floor was almost entirely covered in caves now. The caves were set about in a maze of sorts, that went up and down stairs, curved around to dead ends, and had a bunch of "rooms", places big enough to sit in comfortably. The rooms were themed. There was a make-out room that housed two couches and could only be gotten in and out of by climbing over the kitchen counter, and also contained a stereo with only CDs like Barry White and Parliament. There was a psychedelic room with black lights and Day-Glo paint and an oriental rug to sit on. Also, the entire bar-room (the back room where Lund got his) was open, so people could mill about and pour drinks, but the only way to get to it was to find your way through the gigantic maze of cardboard. Same with the bathrooms, though that one was, in retrospect, probably a bad decision. The only entrance to the house for the party would be through the basement. There were two steel doors, like tornado shelter doors, on the far end of the basement, and the caves would start there. Basically, if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to crawl, but it really was dope and a pretty fucking unique setting for a big party.

Though it was still under construction at this point.

At about 1 or 2 PM, Smitty had shouted to me something like "Hey Paint CHiPs, I think I just saw Miegs lurking around out here!" I heard him fire off a few bottle rockets, kind of warning shots, though he couldn’t be sure who it was out there or what they were doing. At about the same time, I saw two actives to my right, crouched down and silently running out of the forest by the parking lot towards the mattresses beneath me. I leveled my bottle rocket, fired, and shot a guy in the leg, who yelped and ran back into the forest. The other guy had made it to another little cluster of trees between us and the sorority house, immediately in front of me. I was firing bottle rockets at the tree that the guy had hid behind, focusing straight in front of me, when all of a sudden from my left a bottle rocket whizzed by my head and exploded on the awning right above my head. I jerked back into the room and fell over a futon. Smitty was furiously firing off bottle rockets of his own across the hall, and I could hear him saying "Paint, Paint, what’s going on?! I see about six guys running around! Out here!". I shouted, still on my ass, "Yeah, same here!! PARKS?!! PARKS!??! BE READY!!!" When from the other room, I heard Smitty yelp and saw him duck just as a bottle rocket flew in from his window, across his room, out his door, across the 3 feet of hall space, into my room, and landed and exploded on the futon I had just tripped over.

"ACK!" I shouted, as fire started to come up from the futon. I jumped on top of it and started stomping out the fire. I succeeded in stamping the fire, and the futon, to death. Finally, I grabbed my plastic cup of beer and poured it over the remaining pieces, extinguishing it in a haze of smoke that wafted around the room. Unfortunately, all my stamping had rendered the futon into a charcoaled pile of kindling and skanky beer. Take that Lund.

I quickly stumbled back to my window and looked out. A bunch of actives were dragging the mattresses away from the windows and driveway. As they were right below me, I grabbed the bucket of piss that the actives who had barricaded themselves in the room the night before had used, and I dumped it out my window. It splashed all over about six guys, who scattered, though they got two of the mattresses. Another hail of bottle rockets shot for me, and I ducked back in the window.

From downstairs I heard a lot of activity as Parks and the other pledges were running around making sure everything was barricaded. When I peeked out again, I saw actives running from tree to tree, sneaking up on the place. The mattresses had been dragged into the forest and now were forming a kind of duck blind, propped up against some trees in the semi-distance from which two actives were firing at me and at the back of the house. I saw a few guys running up and down the driveway.

Now, I had been firing bottle rockets at the people in the distance, and was fairly successful at staving them off. But once they got close to the house, it became nearly impossible to aim my bottle rockets, as when you try and aim straight down the rocket slips out of the bottle before it goes off. And besides, my bucket of piss tactic has already been used.

So, I saw two guys directly below me, who had flattened themselves against the wall so as to not be seen by the pledges through the first floor window. So I lit three bottle rockets I had in my hand, and simply dropped them.

This turned out to be a wonderful tactic, and Smitty started doing it as well. You see, when you just drop a lit bottle rocket onto concrete, what happens is, when the fire hits the fuse, the bottle rocket starts to spin around. Then, all of a sudden, it will rocket itself in whatever direction it happens to be facing and explode at whatever point of impact it meets. Deliciously chaotic.

In any case, I dropped the three bottle rockets, shot off a few at the mattress barricade, and watched below as the two actives who had flattened themselves against the wall tried to run in opposite directions. One of the bottle rockets shot off towards the forest, but one of them shot right at one of the fleeing actives, hitting him in the ass and dropping him to the ground, and the other rocket (I only found this out in conversations later), nailed the other active on the back of his hand, leaving a scar he still has to this day. Thus, the actives, in approaching the house, or in trying to get from the back to the front via the driveway, had two options. Try to give the house some distance, at which point they risked our aimed fire and being seen by the other pledges in the house, or they could try to stay close to the house, at which point they didn’t really have to worry about being seen so much, but had to worry about bottle rockets being dropped all around them that could conceivably shoot off in any direction. Also, there were the buckets of piss to consider.

As more and more actives started to get close to the house, I needed a new weapon. The dropped bottle rockets were still working, but the actives had figured out that when I drop them on the ground, they shoot off at low angles. And thus, when one was dropped in front of them, they either jumped on it to extinguish it, or grabbed an awning or a gutter or something and climbed up a few feet. Besides, I was dealing with the random chance that the rockets would shoot of at an active and not into the forest or the yard. Granted, it was really hard to get away from if it chose to shoot off at you, as it was short range then, but also really hard to ensure consistent effectiveness. I probably hit an active with these random rocket drops about 15 times, out of maybe a hundred dropped (though I was dropping them at a really fucking rapid rate, so being on the ground approaching the house was like running across a minefield full of Bouncing Betty’s).

In any case, at one point Parks ran upstairs and gave both Smitty and me buckets filled with water balloons of a great variety that the pledges downstairs had been making on and off throughout the day. Some were filled with shaving cream, some with Crisco, some with piss, some water, some with hot coffee, whatever. It was like a box of chocolates; you never knew what you were going to get. So in addition to shooting bottle rockets and simply dropping them, I also began throwing water balloons. THESE I can aim. It was great fun, nailing a ducking guy in the back and watching shaving cream explode all over him. Or dropping a balloon full of Crisco square on the top of some guy’s head from three stories up and watching him stumble away in a panic and a daze, covered in slimy non-stick goodness.

However, as I was doing this, the downstairs people were having problems.

It seems that we had missed a single active who was still hidden in the house. And this one did not have a drinking problem (though in my frat that was all quite relative). His name was Gerald, a really good guy, levelheaded and cautious. What he had done was to hide out. There was a small space, actually one right next to The Beach, that is kind of hollowed out, the space beneath the stairs that lead to the third floor. In that space we had kept a file cabinet, a rather large one, that kept all kinds of frat records. We also kept various things in there like broken chairs or stolen lawn art or fire hydrants or whatever.

Well, what Gerald had done was to empty out all the drawers of the file cabinet and lock them away in his room. He had then taken a bunch of older drawers that had fallen into disuse and ended up in a junk heap in the basement (a room we called "Storage" that contained artifacts deposited by frat members from as far back as 1968). In any case, he had gotten these old shelves and had sawed off all the parts except for the faces and the part that holds it to the cabinet. He then GOT INSIDE the hollow file cabinet, and from the outside, it looked the same as it ever did.

Well, once the actives were starting to claw there way inside from the first floor, all the pledges had run down to try and help stave them off. About 20 actives were trying to pull apart the barricade of the front doors, and were semi-successful, so most of the pledges were there, trying to rebuild it and support it. Gerald then got out of the file cabinet, and ran to the beach and threw out a rope ladder from its window. He then ran towards the back of the house and threw another rope ladder out of a very small room, the only single in the house. After doing that, he attempted to get to the third floor (he was one of the non-smokers who lived in the Observatory), but when he got there, he found Smitty and myself. He quickly had a face full of shaving cream, pants full of burn holes, and a body covered in duct tape. We didn’t have time to get him out of the house, so he laid there, in the third floor hall, shouting "Paint CHiPs, put out that cigarette!!! Quit smoking in my room!!! And what the fuck happened to Lund’s futon?!?!"

Smitty and I had no clue what was going on downstairs, we just held our positions at our windows. After a short while though, I couldn’t see anymore actives, though Smitty was shooting off as many fireworks and balloons as fast as humanly possibly. At one point, he shouted to me "Paint CHiPs, they’re climbing up the fucking walls!!!!" He couldn’t see the rope ladder, which was hugging the wall below the single room a bit to his left. 8 guys were under it, 6 of whom were beginning to climb their way into the house, and two of whom were simply staving off Smitty by constantly sending a barrage of bottle rockets and roman candle fire his way. It got so bad that all Smitty could do was keep the window cracked and throw out water balloons, careful to not extend any appendages out of said window for fear of fire (which lead to him scrapping his earlier idea of just pissing out the window and bypassing the piss balloons altogether). The barrage of bottle rocket fire from the actives below was so bad that from that day forward, it was nearly impossible to see anything out of that particular window, so covered in soot and fire and ash as it was.

Since I had no more targets on my end, and as I heard a helluva lot of noise from downstairs, I decided to go help out the struggle on the first and second floors. As I reached the staircase, I saw an active who had stopped at the bottom of the stairs on the second floor and was staring up at me, not sure of how to proceed. I then shouted over my shoulder, "HEY GUYS, LET’S GET HIM!!!" at which point he took off. The bluff worked.

What had happened is that through the single room below Smitty, about 5 of the actives had gotten in and were now running around the house kicking through cardboard and trying to find ways to let more actives in the house. Carl, meanwhile, had seen the actives coming in through the Beach, and even though the door opened inward, had barricaded the door with a bungee cord stretched to its limit attached to a toilet somehow.

To this day I have no clue what all happened. All I know is that I ran into the single room that I had just seen another active run out of, and there I saw two guys--Petey and Bob--coming towards the door. I screamed for backup, and as they went for me, I managed to get to the rope ladder hanging out of the window and throw it to the ground below. The two actives that had made it into the room were on top of me, but by this time another pledge, Bowser, had come in to aid me. He closed the door behind him so the actives couldn’t run by us, and I took Petey and Bowser took Bob.

Meanwhile, downstairs, the actives had busted in through the front door and about twenty of them had been standing in the main room, kicking apart cardboard boxes and wrestling with pledges when Stimmel came in from a back room, dressed in combat fatigues, and holding his .45 above his head he shouted at the top of his lungs "EVERY ACTIVE IN THIS GODDAMNED HOUSE HAD BEST GET THE FUCK OUT RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!!". At that point, he shot off two blanks above his head. BANG!!!! BANG!!!!

I wish I would have been there to see the actives run, but apparently, it took about 5 seconds and the main room was cleared of actives.

Meanwhile, Bowser and I were still locked in combat, wrestling around on the ground with the two actives. There were also about 8 other actives running around the house being chased by a bunch of pledges. Not to mention however many actives had gotten locked in The Beach by Crazy Carl. Also, the house president and probably the most responsible of any of us, an active name of Barringer who had gotten in somehow, was running around trying to see if somebody had been shot or not.

I had almost gotten Petey immobile, and had an arm snaked around his neck ready to choke him, when all of a sudden the fire alarms in the place went off. This was nothing new, the fire alarms in the place were notorious for going off at any hour for any reason. So we continued to wrestle around.

However, a cloud of white smoke began to creep in through the closed door.

It took us awhile to even notice, as we were locked in combat, but at one point, Petey said "Wait! Wait! Hold up guys!". To which I replied "Foolish active, I will not fall for such a ploy!!!" "No no," he continued, "Paint CHiPs, Bowser, Bob, I’m serious, I think the house really is on fire!" Still holding each other but no longer struggling, we each stopped and, breathing heavily, looked around. We let go of each other and opened the door, and the hall was full of a white powdery smoke. Petey said to Bob "Fuck this" and they took off down the stairs for the back door. I said to Bowser "Holy Christ, let’s find that shit and put it out!". At that point, we dove into the caves and started shimming through them as if they were Viet Kong dugouts.

It was truly a site to behold. The second floor was full of this white smoke. On the first floor actives were trying to find the quickest route out of the house, as Stimmel was still brandishing his .45. Some of the pledges, convinced the house was on fire, were leaping out of windows. And then there was the glorious scene in the middle of the second floor that involved Ptazack, 4 other actives, and Parks and a few pledges.

I wasn’t privy to this as I was shimming around the caves up and down the back staircase looking for a fire and asking anybody I came across if they had seen it. But apparently, A few actives had been chased around by Parks and his pledge goons, and they had finally gotten cornered. In front of them was where the construction of caves had ended and the rest of the completed caves began. Basically, a hall full of cardboard caves. The rest of the second floor was not yet done, so they had been moving about freely, but going through the cave mazes with a bunch of pledges in hot pursuit would be slow going at best. So, Ptazack turned around, grabbed the gigantic industrial fire extinguisher off the wall, and sprayed it all in one gigantic shot at the oncoming pledges.

This had two effects. For one, it stopped the pledges dead in their tracks, as they were covered in the CO. The pledges then all went right for the bathrooms to try and wash and/or towel off the freezing cold liquid.

But secondly, it had created an enormous cloud of white hazy smoke that filled the house and caused everybody to think it was on fire.

Total chaos, to be sure.

Barringer had finally found Stimmel, gotten the explanation for the gunshots, and had taken the .45 away from him (it was handed over voluntarily; even despite the war games, Barringer had the ultimate authority). The actives were now divided into three or four different camps. The vast majority of them were already gone, figuring either Stimmel had a .45 and had cracked or the house was now on fire. Another large group of people were actives and pledges who were jumping out of windows or finding their ways to the doors, convinced of the same things. Then there was the group with Ptazak who knew exactly what was going on and were now going to un-barricade the front door.

I’m not sure how, but at least among the actives and Barringer, word of what had really happened began to disseminate. The pledges who had originally fled got back in, and all the actives had either fled of their own free will or were now at the front door, either coming or going, in one massive bottleneck. The pledges were also at the front door, shoving the rest of the actives out of it.

That was a scene unto itself, the massive struggle of 30 or so guys. Water balloons flying in every direction, one guy got accidentally punched in the face and was screaming bloody murder, Hijinio was trying to get in and screaming in Spanish about his family portrait.

At one point, when the tide had clearly turned in favor of the pledges, the actives who had, up until then, been trying to push INTO the house, all of a sudden began to try and pull pledges OUT of the house. This came as quite a surprise to the pledges, who went from pushing to being grabbed and forced to pull the other way in a split second. I was at the back of the fray. It took a few minutes, but finally we got them out of the front door, though they had gotten a pledge named Boucher and had him on the porch and hog-tied.

We decided to sacrifice him for the sake of the house, and had closed and were furiously re-barricading the front door. We found out later that the worst fate that Boucher was forced to endure was to sit in an active’s apartment and take shots.

It was about this time the cops showed up.

Now, the street the house was located on was solely home to all the fraternities and sororities of Drake University, so the cops getting strange calls regarding those properties was nothing new to them. They also tend to go by the mantra of "more trouble then it’s worth" in regards to how they deal with it. But when shots are fired and fire alarms are going off, they have to at least send a car out. So at the same time as the actives all began to disperse, the cops showed up.

This lead to another funny scene. Barringer, the president, goes out to meet the two cops that show up. They glance around, see duck blinds made of mattresses, rope ladders out of a front window, urine, shaving cream, and spent fireworks EVERYWHERE, men with war paint walking around leaving the scene nonchalantly, four guys carrying a hog-tied man away, and Barringer walking up to talk with them, sweating balls and scared out of his wits because he has Stimmel’s .45 in his pocket.

In any case, Barringer, who had had much experience talking to police on behalf of our frat, convinced them that both the gunshots and the smoke was from fireworks. He got lectured a bit on fire safety and noise levels, the cops made sure the hog-tied man was okay ("yes officer, we are just playing around") and everybody got warned to cut all the shit out. They had briefly thrown around the idea of going inside the house to check things out, but one active told them "I don’t think you’re going to be able to get in there".
More trouble then it’s worth, officer. The cops left. The actives left. We finished the caves.
The party that night was truly dope. We had a few thousand dollars worth of alcohol. At the bottom of the tornado shelter doors that lead to the basement from the outside, before people entered the caves, every single frat member and every date got a bottle of champagne of their own, dug out of a garbage can full of ice. It was a blast. All the actives were no longer pissed, but rather much of the time was spent trading war stories amongst each other. I had at least five guys come up to me during the course of the party and show me scars that my bottle rockets had caused, saying "Hey Paint CHiPs, that was AWESOME! Nice fucking shot!" A few of us approached Hijino and said "Hey man, we’re really sorry about your family portrait" at which point he guffawed quite a bit and said "It’s okay man, I’m really sorry for lying to you about my family portrait". Charlie had even returned, and he was in the middle of a circle of frat members, recounting his fabulous story of how he got from the Iowa wilderness 60 miles away to St Louis and then back to Des Moines again (more then a few people said "Dude, we thought you were dead.") That rugby player I had blinded hours earlier came up to me and asked to see the super soaker I had wielded against him. I handed it to him, at which point he smashed it to bits against the wall. He then turned and shook my hand and said "Good fucking show." Everybody was tired as fuck, but the exhilaration and booze kept spirits and energy really high.

We had an insane amount of alcohol and women around (the ones that stupidly wore skirts to the party had to crawl around on their hands and knees being followed by a pack of guys). Everybody was all smiles, telling stories about the day, complimenting people on various aspects of their maneuvers and on the incredibly complex system of caves, and generally having a great time. People and their dates were exploring the caves, meeting other couples in the middle of a space maybe 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet and sitting down like Bohemians to finish their drinks and start up a conversation. All over the house people were wandering around in cardboard caverns, trying not to spill their drinks, and marveling over the amount of work and effort that it must have taken to create the caves. And the dates didn’t even know the half of it.

I remember I was with my date in the make-out room, and she whispered into my ear "Let’s go back to your room." I responded, "I’d kind of like to see how the party turns out." It was that much fun.

The party started at 7 PM. At Midnight, also on par with tradition, the caves were destroyed. On the dot, one of the actives shouted "KILL IT!!!" and all of us started stomping the shit out of the caves, reducing them once more to flat cardboard, much to the bemusement of our dates. Viking funeral.

Probably, all in all, that 36-hour campaign and subsequent celebration was the most fun I have ever had in my entire life. Not only was it one of the best parties I have ever been to, but the events leading up to it made it all unforgettable. We had to WORK for it. We got to play Rambo for two days. It was war without consequence.

I got to be Patton CHiPs.

(Finally) The End.

Post script: A few days later, Ptazak, for spraying us all with CO, filling the house with smoke, and making us think the place was on fire, was subsequently kidnapped by the pledge class and taken to the trail that led from the fraternity and sorority street to campus proper. There, he was duct taped upside-down to the trunk of a massive tree that was next to an Emergency Phone, the kind that you are supposed to pick up if you are being raped (known as Blue Phones on some campuses). We left him duct taped upside-down on that tree, left the Blue Phone off the hook, and walked back to campus.