In response to the fish fiasco, Cabot House formed its own Department of War and allied with Mathergrad. Dunster House entered the fray by stealing the Eliot House banner, though it was turned over to the Harvard University Police Department subsequently.

On Feb. 25, the Adams House gong was discovered on a flagpole outside Kirkland House. Kirkland resident Diego Prats ’04 said he dislodged the gong and presented it to Adams House dining hall workers at 6 a.m. The next day, Adams residents celebrated the return of the gong with a champagne toast.

A CAGED BATTLE

While the war led to no physical wounds among its participants, it was replete with personal attacks executed by e-mail.

Maats said he made a conscious effort to avoid “expensive and destructive” actions, but to keep the war “lighthearted and fun.”

“When you imagine most college pranks, they’re actually very violent,” said Maats, citing the example of students at another school who filled a dean’s car with water, turning it into a portable aquarium. “But on some level we would have loved to do these kind of pranks.”

Instead, Maats said the council had to devise a more realistic plan of action.

“Since we were operating under constraints, we knew that there would be few House symbols to strike at,” he said. “Therefore the House banners and Adams gong became important.”

Corker said the idea to steal the gong came from the 1999 House war between Pfoho and Adams, when Pfoho residents famously stole the Adams House gong.

Corker, Maats, Morris and Hersh all say this year’s war was caused by an e-mail that former Mather House resident Daniel E. Kafie ’05 sent to the Mather open-list last May. Reminiscent of the cause of the Trojan War—the defection of Helen to Troy—Kafie and his blockmates moved from Mather to Kirkland House last fall.

In that May e-mail, Kafie, responding to an earlier e-mail from Morris about the upcoming transfer, described poor living conditions and House social life as his reasons for transferring.

As Mather HoCo co-chair, Maats said he was “appalled” by the “tasteless” e-mail.

But Kafie said he was an easy scapegoat for the war, since after his blocking group transferred to Kirkland in fall 2003, many others followed suit.

“It got to the point where there are only two or three senior blocking groups in Mather,” Kafie said. “I definitely think that Hunter wanted to give Mather attention to stop hordes of people from leaving and to put Mather back on the map in a lot of ways...and he needed someone to blame for it.”

UNSUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN