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This Is How Much Dartmouth Frat Boys Love Vomiting

A "Rolling Stone" investigation into the dark underbelly of Dartmouth frats reveals a lot of unsavory stuff, but possibly the strangest is the prevalence of vomit. Dartmouth frat boys appear to spend basically all their time barfing.

Student Andrew Lohse came forward in January with horror stories about puke-filled kiddie pools, and now "Rolling Stone" has a detailed exposé of the Dartmouth frat scene and its excesses — most of which seem to be of the gastrointestinal variety. Dartmouth frat boys apparently liked to incorporate vomiting into lots of different scenarios, including the following:

1. Dog crates

One fraternity reportedly beat their pledges; another was said to place them in dog crates while the brothers vomited on them.

2. Blackballing

Lohse, now very drunk, faced a Review brother who had wanted to blackball him. The brother held Lohse's embossed bid card in one hand and a lighter in the other. Ten cups of beer sat on a table. "Do a quick six in the time it takes for this to burn," he told Lohse, setting the bid card on fire. "Go!" Lohse chugged, but was only up to his third cup when time ran out. Seeing his future go up in flames, Lohse vomited all over himself – at which point the brothers told him they were just kidding.

3. Breakfast

One brother recalls the night some of the pledges were served a scramble of vomit and eggs, known as a "vomlet."

4. Swimming

At last, he and the other whale shits were escorted to the basement, where they were formally baptized as SAE pledges in a kiddie pool filled with a noxious sludge. "By that point you are really, really drunk – which is the point, because if you weren't, you'd never get in it," says Lohse, who was later told that brothers had peed, defecated, vomited and ejaculated into the pool. His account of the kiddie pool has been almost universally contested by others who took part; according to an SAE brother, the pool was actually filled with food products like water, bread, vinegar, soy sauce, salsa and hot dogs. "When you mix all that stuff together, it smells really gross," the ex-brother says. "And when you're in it, you don't know what it is. We let the pledges' imaginations get the best of them." Lohse, for his part, hasn't backed down. "I know this because I watched them make the batch for the 2011 term," he says. "We were told they needed a few more guys to piss and boot in it."

5. Going to the bathroom

Ritualized vomiting was simply part of brotherly life. SAE has a "boot room," which is essentially a bathroom where brothers in the midst of a rigorous game of pong can stick their finger down their throat – the term is "pulling the trigger" – and then resume the game. At some houses, pledges are not allowed to pull their own triggers, but must get a friend to do it for them. "It's all about the challenge," says one of Lohse's SAE brothers.

6. Friendship

"Seeing two friends pulling each other's trigger was one of the most glorious things I've ever seen in my life," says Snowden Wright, an SAE brother who graduated in 2004. "It was like two kittens licking each other clean. Pure friendship." I assume Wright is kidding; he assures me he isn't.

7. Thunderdome

A game that is played at nearly every Dartmouth fraternity is called Thunderdome, or Dome. The entire goal of the two-man contest is to make the other person drink until he vomits – at which point the winner "claims his right" by throwing up on the loser.

8. Daily life

By the end of his pledge term, Andrew Lohse had vomited so much that the enamel on his teeth had largely burned away.

Totals

Here's a rundown of how often "vomit" and other related words appear in the piece:

• vomit: 16

• boot: 8

• vomlet: 4

• trigger (as in "pulling the trigger"): 3

• puke: 1

• puking: 1

Now I'm going to vomit.