You may have seen Mr. Joe Benkovich waltzing into Mr. Marcus Whithorne’s classes. Or you may have seen the two of them walking side-by-side on campus – small and tall, both history nerds, the perfect pair of best friends. 

But never would you consider for a moment that they had a bloody feud at the beginning of the school year. Never would it cross your mind, for even a nanosecond, that these two brothers from another mother would soon become mortal enemies. 

You would be wrong.

The Textbook War began in the first semester of the 2023-2024 school year. Tensions started when the two poked fun at each other with seemingly harmless jokes, specifically about their contrasting heights. “He would always say, ‘Oh, you’re too tall.’ And I’d say, ‘You’re too short,’ and it just grew and grew and grew,” Benkovich explained. 

However, it soon became clear that it would be more than just “wholesome pranks.” The tide turned when Whithorne took the war a step further, by forcing former students to drop off old textbooks in the middle of Benkovich’s class, while he was in the middle of teaching a lesson. 

This, of course, was an act of war. 

Much like when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Whithorne had awoken a sleeping tiger. Enraged, Benkovich decided that Whithorne would rue the day that he had decided to drop off those textbooks. 

The textbooks thus became the instruments of combat. They would soon take over the teachers’ entire lives, both personally and professionally. Whithorne asserted, “Benkovich escalated [the situation] and put them underneath [the] windshield wipers on my car. I then took more and placed them on top of his car.”

Soon the textbooks signified more than just a simple work feud. They became symbols of a full-blown war. Benkovich, motivated by “the sheer joy of annoying” Whithorne, shipped a package to his house, timed perfectly with his daughter’s birthday.

A poor, unsuspecting Whithorne opened the package, expecting a sweet gift for his young daughter. But what he found inside destroyed the last shred of hope for victory. It was “a textbook that was maybe fifteen years old,” Whithorne recalls.

With Whithorne forced to surrender, Benkovich celebrated this victory with one last prank. Knowing that Whithorne’s greatest phobia is owls, Benkovich placed statues of those wretched creatures around the top of his classroom, where they could not be reached, thus symbolizing the crushing defeat and torment for his conquered foe.

October 18th, 2023 marked the official end of the Textbook War. The two combatants ratified a peace treaty with their personal stamps, effectively ceasing hostilities for the foreseeable future. 

However, there are whispers of a reignition of the conflict. Will Whithorne have his revenge? Will Benkovich further cement his authority? We have the inside scoop, presented here as a dialogue between these two adversaries.

Whithorne: “It’s not similar enough to the Cold War…”

Benkovich: “It’s kinda like the Cold War.”

Whithorne: “We go to extenuating detail and lengths to not fight one another anymore…”

Benkovich: “…with nuclear weapons. It would be the end of the world, so right now fear is keeping us on our best behavior.”

So there you have it, Nitros. Only time will tell what will happen next, but for now these two former rivals are back to being best friends. 

“He’s my best friend, and he bought me a cup of coffee today,” Benkovich gushed. “Despite all our pranks, we are really good friends.”