It’s the Oddest, Dirtiest Military Tradition. Pete Hegseth Would Hate It. It’s Perfect.
The United States Naval Academy has a tradition where students climb a 21-foot grease-covered monument to mark the end of their first year. This tradition, known as the Herndon Monument Climb, is a team-building exercise that has been taking place since the 1940s. The climb is a significant event for the students, who have undergone a year of discipline and training, and is seen as a way to cap off their first year at the academy.
- ▪The Herndon Monument Climb is a annual tradition at the United States Naval Academy where students climb a 21-foot grease-covered monument.
- ▪The climb is a team-building exercise that marks the end of the students' first year at the academy.
- ▪The tradition has been taking place since the 1940s and is seen as a way to test the students' physical and mental strength.
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| Original publisher | Slate Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/06/navy-military-graduation-herndon-climb-pete-hegseth.html?via=rss |
| Publication time | Wed, 24 Jun 2026 09:45:00 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-24T09:46:37.375Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-24T09:46:37.375Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6GDcrTdJmlOH |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Politics War Games Every summer since the mid-1900s, Naval Academy students have climbed a grease-covered 21-foot slab of granite. It goes against everything Pete Hegseth stands for. By Pat Cassels June 24, 20265:45 AM Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images Copy Link Share Share Comment Copy Link Share Share Comment Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The first thing the 1,000 men and women of the United States Naval Academy do, after hearing the artillery fire, is scream, tear off their shirts, and charge toward me. I have a painfully naive fantasy of being a war correspondent, but that’s not what this is. Probably for the best.
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