Alumni, sailors: Herndon climb should endure - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Alumni, sailors: Herndon climb should endure

As they have for decades, Naval Academy midshipmen are set Monday to smear lard up and down the Yard’s 21-foot Herndon Monument, set a white cap on its peak, and watch this year’s class of freshmen — or “plebes” — scramble, struggle and fumble to climb up and reach it.

What’s different this year is that the Herndon climb will take place under a superintendent who has said he thinks the ritual should end. Vice Adm. Jeffrey Fowler, whose tenure at the Naval Academy is up this summer, has said he thinks the event’s risk of injury and its focus on small-group or individual achievements is the wrong way to train students to work together.

But Navy Times readers, both academy alumni and enlisted sailors, disagreed. In more than 30 e-mail messages last week, an overwhelming number defended the Herndon climb, criticized Fowler’s stance and said generally that the Navy keeps its traditions for good reason.

“It is obvious that the Navy is evolving, but at what cost?” asked Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class (SW) Joseph Ellison.

“It’s apparent that the ones who make final decisions value tradition as cheap and easily disposable. Month to month, tradition is cast into the history books, never again to be experienced by new additions to our naval fleet. I’m a junior sailor. I joined with the hope of experiencing the stories and traditions of the ‘old’ Navy in my head. Even though I’ve never experienced any of it firsthand, except dulled-down traditions such as the shellback ceremony and pinning ceremonies, I miss that Navy that was in those ‘old’ stories.”

Naval Academy alumni, both on active duty and in civilian life, also came to the defense of the annual event.

“I can tell you the loss of the Herndon ceremony will leave a Herndon-shaped hole in the hearts of all [Naval Academy] graduates, past and present,” said Lt. Jim Elmore, who graduated in 2002. “The Herndon experience was much different than Sea Trials. If the admiral really thinks that more teamwork is required to finish Sea Trials, then he needs to pull the blinders off and take a look around during these two vastly different events.”

Sea Trials is little more than glorified physical training, Elmore wrote, in which teams don’t actually work together to their full potential because they’re forced to wait, slow down and generally accommodate classmates who aren’t trying their hardest. But in the Herndon climb, if even one participant slacks off, none of her or his classmates can get to the top of the monument.

“It requires the concerted effort of the majority of people in the class and is a much better metric of performance than Sea Trials could ever be,” Elmore said.

Another reader didn’t want to pit the two events against each other, but said they were equally valuable.

“Both Sea Trials and Herndon have a place at the academy and one should not succumb to the other,” said retired Cmdr. Scott Gordon, who graduated in 1984. “Sea Trials provides rigor, leadership challenges and team-building opportunities that positively reinforce what plebes have been taught. … Climbing Herndon is also a rite of passage with more history and tradition behind it, but is also recognition for plebes that they are plebes no more. Herndon is more a release of raw energy and a needed outlet for the class. Its demise would signal more than any printed word could ever explain away.”

Navy Times heard from just one reader who agreed that Herndon should be phased out, but she made a spirited case.

Erin Marshall, who graduated in 2003, said that in her plebe year, Sea Trials was a tougher, better finale than the Herndon climb, and taught better lessons for officer candidates.

In Sea Trials, “I distinctly remember being thoroughly impressed with my classmates as we each made decisions while stressed, hungry and tired only 10 months after arriving at this academy as quivering bald kids with high socks,” she wrote. “It also forced me to think about what it meant to have stuck it out all year and be still standing with my squad, as the absence of the company-mates who had quit during the course of the year was palpable. … So I think a lot of people in my class felt Herndon was anti climactic.”

Not only that, Marshall said, “Herndon was dangerous and irrationally dangerous at that. Yes, people got hurt in Sea Trials but that exercise had real training value. … Herndon, for all the pyramid-building, is a total melee where plebes just get to act like 11-year olds in 150-220 pound bodies, not [use] actual teamwork. It was the sort of ‘mandatory fun’ that is actually a little embarrassing, especially as each of us helped cause gratuitous destruction of the beautifully landscaped Yard, which is the face of the whole academy and its people.”

But most of the readers Navy Times heard from want the Herndon climb to stay a fixture of life in Annapolis, irrespective of Fowler’s skepticism.

“Come on, admiral,” said retired Chief Hospital Corpsman (SS) Eugene Peterman. “It is fun and harmless. Time to climb off your high horse and get real.”