The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #71482   Message #2280215
Posted By: GUEST,Chicken Charlie
05-Mar-08 - 11:03 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Airborne Ranger Song (US Army 82nd)
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: Airborne Ranger Song (US Army 82nd)
[Did it again, didn't I?]

OK, now:

Joe--
If you learned some German ones, great. I think I posted this on another thread, but I came across one single couplet from an OLD German 'jody' that may date back to Bismarck. All I know is

Zicke, Zacke, jup hei die--
Schneidig is die infantrie.

(Ta-ra-ra boom-dee-ay! The infantry is snappy!}

Ever come across anything like that?

Gargoyle:

What year did you hear "Napalm Sticks to Kids" ?? In 1969-71 I was at the same fire base as the 222nd Aviation Co., "Tiger Sharks." They provided our air support, so we were semi-frequent guests in each other's clubs. A number of their pilots collectively wrote "NSK", and I need to add that it was as a means of venting ambivalent feelings about what they were doing. Somewhere I have a wrinkled mimeograph copy. The only other reference to it I've ever seen was a thread, possibly right here on dear old Mudcat, by a bunch of well-intentioned idealists who didn't know what the hell they were talking about. BTW, that was never to my knowledge used as a cadence.

Back to "I wanna be an airborne Ranger...." There are running cadences and there are marching cadences and there are songs you sing while being trucked somewhere. The break-down depends on the length of the phrases, as you take shorter breaths running ("shuffling") than you do marching. I would venture to guess that the reason nobody can come up with more lyrics is that after that first couplet,
"I wanna be ...; I wanna live," it dropped back into some very short, trivial phrases, like:

(Each line echoed)

I wanna be an airborne Ranger.
I wanna live a life of danger.
Here we go!
Up the hill!
Down the hill!
How far?
All the way!

just so everybody breathed out for two steps and in for two steps.

A number of the lyrics posted above were common marching cadences, true, but I don't remember ever leading into them with this couplet.

Chicken Charlie
aka Yankee Two Six Actual