Airborne

For no reason I can remember, I googled "I wanna be an airborne ranger" the other day. It may have been a random memory of The Breakfast Club, but it is certainly true that one of the Google suggestions was a variation of "What is Bender yelling when he runs down the hall?" The idea that someone has to ask that question makes me think that something about that reference is tied to the time of the film (the early 1980s, 1984 in particular). Do teenage boys NOT know that cadence these days? Is that no longer in use even in the military? 

Or yes, perhaps someone was just wondering about the words or history. I may be reading too much into this. I'm going to run with it, though.

To start, it says a bit about Bender that he knows and is singing it. He may be mocking the institutional hierarchy of school by comparing it to the Army. Perhaps he is expecting that this detention will end with that as his only career option. To know the words, he would have been around others who knew it, presumably with some connection to the military   Most likely, that would mean enlisted military, it being  a marching cadence associated with soldiers rather than officers. In 1984, that could mean folks who had been in Vietnam a decade or so before. 

(Teachers at my high school, around that same time, would regale students with dropping-Charlie-out-of-helicopters war stories.  For all I know, they were cribbed from John Kerry, but there it was.)

In the current Millenial army, even a song as relatively tame as this might not be sung. An article in Soldiers Magazine indicates that the Army started toning down off-color cadences in the mid-80s - soon, that is, after Bender was first seen calling this one. Perhaps Do Wa Diddy Diddy is standard, now.