This moto kid singing ‘The Army Song’ will make you want to join

A small child is going viral on social media for his awesome rendition of The Army Song, the song performed at Army ceremonies around the world to celebrate the service and its history. And the fact that the kid is wearing a comically oversized helmet with night-vision goggle mount and full camo paint is just gravy.

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Gonna be honest, I watched this and then found "Army prior service recru" in my Google search bar before I could get myself back under control. Become one of the millions like me by just clicking the play button above.

(And you can go ahead and stop reading here. We have to put about 300+ words in articles to get search engines to see them properly, so I'm going to write some stuff about The Army Song below, but the big attraction is the adorable singing child, so you can scroll back up and watch that. Seriously, the rest of this is aimed at robot readers anyway. Go look at the adorable kid. Seriously, I haven't hidden any cute kid stuff below. It's all just history.)

The Army Song was adopted by the U.S. Army as its official song in 1956, but it's based on a song written by a brigadier general in 1908. Brig. Gen. Edmund Louis 'Snitz" Gruber wrote The Caissons Go Rolling Along as a way of expressing his experiences serving with an artillery unit in the Philippines.

Field artillery pieces and caissons on a parade ground in 1914 during border clashes between the U.S. and various forces involved in the Mexican Revolution.

(Library of Congress)

Caissons were horse-drawn supply wagons designed to carry ammunition for artillery units, and the song as a whole is about the inexorable power of a column of artillery marching to the battlefield. The first verse and the refrain are:

Over hill, over dale
As we hit the dusty trail,
And those caissons go rolling along.
In and out, hear them shout,
Counter march and right about,
And those caissons go rolling along.

Then it's hi! hi! hee!
In the field artillery,
Shout out your numbers loud and strong,
For where e'er you go,
You will always know
That those caissons go rolling along.

When the Army adopted a broader version in 1953 as The Army Song, they simply changed out some phrases to reflect Army history and make the song less field artillery specific. The first chorus and refrain now go:

First to fight for the right,
And to build the Nation's might,
And the Army goes rolling along.
Proud of all we have done,
Fighting till the battle's won,
And the Army goes rolling along.

Then it's hi! hi! hey!
The Army's on its way.
Count off the cadence loud and strong;
For where'er we go,
You will always know
That the Army goes rolling along.

The full song has additional cadences not often sang at ceremonies that can be seen here at the Army website.