Napalm Sticks to Kids
Napalm Sticks to Kids is a protest song from the Vietnam War. It was released in 1972 by the Covered Wagon Musicians on the album We Say No to Your War!, by Paredon Records. The group consisted of U.S. service members stationed at Mountain Home Air Force Base.
The song’s words were written by Army and Air Force personnel who served in South Vietnam. Each writer added a verse about actions they took, expressing anger at the war. The band says Sergeant Mike Elliot published the lyrics in Mountain Home’s Helping Hand newsletter, helping the song spread through the military.
Soldiers in Vietnam were already hearing the tune in June 1970, and a U.S. senator later confirmed this in Congress.
The song also circulated as a military cadence—an in-step chant used during marching. By the late 1980s the cadence was taught in training across the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines. The Naval Academy used it from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and there were attempts to stop its use; the film An Officer and a Gentleman faced Navy objections when its script kept the cadence.
The lyrics vividly describe napalm attacks, including images of burning people. Some hear it as a protest against war or against the violence some soldiers witnessed; others see it as mocking a negative image of pilots. Music historians say the song shows a brutal, unflinching view of the war.
Napalm drops were a major part of the war, with hundreds of thousands of tons of Napalm B used in Indochina between 1963 and 1973.
In military culture, cadences are used to boost morale and unit cohesion, but they can be offensive. The phrase Napalm Sticks to Kids also became a slogan for anti-war protesters, often linked to the famous 1972 photo The Terror of War.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:14 (CET).