Started after I got out in 1962. Back then, Marines greeted each other with Semper Fi (same as today) and the response was Do or Die.
Yes, Marines, hoo-RAH, or oo-RAH.
Navy Rescue Swimmers used to say, hoo-YAH.
One Guy washed out of rescue swimmer school in Jax, FL. Turns out he was a crappy swimmer. LOL
After my 5th birthday in November 1941 came Pearl Harbor. I was only one of millions of children who endured direct exposure to the whole militaria of WWII, and of the returning GIs, few of whom ever discussed the depth of those experiences in their earned humility in the presence of combat-scarred contemporaries.
Those war-dominated years of civilian life and after were filled with military terms and tales and acronyms, from personal anecdotes to news articles to magazine articles to radio shows, movies, and kid comics building om their eye-witnessed use by WWII and Korean War veterans, and the beginnings of our Special Operations units after the Legionnaires' ejection from Dien Bien Phu and the dividing of its country.
Enlisted in August 1956, and like you honorably discharged in October 1962, I had personal training by true CW individuals from those conflicts, and sharing of their fellowship for the rest of my life. Yet, my tiny national service was accepted by even with one of the guys whose wall against disclosure of intimate details began to crumble, a machine gunner in the 104th Infantry of the YD that marched from bloody Metz to the Bilge that included Bastogne in Patton's fabled three-day repositioning of the Third Army, of the fellows whose soul-freezing survival of the thrashing of tree-bursts precluded any remembrance to infantile morale-boosting pre-slaughter enthusiastic utterings like . . . the ages-old "hurrah," or "ooraw" as it lately has become.
Another, a hero of the Marine Raiders who participated on Edson's Guadal Canal Bloody Ridge permanent rebuttal of the Japanese Pacific attack,with a kindly gracious determination treated me as if militarily an equal, greatly undeserved as it was. And so did his wife, both sharing their life stories in privileged confidence.
Perhaps what I write now will be confirmed bu a man of valiant service as they were, that reads this: Whatever that action-prelinary grunt has become and means to our beloved warriors of this Millenial age, I never heard it mentioned, voiced, or voluntarily injected in a courageous effort by any of their predecessors, or as an "Amen" after, or in the records of the twentieth century's valiant acts.
Just sayin'.
If a professonal man of war wants to brag about it? well, OK for them. But for the now-enlisted kids that have had no contacts, even brushing, with that ancient history or anything like it, one hopes they never, ever will have to. They certainly should be made to understand that there is no jubilance, hilarity, or hubris involved. For those that are truly experienced, only an unwelcome, deeply-sensed dread and aversion to that kind of expression, not a voiced anticipation of a delightful, memorable, badge of virility, which it will not be.
Hopefully, the threatening of such an event will bring about an avenue of honorable reconciliation and mutual respect of the parties involved. The attitude of oppositional defiance that the seal of shared "ooraw" on the threshold of shed blood, scorched neurons, and scissored dignity will not bring that about, will it?
Some motivated humans wish to instigate violence to produce a certain result for themself; others, to institute an honorable procedure in which all, with a changed mind, can come to a satisfactory conclusion that truly deserves an approving "ooraw" from everyone affected.