Army - Kicking Tires On Jltv

The Outpost
Fighting It Out at Chipyong-ni
By Lt. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, U.S. Army retired
Retreat is not a word American soldiers like to use. You
won’t find the term in Army field manuals. There are
paragraphs on retrograde operations, to include delaying actions,
withdrawals and retirements. But retreat? Well, that’s a
ceremony at sunset when they lower the post flag. It sure isn’t
a recommended battle tactic.
Of course, doctrine is one thing while reality is another.
Even a cursory review of U.S. Army history reflects several
notable “retrograde” events: Gen. George Washington’s
bedraggled Continentals fleeing British redcoats in New York
and New Jersey in 1776; panicked Union troops legging it
north after the Confederates had their way at the First Battle
of Bull Run in 1861; and frantic G.I. backpedaling in the face
of German panzers at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in 1943.
There are other examples, from Brandywine to Bataan. Few
turned out well.
But when it comes to retrogrades, or retreats, those of the
first six months of the Korean War formed a particularly humiliating
category all their own. First, in the hot summer of
1950, the North Koreans ran the Americans south. Then,
once the U.S. Eighth Army recovered and pushed north in the
snows of an early winter, the Communist Chinese intervened,
triggering a series of disastrous one-sided clashes, thousands
of casualties and a wholesale rush south. U.S. Army trucks
eventually outran Chinese foot soldiers. But the ignominious
pullback generated a conviction up and down the ranks that
something was seriously wrong with American morale, discipline
and leadership—especially that last one. The troops who
had won World War II couldn’t hold a hill in the face of peasant
Chinese Communists with hand weapons.
Senior officers did not use the “R” word. They mumbled
into their wool winter shirts and hoped things would turn
around. Maybe it was time to pull off this godforsaken Korean
Peninsula. Or maybe it was time to drop the Big One, the
atomic bomb. But going at it man-to-man? There wasn’t much
interest in that. Better to just leave—the ultimate retrograde.
The troops also didn’t talk of retreat but they sang about it,
to the tune of a popular Hank Snow hit:
When the mortars started falling ’round the CP tent
Everybody wondered where the high brass went
They were buggin’ out—
Just movin’ on…
The generals and colonels tried to ban “Bugout Boogie.”
But the soldiers kept singing it. Worse, they kept doing it.
It’s hard to say where “Bugout Boogie” originated. Most
thought it came from the embittered privates of the 2nd Infantry
Division. That famous old outfit had been savaged trying
to break contact with Chinese regiments at Kunu-ri dur-
First Cavalry Division soldiers move north of
Chipyong-ni, South Korea, in late February 1951.
National Archives
February 2016 ■ ARMY 57