Bartholomew worked at a simple steel and plywood workbench near the end of the assembly line, not long before each BLU-97 became a finished item ready to be tucked inside the big CBU-87 canisters. He was paid about $15 an hour. On July 26, 1989, he shared the station with five other workers. Together they spent their shift repeating their steps in the process, over and over again, looped in the drudgery of a widget-making routine.

At 4:20 p.m., a BLU-97 exploded inside Building 1113. The blast killed two of Bartholomew’s co-workers, Gerald Jenkinson and Shirley Lever.

Bartholomew was roughly three feet away. He was about to set a bomblet on the conveyor belt when pressure, shrapnel and bloody pulp slammed into him. He screamed and staggered from his workbench, aware he had been hit but not sure by what. “I was covered in so much blood that wasn’t mine,” he said. He bolted out into the hallway, where fellow workers were rushing to evacuate the building. They took him outside, where he collapsed with abdominal pain. Shrapnel had entered his stomach and traveled downward through his body; another piece hit his head. He dunked his hands into a bucket of water, which turned pink with Jenkinson’s blood.

Bartholomew had been spared the worst. The explosion killed Jenkinson and Lever instantly. Jenkinson was apparently closest to the bomblet and absorbed the largest share of its fragmentation. The injuries were horrific.

Three other workers were treated at the nearby Labette County Medical Center and released. Bartholomew, however, was out of work for five years on disability. An Army investigation concluded that the explosion was probably caused by a fuze being damaged while the worker screwed it into the body of the bomblet.

Much of the plant’s work force was laid off for the better part of a year after the explosion. Day & Zimmermann did not pay them during that time. Under Kansas workers' compensation law, the payout to Jenkinson’s and Lever’s families for the loss of life was $2,500 each, one longtime worker remembered. (Thirty years after the fatal accident and long after the BLU-97 assembly line in Kansas was shut down, Day & Zimmermann declined to answer questions about the episode. It did, however, warn the plant’s small remaining work force, which makes mortar projectiles, that a reporter was inquiring and that they were not allowed to speak to him.)

The memories of that tragedy in July 1989 have dimmed a bit for Rod Fleming, a retired Army explosive-ordnance disposal technician, but he can still remember what he saw and did that day. “It was a big fubar,” he recalled. “We were there for a week cleaning up the mess.”