This was not the first time the military overhyped new artillery weapons. The Army’s first generation of artillery cluster shells was born out of the service’s bitter experience facing human wave attacks in the Korean War. A top-secret postwar program at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey raced to create a new generation of weapons it called COFRAM, for Controlled Fragmentation Munition. The idea was to design artillery shells that broke open in midair, dispensing little grenades that exploded in more uniformly sized pieces than earlier munitions did. The key, they found, was to score the inside walls of the grenade body in a crosshatch type of design. (The M67 fragmentation hand grenade still in use today is a direct descendant of the COFRAM program.) By blanketing large areas with smaller munitions, they hoped human wave attacks could be defeated.

These COFRAM munitions stayed largely under wraps until early 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson panicked over the possibility of North Vietnamese forces overrunning the Marine base at Khe Sanh. The president discussed the possibility of using small nuclear weapons with Pentagon leadership to defend the base, but his commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, suggested that nukes would not be necessary. In January, the Pentagon agreed with Westmoreland’s request to declassify COFRAM for use in Vietnam.

The Marine Corps’ official history of the war shows that less than a month later, a brigadier general flew to Khe Sanh with the first pallets of 105-millimeter cluster artillery rounds, and a warrant officer delivered handwritten instructions on their use. On Feb. 7, 1968, Marine howitzers fired the first artillery cluster rounds in support of the Special Forces camp nearby at Lang Vei. The Marine artillery commander who was ordered to use the new top-secret ammunition only fired a few rounds and “doubted very much their effectiveness.” He went back to firing normal high-explosive rounds but kept reporting to his superiors that he was using the new cluster munitions.