He didn’t elaborate. Two years later, I was going through advanced training at China Lake, Calif., and the small bomb-disposal detachment there warned us of the dangers present on base by showing us photos of a civilian scrap-metal hunter killed by a BLU-97 after sneaking onto a bombing range. A couple of years later, in Iraq, I dealt with the bloody aftermath of old BLU-97s that exploded years after they were dropped. In 2009, I witnessed the Navy attack an apparent terrorist training camp in Yemen with BLU-97s dropped from special Tomahawk missiles. The attack reportedly killed 55 people, including 14 women and 21 children. Then the military tried to deny it, perhaps not realizing that duds would be left behind, definitively pointing to American involvement.

In my mind, these bomblets were hot garbage that caused more problems than they solved.

Several years later, right after I graduated from journalism school, I decided I needed to find a research project to occupy my time and use the new skills I’d just learned. I figured I’d go back to what I knew: bombs. Specifically, this one little bomblet, which had caused so much suffering around the world.

After I moved to Los Angeles, I finally figured out who that scrapper was and retraced his last moves before he sneaked onto the bombing range. In Irvine, I sat down with a retired engineer who worked on the BLU-97 in the late 1970s and tried to download everything he could remember about how the weapon was developed. And somewhere along the way, I found a decades-old Army War College paper online that said that on Feb. 26, 1991, the 27th Engineer Battalion’s Alpha Company lost seven soldiers at the As Salman airfield in southern Iraq when a pile of BLU-97s exploded.

I had my first solid clue that my old instructor was onto something. Something really bad happened in 1991, and the Army’s official histories of Desert Storm didn’t breathe a word of it.

Going through the National Archives’s casualty database, I quickly found those seven soldiers’ names. The more I dug, the more names I found of other troops with suspicious or unclear causes of death. Eventually, I had a story. Rather, I had a lot of stories. And this week, At War published two of them.