An Old Army Myth That Went Unchallenged for Too Long

A Times reporter explains how he started investigating a gulf war-era tale of artillery superiority and its questionable origins.

For some United States Army leaders, the imagery was intoxicating: Iraqi soldiers cowering in fear as dozens of American rockets and artillery shells broke open above them. Thousands of explosive grenades streamed down onto their positions, destroying lives and equipment and forcing surrenders en masse. “Please save us from this ‘steel rain,’” the Iraqi soldiers supposedly implored their American adversaries.
Though the narrative has differed a bit depending on the storyteller, the meat of the story was basically the same: During Operation Desert Storm, the Army’s new second-generation cluster weapons — called dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs — broke the Iraqis’ will to fight, and it was Iraqi prisoners of war who named them “steel rain,” because the grenades were made of that metal and they fell in thickets over large areas of the desert.

I came across this tall tale over and over again in recent years while studying how dud American cluster munitions often killed American and allied troops during Desert Storm. Some of those allied soldiers were killed by unexploded DPICM grenades, but emerging from Desert Storm was a hero narrative around these little submunitions — and one without any official documentation to back it up.

Digging into the archives showed how such a story entered the Army’s consciousness unchallenged. We published that story this week in At War.

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.

These weapons continued to cause problems whenever and wherever they were used, leaving behind numerous duds that the Viet Cong often harvested and incorporated into mines and booby traps that they used against American troops.
The failures of the cheaply made and mass-produced artillery submunitions in Vietnam evidently were forgotten, or were presumed to have been fixed in the Army’s second-generation weapons they debuted in Desert Storm. Although the enemy in 1991 did not turn these duds against American ground forces as they had in Vietnam, at least 16 American troops ended up dead and wounded anyway from picking them up by hand, often thinking they were harmless souvenirs.

But the Army still holds fast to the myth of their effectiveness. Today, a painting titled “Steel Rain” depicting National Guard soldiers firing rockets containing DPICM grenades during Desert Storm hangs in the Pentagon. Reporters like me who enter the building from the Metro entrance pass it on our way to the press operations office, along with paintings depicting other stories.