The Obscure Vietnam War Bullet That Left a Trail of Horror

The Obscure Vietnam War Bullet That Left a Trail of Horror

You are lying in the tall grass and a silhouette flashes between two trees a hundred yards away.  You shoot once.  You miss, and the silhouette disappears. Now imagine that one pull of the trigger released two bullets instead of one, which flew out intentionally , covering the space your scope couldn’t reach.

  This cartridge was real.  The Army created it, described it in an official field charter, and sent it to Vietnam.  And the reason for its existence is stranger than any legend you’ll find online. Because a secret study just told the army something no rifleman wanted to hear.  Your accuracy counted for almost nothing. Chevy Chase, Maryland, 1952.

  In a quiet research office that the Army ran through Johns Hopkins University, an analyst named Norman Hitchman was completing a report that would change America’s perception of the rifle.  The office was called the Operations Research Office. Hitchman’s report had a dry title: ” Operational Requirements for Infantry Small Arms.

”  But what was inside turned out to be far from dry.  Working with two statisticians, Scott Forbush and George Blakemore, Hitchman’s team processed thousands of combat casualty reports dating back to the two world wars and the Korean War.  This work grew out of an earlier effort called Project Alclad, in which the same office studied millions of battlefield casualty records for one reason: to understand how soldiers were actually wounded and killed.

  And according to this study by the Operations Research Office, the conclusion was stunning. A rifle in the hands of a trained soldier was only reliably effective up to 100 yards, and its usefulness dropped off sharply after 300. Here’s the part that stuck out the most. When researchers secured a rifle in a machine gun and fired at a silhouette of a person 300 yards away, they almost never missed.

  When they allowed skilled shooters to aim the same rifle at the same target, they missed about three out of four times. Think about that for a moment.  The weapon could have fired that shot. The soldier behind her— usually not.  The same study found something even more useful. The most effective rifle shooting in real battles took place at close range.

    The vast majority are within 200 yards.  And whether an enemy soldier would be hit did not depend on the skill of the shooter.  And how long the target remained exposed and how many parts of their body you could see.    A bad shooter could hit a large, slow target right in front of him.    The brilliant marksman couldn’t catch the flicker of movement in the distance.

  And Hitchman did n’t work alone. Around the same time, engineer Donald Hall of the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory was advancing an idea that was almost heretical: that a much smaller, faster bullet might be better for the average soldier than the powerful rifle cartridge that everyone worshipped.  From two different directions, old dogmas about rifles began to show cracks.

  So the army asked a completely logical question. If human accuracy is the weak link in the entire system, what happens if we stop relying on it so much?  This question grew into Project Salvo, a research program that lasted throughout the 1950s. Gun historians Edward Ezell and Blake Stevens, whose books remain the most detailed accounts of this saga, describe how the Salvo pursued one main purpose.

Increase the chances of hitting with each shot fired by a soldier.  And the people who ran the project were willing to try almost anything to achieve it. Journalist K.J. Chivers, in his history of the automatic rifle, describes these years as a total search for a way to circumvent human imperfection.  They tested shot cartridges equipped with small steel arrows.

They were testing experimental rifles with a crazy rate of fire. They even designed cartridges that held three or four bullets one after the other.  But in the “Salvo” field trials of 1956-57, one idea surpassed the others in cost and simplicity.  The best solution, which did not require any changes to the rifle’s design, was to load two bullets into one cartridge case.

The result was a truly standardized cartridge.  The Army called it the M198 duplex cartridge.  On the outside, he looked almost normal.  A .30 caliber cartridge with a green-painted tip.  The secret was hidden inside .  Two bullets, placed one after the other in one sleeve, so that one press on the hook releases both towards the target.

According to the military cartridge specification, each of these two shells weighed about 80 grains.  And together they roughly matched the weight and recoil of a single conventional rifle bullet.    The front bullet left the barrel at a velocity of about 2,700 feet per second. The rear one was moving a little slower, around 2200.

 They were both flying one after the other towards the target. Nothing has changed for the rifle itself.  And this is the first myth that is worth debunking. Search for this cartridge on the internet and you will see it referred to as a secret or banned weapon.  This was not true .  It was openly classified by type.  It was listed in the Army Field Manual for the M14 rifle in 1965 .

  And today it is part of many cartridge collections.  There was nothing forbidden in it.  The only thing that remained hidden was the confusing mathematics that led to this .  Now, two bullets in one cartridge case will only help you if they go in different directions.  If you shoot a pair that hits the same spot, you will not gain any advantage.

  So the designers intentionally built in the scattering effect.    The front bullet sat in the sleeve as usual, with a slight depression in the bottom.  The rear bullet was a little different .  Her nose entered this recess.  They nested inside each other like a pair of spoons. And its own base was beveled, at an angle of several degrees to the axis.

  So when it left the barrel, the powder gases pressed against this beveled end and deflected the bullet from its trajectory.  Engineers called this effect controlled dispersion—a deliberate and predictable dispersion.  On paper, it was insignificant. The specification called for the front bullet to hit within 2 inches at 100 yards, and the rear bullet to hit somewhere in a circle of 5 to 10 inches around it.

At close range, a tight pair.  Then there is an increasingly larger interval.  The goal was to give the average soldier two chances to hit where he previously had only one.  But the versions of this story you find online almost always lack an ending.  Because when these rounds were finally put into real-world conditions, things didn’t go as the army had hoped.

  The only place where the duplex cartridge saw real combat is a story that few people know.  Among the few fighters who used them in Vietnam was Robert Howard, so decorated that he is often called the most decorated American soldier of that war, a member of the secret MACV-SOG special forces unit.  According to Major John Plaster, writing for American Rifleman, Howard loaded duplex rounds into a shortened M14 rifle, effectively doubling the number of bullets his magazine could fire during an ambush.  I spent a very long time gathering information about this

secret unit, people who carried out missions that no government would ever acknowledge. MACV-SOG conducted the most dangerous reconnaissance of the entire war , crossing borders that officially did not exist, and the true history of this unit is buried under a pile of myths and disinformation like no other unit in American military history.

If this hidden war appeals to you as much as it does to me, I have compiled everything I found into a book, the link to which awaits you in the description on the website truevietnamdocs.com. Check it out when you’re done watching. Now let’s get back to the cartridge and the reason why almost no one remembers it.

  Apart from a few cases like Howard’s, duplex cartridges hardly reached soldiers on the front lines.  The ammunition that did make it to Vietnam went mostly to machine gunners and some helicopter crews, arriving in long ribbons to the M60.  And one strange detail keeps popping up in reports from the war zone. Most of the soldiers who could have used them were not even aware of their existence.

The amount of ammunition confirms this.  Historian and arms collector Ray Makita, whose data is the source of most information about this cartridge, describes the batch sent overseas as large-scale military tests, rather than full-fledged combat support. Simply put, the army continued testing, using real war as its testing ground.

  This leaves open the question that the Army itself has constantly asked: Did this thing really work? For decades, almost no one shot them to find out.  And then the modern weapons channel, InRange TV, tracked down the original 1964 cartridges and took them to the shooting range to test the theory in practice.  See what happens when they push the target further.

    Well , let’s take a look at this. Now it is starting to dissipate.  Oh, this is serious.  Here’s one hit, right on target. Aha. And one more thing there. Wow. Is this a foot? 10 inches. 10 inches, okay.  10 inches at 100 meters. OK. Some people will look at this and say, “Oh, now that’s worthless.” In fact, I think quite the opposite.

  Now that we have this dispersion, these rounds are really capable of fulfilling their purpose.  Well, let’s think about it. We went from 2.5 to 3.25, and now it’s 10 inches. So at 200 meters , the range will probably be quite significant.  Yes. At two hundred, maybe I can aim here and get one miss and one hit.

  It seems that this is exactly what the results promised.  Let’s take a closer look and draw conclusions about this. At close range, the two bullets landed almost one inside the other.    A small flight is useless. But when the target was moved to 100 yards, this pair separated by about 10 inches .  Two separate wound channels after one click on the hook.

At such a distance, against a barely visible enemy, the idea truly delivered on its promise.  It gave the shooter a hit zone, a small area of ​​land where he was likely to hit, even if his aim was somewhat inaccurate. This gives rise to the main mystery.  If it worked, why have you never heard of it? Why did the army bury this project so quietly? The answer is not some dramatic cover-up.

  Everything is quite bureaucratic and honest.  In 1965, the same year these cartridges appeared in the field regulations, the Army evaluated them and issued a harsh verdict.  According to the Army’s Armaments Research Center, the M198 was deemed unfit for service because it did not provide a significant combat advantage over the conventional bullet it was intended to replace.

  People thought they knew the whole truth about this cartridge.  They were wrong. Several hidden problems have accumulated. These two short bullets, light and blunt, quickly lost speed and accuracy.  So a machine gunner firing at a distance of over two hundred yards would fire weak, unguided rounds instead of accurate shots.

  The cartridge was also much more expensive and more difficult to manufacture, as the factory now had to make two different bullets and place them perfectly one after the other in each case.  But the biggest problem was time.  By the late 1960s, the army was already transitioning to a smaller, lighter cartridge and rifle for it—the M16.

  This small, high-velocity round solved exactly the problem that the Salvo program was working on.  More hits per soldier.  And he achieved this thanks to the controllability of automatic fire, and not by placing bullets one after another. The use of two shells only made sense in large, heavy calibers, which were already becoming a thing of the past .

  There was also a deeper resistance that could not be measured. American shooting doctrine was based on the proud myth of a rifle in the hands of an accurate marksman. One shot, one hit.  The bullet, which silently testified that chance trumps accuracy, was an affront to everything this culture believed in , which brings us to the numbers you’ll see online and why most of them should be treated with suspicion.

  You will find confident claims that millions of these rounds went to Vietnam, or that duplex rounds doubled the number of hits.  Treat every such claim with suspicion.  This common figure of millions of rounds comes from one collector, Ray Makita, and no official production totals have ever been produced to support it.

    The impressive hit figures you see— 70% or more improvements— come from controlled field tests, not actual battlefield casualty counts.    There has never been a reliable calculation of how exactly this cartridge affected a person in combat conditions.  And one more clarification, because this is important.

  A duplex cartridge is not a “beehive” type flechette cartridge.  These are completely different weapons, and confusion between them is one of the surest signs that the source has no idea what they are talking about.  So, was this the deadliest bullet of Vietnam? Honestly, no.  The truth is quieter and much more interesting than myth.

    The duplex cartridge was the Army’s response to a truly disturbing discovery.  That the lone gunman they mythologized for centuries was, by dry numbers, a worse choice than a bit of planned randomness.  So the army created a bullet to correct the aiming of its own soldiers. I tested it in the middle of a real war.

  Decided it wasn’t quite worth the expense.  And allowed it to become a footnote in a collector’s tray. The problem she was supposed to solve hasn’t gone away .  The solution simply turned out to be another, smaller ball.  The one you’ve definitely heard of. If you want to know the real history of this weapon, the version from reliable sources, not retold myths, subscribe and stay with us.

Next, see the story of the rifle that actually solved this problem, along with the scandal that nearly destroyed it in the jungle.