08/25/2026
Amazing find
The Sixteen-Inch Shell That Waited Fifty Years, In 2015, a farming family working a field in Quang Tri Province turned up something the war had buried for almost fifty years. It weighed 1,900 pounds, measured 16 inches across, and had never gone off.
The round was a Mark 13 High Capacity shell, fired from one of the nine 16-inch/50 caliber Mark 7 guns aboard USS New Jersey (BB-62). Recalled from mothballs in 1968 as the only active battleship left in the world, New Jersey steamed off the Demilitarized Zone to put a ton of steel and dunnite directly onto positions no cruiser or destroyer gun could reach.
The Mark 13 was built for exactly this kind of work. A single round could blow a crater 50 feet wide and 20 feet deep, stripping trees for 500 yards around the impact point. Over roughly four months on the gun line, New Jersey's main battery sent nearly 6,000 of these shells into North Vietnamese bunkers, artillery positions, and supply routes near Con Thien and the Song Giang River, more 16-inch ordnance than she had fired in all of World War II and Korea combined.
This particular round missed its mark and went quiet in the mud instead. Ordnance disposal specialists deactivated it on site decades later, one more chapter in Vietnam's long effort to clear a war that keeps resurfacing.
New Jersey herself came home for good in 1991 and now rests as a museum ship in Camden, just across the river from the yard that built her. This shell is the closer reminder of what she once did.
