About two hundred bombs. More than 160 craters counted in the reconnaissance photographs afterwards. Fourteen breaks in the runway — and those quickly repaired. That is the whole arithmetic of the December 1971 attack on Quang Lang, a modest dirt-and-steel airfield 75 kilometres northwest of Vinh, and it is the reason people who study air power keep coming back to places like this. Cratering a runway is easy. Keeping it cratered is the hard part, and in the hills of western Nghệ An the North Vietnamese were very good at the hard part.
The raid was part of Operation Proud Deep Alpha, flown between 26 and 30 December 1971. More than two hundred US Air Force and Navy aircraft put up 1,025 sorties against targets in North Vietnam south of the 20th parallel, some as close as 120 kilometres to Hanoi, with the airfields at Quang Lang and Bái Thượng near the top of the list. The point was to make MiG operations against B-52s and gunships over Laos impossible. The weather had other ideas. Clear skies on Christmas Day gave way to overcast on the morning of the 26th, and most of the campaign was flown blind, bombing through cloud on radar. The Air Force's own assessment afterwards was that only about a quarter of the bombs dropped landed anywhere near what they were aimed at. Three aircraft were lost: a USAF F-4 on the 26th, and a Navy A-6A and an F-4B on the 30th. East German television reported that two MiG-21s at Quang Lang had been blown onto their backs.
Quang Lang was built in 1966 and sat at just 60 feet above sea level, its runway surfaced with pierced steel planking — the perforated, interlocking steel mat that armies have used since the Second World War to turn a graded field into an airstrip in days. Its great virtue is modularity. A bomb tears a hole through it, and the repair is not a concrete pour requiring cure time but a matter of hauling out the twisted panels, filling and tamping the crater, and locking fresh mats into place. Whoever did that work at Quang Lang did it under the reasonable expectation that more aircraft would be back. Fourteen breaks from two hundred bombs, closed fast enough that the field kept operating, was not luck. It was a doctrine, and it was the doctrine that beat the campaign.
The air above the base was busier than the base itself. On 19 January 1972, escorting an RA-5C Vigilante on a photo-reconnaissance run over Quang Lang, Lieutenant Duke Cunningham and Lieutenant j.g. William P. Driscoll of VF-96 — flying an F-4B from the carrier Constellation — engaged and shot down a MiG-21. It was the first of the five victories the pair would record between January and May of that year. On 6 March, Lieutenant Garry Weigand and Lieutenant j.g. Bill Freckleton of VF-111 downed a MiG-17 near the field in another F-4B; the same day, an F-4J of VF-51 escorting another Vigilante fought a MiG nearby with a result that was never confirmed. On 10 May, far from here, Cunningham and Driscoll took three MiGs in a single flight to become the only US Navy aces of the war, and were then hit by a surface-to-air missile on the way home and ejected over water near Nam Định. What became of the North Vietnamese crews in the aircraft that fell around Quang Lang, the record does not say — a common silence on that side of the ledger.
The field was hit again on 15 June 1972, during the sustained strikes of Operation Linebacker, and hit once more three days later, on the 18th, with further damage to the runway. It was the end of its useful life: Quang Lang had been in service six years, from 1966 to 1972, and it did not reopen. Today there is nothing to visit. The base was abandoned and the land turned over to farmland, which in this part of Nghệ An means rice and cassava and the ordinary business of a river valley. Somewhere under the paddy bunds is the outline of a runway that absorbed two hundred bombs in five days and was flying again by the end of the week — the sort of place that never made a headline, and settled an argument anyway.
The former airfield lies at approximately 18.97°N, 105.05°E in Nghệ An Province, near Đức Sơn and about 75 km northwest of Vinh, at an elevation of roughly 60 ft (18 m) above mean sea level. Nothing operational remains — no runway lighting, no ICAO or IATA identifier, no surface worth attempting — so treat it strictly as an overflight point. Descend to 1,500–3,000 ft AGL to pick out the faint rectangular scar in the fields; the Lam River valley running southeast toward Vinh is the reliable navigation feature, with the Annamite foothills rising to the west. Nearest active airport is Vinh (VVVH) to the southeast; Thọ Xuân (VVTX) lies to the north and Đồng Hới (VVDH) to the south. Summer afternoons bring hot, dry westerly winds off Laos and considerable haze; the clearest air is from November to April, though morning fog fills the valley.