Qualla: Đức Cơ Camp

Đức Cơ Camp: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the spring of 1973 a team of international peacekeepers moved into what was left of Đức Cơ Camp, sent there under the Paris Peace Accords to watch North Vietnamese traffic coming into Pleiku province. They were never permitted outside their own compound without a North Vietnamese escort. They were not allowed to observe any traffic or any military activity at all. What they got instead was malaria and dysentery — the sanitation provided to them was inadequate, every member fell ill, and the International Commission of Control and Supervision closed its Đức Cơ base in May 1973, having seen nothing. It was the last posting the camp ever had.

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Đức Cơ Camp: Thirteen Kilometres

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Đức Cơ sat on QL-19 about fifty-five kilometres west of Pleiku, with the Cambodian border thirteen kilometres further on. That distance was the entire point. In December 1964 Operational Detachment Alpha-224 of the 5th Special Forces Group built a camp here to watch communist inf...

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Đức Cơ Camp: The Relief Column, August 1965

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In late May 1965 the People's Army of Vietnam laid siege to the camp, then held by Special Forces Detachment A-215 and its CIDG companies. The relief took two and a half months to arrive. On 3 August a force of South Vietnamese paratroopers went in with an American major named No...

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Đức Cơ Camp: Tenants

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For the rest of the American war the camp was a place other units passed through. Operation Paul Revere opened in the Đức Cơ tactical area in May 1966 and the fighting near the border that summer was costly — a platoon of the 35th Infantry was ambushed and overrun on 3 July with ...

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Đức Cơ Camp: Twenty Days Before the Peace

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 and came into effect on the 28th of that month. In the days before the ceasefire both sides raced to plant flags on ground they wanted to be holding when the music stopped — a scramble that acquired the name the war of the flags...

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Đức Cơ Camp: Chư Ty

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The camp is gone. Its ground is farmland and housing now, folded into a landscape of smallholdings on the red earth west of Pleiku, and the district that grew up around it took its name — Đức Cơ, seat at Chư Ty, 88,090 people spread across 722 square kilometres at the end of 2024...

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