The story starts with a village rather than a runway. In early 1961 the CIA devised the Civilian Irregular Defense Group programme to counter growing Viet Cong influence in the Central Highlands, and the first unit was raised in Darlac province among the Rhade - the Ê Đê - with the airfield outside Ban Me Thuot as the US Army's 5th Special Forces Group base. Small Special Forces A-teams moved into villages, trained local men to defend their own ground, and dug wells and clinics alongside the weapons training. The programme worked partly because it offered highlanders something both Vietnamese governments had withheld: recognition. Montagnards had been marginal to Saigon and to Hanoi alike, and CIDG service eventually brought them identity papers, benefits and formal citizenship. It also brought them into a war they had not started, on terms set by outsiders who would leave.

The base kept changing hands within the American structure. 5th Special Forces Group Detachment 32 gave way to MACV-SOG's Command and Control South, which named its compound Camp Torres and ran reconnaissance teams across the Cambodian border from it. Flying those teams in and out was the job of the 20th Special Operations Squadron - the Green Hornets - based here from early 1968 with UH-1 Hueys, while the 155th Aviation Company worked the field from October 1965 to March 1971. On 26 November 1968 one of the squadron's pilots, First Lieutenant James P. Fleming, extracted a six-man Special Forces team under fire near Đức Cơ - an action for which he was later awarded the Medal of Honor. The airfield's own vulnerability had already been demonstrated: on 30 January 1968, at the opening of the Tet Offensive, Viet Cong commandos got inside and shut the base down for several days.

By 1975 the field was Phung Duc, home to the ARVN 44th and 53rd Regiments. Two PAVN sapper battalions came through the wire before dawn on 10 March, opening the Battle of Ban Me Thuot. The 44th's area, held mostly by rear-echelon troops, fell almost at once. The 53rd did not. Its defenders pushed the sappers back out by daylight, at a cost to the attackers of more than a hundred dead, and then held the perimeter for a week while everything around them collapsed. The 149th Regiment came again on the 11th and was repulsed. At dawn on the 14th it came with six tanks and lost one. A second attempt that afternoon arrived late and went in at sunset instead, when the tank crews lost their bearings in the failing light and became targets; by midnight it was called off. Not until 03:00 on the 16th, after an artillery barrage and a two-pronged assault by the 66th and 149th Regiments, did the pressure become unbearable - and even then the earthen walls held, taking two more tanks with them, until PAVN engineers blasted a path through. The base fell at dawn on 17 March. Colonel Võ Ân, the 53rd's commander, got out with more than a hundred of his men and headed east for Phước An.

There had been a plan to reverse all this. Buôn Ma Thuột itself fell on 12 March, and over the 12th and 13th the ARVN 45th Regiment was helicoptered onto Hill 581, a mile east of Phung Duc, to mount a counterattack and retake the city. The PAVN 24th Regiment reached them first, coming in with armour on the 14th - the same day the tanks were floundering at the airfield - and scattered the 45th, killing more than two hundred of its soldiers. With that, the counterattack was finished before it began, and the men still holding the airfield were fighting for ground that no longer led anywhere. The wider consequence arrived within days: President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu ordered the Central Highlands abandoned, and the withdrawal down Route 7 dissolved into a column of soldiers and civilians so ruinous that it is remembered as the convoy of tears. Three-quarters of II Corps' combat strength was gone. Saigon fell six weeks later.

The runway is still there, working under the name Buon Ma Thuot Airport - BMV to passengers, VVBM to controllers, 3,000 metres of asphalt at 529 metres elevation, still called Phung Duc in some older documents. Vietnam Airlines, VietJet Air, Pacific Airlines and Bamboo Airways run it to Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang and Hai Phong, and it handled around 860,000 passengers in 2016. There is no memorial on the apron. The earthen walls that held off tanks for a week are long gone, ploughed under for taxiways, and the only thing that still marks the place as extraordinary is how ordinary it has managed to become.