In late August 1965, the 70th Engineer Battalion carved Camp Radcliff out of the An Khê valley, positioned strategically on QL-19, the main highway that ran 60 kilometers northwest from the coast at Qui Nhơn up into the highland town of Pleiku. The base needed to accommodate the entire 1st Cavalry Division, the Army's first airmobile division — meaning it needed enormous space for helicopters, not tanks. To reduce the rotor-blown dust that would blind pilots and foul engines, the advance party had to cut all vegetation to ground level by hand across a vast tract of land. The resulting flat, mowed expanse looked exactly like what soldiers started calling it: the Golf Course. The nickname stuck for the duration of the war. On nearby Hon Cong Mountain, the division painted its distinctive black-and-yellow shield insignia large enough to be seen for miles — a landmark as useful to returning pilots as any instrument approach.

The scale of Camp Radcliff matched the ambitions placed on it. Its perimeter — called the Green Line — stretched 26 kilometers, defended by 3-man watchtowers spaced every 50 meters. Patrolling it was its own kind of mission. The Viet Cong tested those defenses repeatedly. On the night of 3 September 1966, starting at 21:50, 119 mortar rounds fell on the Golf Course over a five-minute barrage. Four American soldiers were killed, 76 were wounded, and 77 helicopters were damaged. The Army's after-action report, filed 17 September 1966, captured the attack in clinical detail — the times, the rounds, the casualties — but not the sound of rotors that would never fly again. Later attacks in 1968 killed South Vietnamese guards and civilians, ignited fuel stores, and destroyed vehicles. The base absorbed each assault and kept functioning.

Camp Radcliff was above all an aviation base, a hub for the helicopters that defined airmobile warfare. The 1st Cavalry Division's helicopter crews flew assault missions into the Ia Drang Valley and across the Central Highlands from this patch of leveled ground. Artillery battalions — the 2nd of the 17th, the 3rd of the 18th — provided the fire support that kept the base viable. After the 1st Cavalry rotated out, the 4th Infantry Division took up residence from mid-1969 through December 1970, followed by aviation units that kept the airfield operational into 1971. The 238th Aviation Company was among the last American units to leave, departing in December 1971. A sapper attack in November 1969 destroyed or damaged 20 helicopters and killed one mechanic — a reminder that the threat never fully abated until the Americans were gone.

The People's Army of Vietnam took over Camp Radcliff after American forces withdrew, and today it remains a Vietnamese military installation. The Golf Course has grown back. Hon Cong Mountain's painted insignia has weathered away. But the roads, the geography, the logic of the highway junction that made An Khê strategically valuable — all of that persists. Veterans who served here have documented the base in memoirs and after-action reports, preserving its contours in print even as the land itself moved on. The base exists now mostly in those accounts: the dust that coated everything, the sound of rotors at dawn, the particular loneliness of a 3-man watchtower on a 26-kilometer perimeter in the Central Highland dark.