The challenge was deceptively simple to state: Chu Lai's terrain was soft coastal sand, useless for conventional runway construction. The Navy Seabees and Marine engineers answered with a concept called the Short Airfield for Tactical Support — SATS. They laid 1,200 meters of interlocking aluminum alloy planking directly over the sand, then added a catapult at one end and carrier-style arresting gear at the other. The result was essentially an aircraft carrier deck nailed to a beach. On 1 June 1965, Colonel John D. Noble, commanding officer of Marine Aircraft Group 12, landed the first Douglas A-4 Skyhawk on the partially completed strip. The same day, Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Baker led the first combat mission off the runway while Seabees were still working on its far end. The Marines were flying combat sorties before the base was technically finished.

By mid-October 1965, more than 80 A-4 Skyhawks from MAG-12 called Chu Lai home. The base's footprint grew with the war: when the new extended runway opened, Marine Aircraft Group 13 arrived with three squadrons of McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom IIs, adding long-range strike capability. In April 1967, all-weather attack aircraft — the Grumman A-6A Intruder — began operating from here, extending the base's reach to targets in North Vietnam through rain and low visibility. The base wasn't just an airfield; it was a small city of revetments, fuel lines, maintenance shops, and bomb dumps, all of it surrounded by the contested countryside of I Corps. On the night of 27 October 1965, a 20-man Viet Cong sapper squad penetrated the perimeter, destroying two A-4s and damaging six more. Fifteen of the attackers died inside the wire.

Nothing tested Chu Lai more severely than 31 January 1968, the opening morning of the Tet Offensive. Rockets and mortars crashed into the base before dawn, triggering a catastrophic secondary explosion in the bomb dump. Marine Aircraft Groups 12 and 13 lost three aircraft destroyed and twenty-three damaged in the strike. Yet operations continued. The base absorbed the blow and kept flying — a measure of how thoroughly the Marines had built redundancy into the facility over three years. From 1967, medevac helicopters of the 54th Medical Detachment also flew from here, their Bell UH-1D Hueys carrying wounded Marines and soldiers from landing zones across Quảng Nam Province to surgical teams waiting on the base.

The Marines flew their last combat sorties from Chu Lai on 11 September 1970, when aircraft from VMFA-314 completed the final missions. The Marines formally departed on 13 October 1970, handing the base to the U.S. Army. The Vietnam People's Army eventually took over after 1975. For thirty years the runways sat largely quiet, a remnant of a conflict the country was trying to move past. Then, in 2005, the airfield reopened as Chu Lai International Airport — now Chu Lai Airport — serving commercial flights to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The aluminum planks are long gone. The arresting gear has been replaced by a modern terminal. But the base that improvised its way into existence on a Vietnamese sandbar continues to connect the central coast to the wider world.