The 5th Special Forces Group's Detachment A-239 established the base at Duc Lap in October 1966, choosing the site for its proximity to known North Vietnamese infiltration routes through the highland borderlands. The location — near where the triple border of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos funneled men and supplies southward along what American planners called the Ho Chi Minh Trail — made it both strategically valuable and inherently exposed. By August 1968, the garrison had grown into a mixed force: U.S. Special Forces soldiers, eleven ARVN special forces troops, over 600 CIDG fighters, and three members of the 403rd Radio Research Special Operations Detachment, an intelligence unit. The Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) troops were primarily Montagnard — indigenous highland peoples, including M'Nong and Rade men, recruited by Special Forces and trained to defend their own territories. Their presence at Duc Lap was both a military arrangement and a reflection of something more complex: the highland peoples caught between opposing forces with competing claims over their land.

On the night of August 23, 1968, the People's Army of Vietnam's 95C Regiment moved against Duc Lap. The assault that followed lasted until August 25 — three days of fighting in the forested hills around the camp, with artillery, mortars, and close infantry combat in terrain that favored an attacker willing to accept casualties. The assault was ultimately defeated, but the toll was severe. Six U.S. soldiers were killed. One ARVN soldier died. Thirty-seven CIDG fighters — the Montagnard men defending the compound — were killed. Twenty civilians also lost their lives. On the other side, over 303 North Vietnamese soldiers were killed. The numbers document the scale; they do not fully convey what it meant to hold a small hilltop camp against a regimental assault for three days in August heat, far from any city, at the edge of a border that both sides were pretending to respect.

Duc Lap did not return to quiet after August 1968. In October 1969, PAVN forces besieged both Duc Lap and the nearby Bu Prang Camp simultaneously — a coordinated pressure across the highland border zone intended to stretch ARVN and U.S. response capacity. The siege at Duc Lap was not broken until December 1969, after two months of encirclement. That same autumn, the camp served as a forward operating base for the U.S. Air Force's 20th Special Operations Squadron, running missions across the Cambodian border — part of the undeclared air war being conducted there throughout this period. In December 1970, the base was formally transferred to the Vietnamese Rangers, and U.S. forces departed. The base closed operationally around 1972.

The camp no longer exists as a recognizable structure. The jungle has grown back over the cleared ground, the bunkers, the perimeter wire. Hill 722 is a contour line on a map, a set of coordinates at 12.43°N, 107.67°E, a site that appears in military histories and the memoirs of Special Forces veterans but is not marked with a sign. This is how most of the war's smaller actions ended: not with monuments but with vegetation. The highlands that were contested so bitterly — by French colonial forces, by various Vietnamese armies, by the U.S. military, by the highland peoples pressed into service on all sides — look today much as they did before any of it began. The forest doesn't keep those records. The people whose ancestors are buried in this ground do.