Detachment A-214 of the 5th Special Forces Group put the first camp here in December 1964, forty-one kilometres northwest of Pleiku and near the Cambodian border, for the same reason the Americans built at Đức Cơ that month and at half a dozen other points along the frontier: to watch communist infiltration coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The detachment — redesignated A-251 — formally took the camp over in August 1965. Like most such places it collected names. Plei Djereng Special Forces Camp on some documents, Le Minh Camp on others. Its fighting strength was never the dozen Americans on the roster but the Civilian Irregular Defense Group companies raised from the surrounding highland villages, men who lived within a day's walk of the wire.

On 14 October 1966 the People's Army of Vietnam began hitting reconnaissance patrols working out of the camp. The American response was Operation Paul Revere IV, launched on the 21st, which put the 3rd Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division north of Plei Djereng and the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division south of it. In the first twelve days twenty-two Americans and 138 North Vietnamese were killed. The fighting settled the question of whether the camp was in the right place, and in late October the answer arrived in the form of engineers: the site moved eight kilometres south and got a proper strip. A camp is a decision about geography, and this one had been reconsidered under fire.

In May 1970 the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division based itself at Plei Djereng — the 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry and the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry — to support the Cambodian Campaign, the incursion across the border that the camp's whole existence had been a quiet argument for. The 1st Battalion, 69th Armor ran tanks from here too. A photograph taken on 6 April 1970 shows the front gate, still American, still busy. Six months later it was not: in October 1970 the camp was transferred to the ARVN 80th Border Rangers. The Rangers inherited a position built to be forward, at a moment when the forces that made forward positions survivable — American artillery, American air, American helicopters — were going home.

On 2 September 1972 a North Vietnamese force attacked the camp and was thrown back, leaving around a hundred dead. It was the last good day. Two mornings later, under heavy shelling and continuous ground attack, the Rangers abandoned Plei Djereng and walked away from it. Whatever happened over the following year, by September 1973 the camp was garrisoned again — 293 Rangers held it, eight months after the Paris Peace Accords were supposed to have ended the shooting. On 21 September the artillery started. On the 22nd the 26th Regiment of the PAVN 320th Division came through with guns and tanks behind it. Two hundred of the 293 were killed or taken prisoner. The Republic of Vietnam Air Force claimed three T-54s destroyed over the course of the battle, which is the only figure anyone recorded from the other side of the wire.

In early October 1973, days after the camp fell, the ARVN 22nd Division's 47th Regiment and the 21st Ranger Group were pushing west of Pleiku along Provincial Route 509 in the direction of Plei Djereng. They did not get it back. Within eighteen months the Central Highlands were gone entirely, and the camp that had been built to watch a border, moved to watch it better, and defended to the last by men who were mostly not the men who built it, went to grass. The site is farmland now. Somewhere under the crops northwest of Pleiku there is a strip of pierced steel planking that was laid in a hurry in the autumn of 1966.