The men holding Đắk Đoa had already fought one war on the other side of Asia. The Bataillon de Corée — the French battalion that served under United Nations command in Korea — came home to the armistice of July 1953 and was sent almost immediately to Saigon. There it was expanded into a two-battalion regiment with two Vietnamese companies attached, and on 15 November 1953 became the core of Groupement Mobile No. 100. Veterans of Chipyong-ni and Heartbreak Ridge found themselves posted to a plateau most of them had never heard of.

G.M. 100 drew a region roughly triangular, its corners at Kon Tum, An Khê and the Chu Dreh Pass, and spent January road-clearing across country that offered an ambush every few kilometres. Within days it was in contact with the Việt Minh 803rd Regiment around Đăk Tô. One of its outposts was a platoon position some forty-five kilometres from Kon Tum at a place the Jarai call Đắk Đoa — the spring of pines. The French fortified it and left it there.

The Việt Minh moved against Đắk Đoa on 2 February. Three days later they blew several bridges north of Kon Tum, which made patrolling difficult and reinforcement worse. Fighter-bombers flew up from Nha Trang and strafed the approaches until nightfall, and nightfall was when the encirclement tightened.

The French command in the region, under Pierre Chasse, made a decision that sealed the outpost's fate: Kon Tum would be abandoned rather than risk being cut off. European civilians and Vietnamese civil servants were evacuated by 7 February. G.M. 100 pulled back and dug in around Pleiku for what it expected to be a last stand. Đắk Đoa was now a platoon-strength position on the far side of ground nobody controlled. A patrol sent out on 11 February was ambushed — three dead, ten wounded — and a sweep into the Dan Roia hills found no one.

The first serious assault came at midnight on 11 February. The attackers reached the barbed wire before the defenders opened up, and what saved the post was a strange collection of improvisations: a light spotter aircraft dropping flares, artillery firing on the lit ground, and Grumman Goose amphibians — flying boats, converted for ground attack — coming in over the perimeter. The attack broke.

The next day two platoons from the Korea Regiment fought their way through and brought the garrison up to a hundred and thirty men. It was the last reinforcement anyone managed. The Việt Minh regrouped and settled into a bombardment, harassing the Pleiku road so thoroughly that resupply became theoretical. Bangalore torpedoes tore the wire apart section by section. By mid-month the defenders had earth bunkers and very little else.

The final assault opened just before midnight on 17 February, and the opening barrage went almost too well for the attackers to have planned it. A mortar round hit the French command post and set off jerry cans of petrol. Another destroyed the generator, which killed the searchlights that had been the garrison's only way of seeing what was coming across the wire. For the rest of the night the position was lit by its own burning command bunker.

The infantry came in behind the mortars. Counter-battery fire from 1st Korea kept up from outside, and the defenders held longer than the arithmetic allowed, but the Việt Minh were into the forward trenches and working through them. At around three in the morning a radio message reported half the post overrun. At four the radio stopped.

1st Korea wanted to push out and look for survivors and was refused; the orders were to break out of Pleiku instead. One wounded prisoner made his own way back to French lines, and the Việt Minh left other badly wounded men on the road to be collected — a small mercy in a war short of them. A reconnaissance force reached the site and found nothing. Its rear platoon was ambushed on the way home at a cost of thirty more men.

One hundred and twenty of the garrison died, thirty of them Vietnamese soldiers serving alongside the French, and only six wounded men ever reached friendly lines. The Việt Minh losses went uncounted, as they usually did.

What followed was worse. Điện Biên Phủ opened in March and fell in May, and France began pulling out of the highlands under the codename Opération Églantine. Between 24 and 29 June, G.M. 100 was ambushed at the Mang Yang Pass near An Khê and lost roughly five hundred killed, six hundred wounded and eight hundred captured, along with eighty-five percent of its vehicles and every gun it had. The 1st Korea Battalion came out of it with 497 men from an establishment of 834. A final ambush at the Chu Dreh Pass in July finished the unit. The soldiers who had survived Korea did not survive the Central Highlands, and the plateau absorbed two more decades of other people's wars.