Like its twin installation at Đắk Tô, Tân Cảnh began as a small Special Forces outpost in 1962, established by Detachment A-333 to watch the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When the war expanded in 1967 and the 173rd Airborne Brigade flew into the Đắk Tô area, the original camp was simply too small for the forces being concentrated here. A new, larger base was built several kilometers to the west — Đắk Tô 2 — and the old camp was redesignated Tân Cảnh, passing to the ARVN's 22nd Division. By 1972, Tân Cảnh was the forward command post for that division, whose regiments were strung across the high ground along Rocket Ridge in a posture that Hanoi's planners had spent years studying. The ARVN had armor, artillery, and American advisers. What they did not have, as April 1972 would reveal, was a command structure that could hold together under simultaneous pressure at every level.

The Easter Offensive began on 30 March 1972 with coordinated armored attacks across three fronts. In the Central Highlands, the PAVN's approach was methodical. Through March and into April, the ARVN firebases along Rocket Ridge absorbed a steadily increasing bombardment: 20 to 50 rounds per day in March, growing to 1,000 per day by mid-April. The 47th Regiment, bloodied on the ridge, pulled back to Đắk Tô 2. The 42nd Regiment held Tân Cảnh. On 23 April, the PAVN 2nd Division opened the decisive phase by doing something unexpected: Soviet-supplied AT-3 Malyutka anti-tank guided missiles, wire-guided and devastatingly accurate, began picking off the M-41 tanks inside the base perimeter. A direct hit on the 42nd Regiment's command bunker wounded the senior U.S. adviser and several ARVN commanders. By midday, all five M-41 tanks in the base had been destroyed. The ammunition dump caught fire at 19:00. By nightfall, a column of 18 PAVN T-54 main battle tanks had been spotted moving toward the base.

An AC-130 gunship engaged the T-54 column with its 105mm cannon through the night, disabling three — which the PAVN later recovered. The ARVN artillery fired on the column until PAVN counterbattery silenced it. Two bridges on the approach to Tân Cảnh were abandoned undemolished. The hunter-killer teams the ARVN organized destroyed two tanks. None of it was enough to stop what came just before 06:00 on 24 April: T-54s in two columns, one attacking the main gate, one seizing the airstrip. The sight of tanks breaching the wire caused the 900 support troops to break. A further artillery round destroyed the new command bunker's radio antennas. Command and control collapsed. In the fog that made air support impossible, the advisers on the ground were left calling into a radio with nobody on the other end of the institutional chain. Vann arrived overhead in his Kiowa shortly after dawn. What he found was not a battle but its aftermath — an overrun base, men running in all directions, and the task of extracting whoever could still be extracted.

By 25 April 1972, the PAVN had completed what its planners had been building toward for months. The 22nd Division ceased to exist as a fighting force: its commander had disappeared, his entire staff with him, and the PAVN had captured 23 105mm howitzers and seven 155mm howitzers, along with large stores of ammunition. The remaining ARVN firebases along Rocket Ridge were abandoned. Kon Tum, the provincial capital 40 kilometers to the southeast, now lay open to an armored advance. The city would survive — barely, after weeks of intense fighting and massive U.S. air support — but the loss of the Đắk Tô-Tân Cảnh complex was the strategic blow that nearly ended it. The base itself is now farmland and scattered housing. The airfield outline persists on satellite imagery, an unintended monument to what happened here. The men who held it, and the men who took it, have mostly passed from the record into the general silence of a war that consumed the lives of millions and transformed a country — and a former French colonial territory, once a village — into a place that soldiers remember and farmers now work.