Đức Cơ sat on QL-19 about fifty-five kilometres west of Pleiku, with the Cambodian border thirteen kilometres further on. That distance was the entire point. In December 1964 Operational Detachment Alpha-224 of the 5th Special Forces Group built a camp here to watch communist infiltration coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and everything the place ever did followed from being close enough to the frontier to see men crossing it and too close to be safe. The airfield was a strip of pierced steel planking, 3,700 feet long at 1,247 feet of elevation — enough to bring in a transport, not enough to matter if the road was cut. The camp went by several names, Đức Cơ Special Forces Camp and Chu Dron among them. Its garrison was small: a handful of American advisers and Civilian Irregular Defense Group troops, most of them Jarai from the surrounding villages, defending a perimeter against regular North Vietnamese regiments.

In late May 1965 the People's Army of Vietnam laid siege to the camp, then held by Special Forces Detachment A-215 and its CIDG companies. The relief took two and a half months to arrive. On 3 August a force of South Vietnamese paratroopers went in with an American major named Norman Schwarzkopf as senior adviser; they took heavy casualties, and Schwarzkopf came out of the fight with a Silver Star and, a quarter-century later, a reputation built on other deserts. A larger column left Pleiku on 8 August — the Republic of Vietnam Marine Division's Task Force Alpha with an armored task force — and ran into a North Vietnamese battalion dug in across Route 19 the next day. The Marines dislodged it and were promptly hit in the rear by a second reinforced battalion. Airstrikes hammered the PAVN 32nd Regiment through the night; it made a last attack at dawn and pulled off the field. On 10 August the column reached Đức Cơ and the siege was over. The Vietnamese Marines lost 28 dead and three missing.

For the rest of the American war the camp was a place other units passed through. Operation Paul Revere opened in the Đức Cơ tactical area in May 1966 and the fighting near the border that summer was costly — a platoon of the 35th Infantry was ambushed and overrun on 3 July with seventeen Americans killed. The 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry was based here in June 1967, the 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry from September of that year to February 1968, and the 1st Battalion, 69th Armor at intervals through 1968 and 1969. Then the Americans left and the camp passed to the ARVN 81st Border Rangers, who inherited the geography and the odds. On 2 November 1972 an artillery barrage was followed by a tank-and-infantry assault that overran the camp outright. The Rangers fell back five hundred yards east, met reinforcements there, and airstrikes were credited with three tanks. The border had finally come to them.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 and came into effect on the 28th of that month. In the days before the ceasefire both sides raced to plant flags on ground they wanted to be holding when the music stopped — a scramble that acquired the name the war of the flags. On 20 January the PAVN 320th Division attacked Đức Cơ, and by the next day the camp was theirs. Eight days later the shooting was officially over. That sequence is why the observers who arrived afterwards were guests rather than referees, and why they spent their tour looking at the inside of a fence.

The camp is gone. Its ground is farmland and housing now, folded into a landscape of smallholdings on the red earth west of Pleiku, and the district that grew up around it took its name — Đức Cơ, seat at Chư Ty, 88,090 people spread across 722 square kilometres at the end of 2024, most of them Jarai, whose villages were here long before anybody drew a border thirteen kilometres to the west. Even the district has now been erased from the map: on 1 July 2025 it ceased to exist in a nationwide reorganisation, and its territory now sits inside an enlarged Gia Lai province administered from Quy Nhơn on the coast. The name survives on the road.