Qualla: Plei Djereng Camp

Plei Djereng Camp: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Plei Djereng Camp is not where Plei Djereng Camp was built. In late 1966, after a bad October, the whole installation was shifted eight kilometres south and the 20th Engineer Battalion laid a new airfield on the new site — 3,150 feet of pierced steel planking at 955 feet of elevation. That is an unusual thing to do with a fortified position. It tells you something about the ground northwest of Pleiku: close enough to Cambodia that a camp's location was a tactical opinion, and one you could be argued out of.

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Plei Djereng Camp: December 1964

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Plei Djereng Camp: The Bad October

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Brigad...

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Plei Djereng Camp: The Last American Tenants

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 argum...

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Plei Djereng Camp: Two Septembers

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Plei Djereng Camp: Route 509

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 g...

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