omorrow we will again be in Saigon.  Come to think about it, the presently closing mountainous tour of duty marked the fifth time we had set foot in the Central Highlands.  Without alteration, every year at the beginning of the wet season, together with fellow ARVN units from the lowland, our unit converged on this mountainous area to encounter big enemy divisions with whom we competed for control of a few denuded hills, control of a road of strategic value running through an uninhabited area.

The Central Highlands, often referred to as this "Wretched Land", filled with unfamiliar place names like Dakto, Chuprong, Pleime, and Ðức Cơ, and inhabited by forgotten ethnic minorities, became well known thanks to the annual battles that engulfed it in fire and bombs and heaps of corpses.  And this year, according to the government's spokesman, the Đông Xuân or Winter-Spring campaign alone, at its peak during the rainy season, dealt a devastating blow to the communist fighters. 

In actuality, the losses for both sides reached a level considered the most horrible since the Second Indochina War had broken out.  In the Ngok Tobas area alone, whole battalions of ARVN were wiped out.  As for damage to the enemy, taking into account only what happened on Hill 1007 – another name for Fire Base 7 – the figure of three thousand corpses is not at all an excessive estimation, and one that customarily could be heard on the government's radio station.  This is to say nothing of the extent of destruction made by hundreds of thousand tons of bombs being dropped from B-52s day and night along infiltration routes. 

Furthermore, during this year's rainy season, for the first time ever in the Vietnam war, or in any war for that matter, the U.S. Air Force in order to decimate the enemy's hope for victory resorted to use of the gigantic Demolition Mark, a type of munitions weighing fifteen-thousand pounds and having the destructive effect of a small atomic bomb.  No living thing remained in the resulting bomb craters, giant lunar lesions larger than soccer fields.  And within this hazardous terrain of tropical forest, fleets of helicopters landed, disgorging soldiers who sacrificed their lives to thrust through the siege laid by enemy troops.  It will be many more months, perhaps until the wet season next year, before we dare return to that area: a jungle of traps, asphyxiating gas, and dispersed CBUs, cluster bomb units.

This is to say nothing of the extent of destruction made by hundreds of thousand tons of bombs being dropped from B-52s day and night along infiltration routes.