From the S&S archives:
Dak Seang view: Kaleidoscope of a Siege

(Editor's Note: Stars & Stripes correspondent Spec. 4 Jack Fuller is the first American newsman to see the battle of Dak Seang. He flew over the besieged camp Friday. This is his report.)

TAN CANH — The Dak Seang Valley Friday was a gash of desolation where the only things living were moving for cover.

Just south of the Special Forces camp, besieged for 10 days, Vietnamese Mobile Strike Force battalions and entrenched North Vietnamese Army soldiers were fighting a pitched battle. From the air, the combat showed itself in puffs of smoke as the contestants traded mortar fire and in a burst of purple smoke signaling helicopters coming in for the wounded.

This Pacific Stars and Stripes reporter flew over the valley at about 2,000 feet Friday with Col. Nguyen Ba Tin, commander of the 24th Special Tactical Zone who is running the battle, and Col. Philip Day, his American senior adviser.

During four days covering the desperate battle, Dak Sang Valley was to the reporter only a patchwork of images, pieced together from reports of pilots who flew over it and soldiers who were down in it.

'Over there, see, the mortars are coming in. Those are the good guys," Day said, pointing down at a small wooded patch. Then he pointed a short distance away to the northeast.

"Those are the bad guys. There, we got him back," he said, pointing to a puff of smoke in a flat, lifeless plain near the southeast corner of the camp.

"Those guys," Day said, "are so close to linking up with the camp now. But they're stopped by that mortar fire."

Two battalions of Montagnards — the Mike Force soldiers-followed their American and Australian advisers on a bitter assault through the valley down toward the flattened camp. But from 2,000 feet, it was only puffs of smoke.

"That looks like artillery from Tango (Fire Support Base Tango about four miles south at the other end of the valley)," Day said. "It's bigger than the mortars.

"They've taken casualties down there, but they're still up to fighting strength and fighting."

The prize for the Mike Forces was the barren patch just north of the battle-an area surrounded by NVA in trenches and bunkers, burned around the edges and littered with the tin roofs of fallen buildings.

The tin shined in the sun. Nothing was moving but the thin, white and camouflage-green parachutes used to drop in supplies.

As the officers reconnoitered the area, the command helicopter made three passes around the camp-past Tango to the south, along a river that could have been out of a travel brochure if it was -just mist that hung over it instead of gunsmoke, and past besieged Dak Seang where hundreds of civilians and soldiers have huddled since the first of the month.

Coming out of the valley and back toward Tan Canh, Day pointed southwest from the battle area.

"There's Ben Het," he said. "That's where we fought this battle last year."