Unlike A-103, Thuong Duc was not a legacy from the French-Indochina war.  A-109 was a relatively new camp.  A-109 was built to monitor and assess enemy activity between the rural areas of the west and the more populated coastal plain.   

tdmap1.jpg (93485 bytes)
Map details:   As the map illustrates, camp A-109 Thuong Duc lay west and south of Da Nang.  It helped protect Da Nang from an attack from the west.  Additionally, it was positioned in a key river valley that enabled its patrols to monitor critical enemy activity.  (The roads are depicted in brown and the rivers are shown in blue on the map.)

Camp A-109 was built at the edge of the high plateau area.  If you take a moment to look at the map on the left, you will notice that the map color changes at Thuong Duc.  To the west is the high plateau -- a very rugged region marked by thick jungle.  The camp was located on elevated area within the flat river valley.  To the north and south were the steep sides of the plateau, while the river valley extended to the west.  (You will note that many pictures of this portion of Viet Nam contain visible waterfalls.  These features were due to the sharp changes in vertical elevation.)

As the map above shows, the area to the east of the camp opened onto the western edge of the coastal plain.   The green (representing the low coastal plain) extends approximately twenty miles to the South China Sea.  

Sunrise at Thuong Duc...

Sunrise at A-109 was breath-taking!  The ridges extending down from the plateau to the river valley formed a truncated "V" which framed the sun as it crested the horizon.  Can you find this orientation on the map above?  Draw an imaginary line from the small box representing Thuong Duc on the map to the small box representing Hoi An.  This approximates the line of sight in the picture on the right.  The .50-cal machine gun position is silhouetted by the rising sun.     

tdeastview.jpg (3357 bytes)

If you look closely at the map above, you will note a distinct lack of towns and villages in the tan-colored area of the map.  This area can be considered to be the interior of the 'central highlands' -- an area marked by a high plateau with steep sides giving way to low river valleys.   The mountains in this area rise out of this plateau.  Other pages in this web site provide excellent aerial views illustrating the topography of this region.