North Vietnamese Army 1:100,000 Dar Lac Province Central Highlands Map

This rare North Vietnamese Army map is captioned Lak Ea Gam which is located in Dar Lac Province. It is marked SECRET (MAT) in Vietnamese along the upper right.

As you can see from the contour lines, this area is really extremely rugged terrain in the Central Highlands.

US Army Special Forces units routinely operated along with Montagnards there.

As you can also see, this area is north of Dalat, west of Nha Trang, east of Ban Me Thout and Southwest of Tuy Hoa. The area shown on this map was undoubtedly home to many NVA infiltration routes from Cambodia. These routes included rest camps & unit base camp/staging area.

Due to its remote location and lack of roads, the NVA could hide here prior to moving on to attacks on Da Lat, Nha Trang, Ban Me Thout and even Tuy Hoa.

This area was home to many indigenous peoples of Vietnam.

The French used this area for commercial rubber plantations.

We also show a US military topographic map (not included) for comparison.

These old maps likely do not exist in Vietnam anymore as they would have been discarded in favor of updated maps published by the PAVN as the years passed and changes to the land occurred, such as new roads, canals and the growth of villages.

They all have the universal elements you will find on military maps from around the world including a legend, identification of adjacent maps, grid to magnetic declination, scale, latitude and longitude etc.

Finding NVA maps in the collecting world is a difficult task.  Like all items of any intelligence value, they were supposed to be turned over to S-2 (Intelligence) for exploitation.  This map shows no exploitable intelligence information such as defensive positions, AAA positions, routes of travel etc.  Because they had no such value, this map  was allowed to be kept as a souvenir after a brief in-field review.

The name of this map is printed in the top center of the map. This is the most prominent feature shown on the map such as a village, a river, a mountain, a river etc.

NVA maps  show the province and district in the upper left corner.

Latitude and Longitude are also shown at the corner of each map.

Maps were carried only by those who had a need to know, such as: officers, senior NCOs, engineers, mortarmen, rocket troops and those who crewed indirect fire weapons, snipers, transportation personnel etc.  Maps would be carried in mapcases, folded up in pockets and small pouches. They were to be safeguarded at all times and were not supposed to be marked up, lest they be captured.

No Vietnam collection is complete without at least one captured map so make sure you pick up at least one today!