The Ghostly Legacies of America’s War in Vietnam

The men heard the tormented, grief-stricken cries of a deceased comrade cautioning them against the futility of losing their lives in combat, beseeching them to put down their weapons and return home.

“My body is gone. I am dead, my family. Tragic, how tragic! My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead. I am dead. I am in hell. … Friends, while you are still alive … go home! … Go home, my friends—before it is too late.”

For months during the conflict, this spectral voice bellowed fear into the clustered civilian homes of northern Vietnamese villages and over Viet Cong camps at night. Yet this frightful counsel came not from beyond the veil but out of loudspeakers operated by U.S. soldiers.

The recording, known as Ghost Tape Number 10, played a central role in Operation Wandering Soul, a psychological operation, or psyop, that sought to crush the morale of North Vietnamese soldiers by weaponizing their minds and exploiting their deepest fears.

It’s hard to convey the precise terror this track could inflict on the Vietnamese, who to this day maintain a sincere belief in ancestor worship, the afterlife and, in some cases, ghosts. Although Vietnam is officially a secular state, Buddhist beliefs remain commonplace, and there is a shrine in practically every home. When somebody dies and is not offered a traditional burial, they are said to roam resentfully among the living, their soul wandering in pain for eternity. In Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War, the protagonist searches for the remains of fallen soldiers in the “Jungle of Screaming Souls.”

Heonik Kwon, the author of Ghosts of War in Vietnam, argues that ghosts serve as a metaphor for how past memories continue to haunt Vietnamese people in the present, especially those who have internalized the trauma of conflict. The various rituals, practices, and beliefs related to spirits and the afterlife, he says, offer a way for Vietnamese people to cope with the lasting impacts of the war.

To make Ghost Tape Number 10, U.S. military engineers recorded the voice of a male South Vietnamese national through an echo chamber to invoke the soul of the dead. They also spent weeks recording ghostly, distorted sounds to ramp up the eeriness of the track. Raymond Deitch, a former commander of the U.S. Army’s 6th Psychological Operations Battalion, said in Secrets of War, a 1998 History Channel series, that the tape was so effective they were instructed not to play it within earshot of South Vietnamese forces, who were as susceptible as the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Broadcasting this grief-stricken voice to Vietnamese soldiers was akin to tearing at an open wound.

Strikingly, this aspect of America’s psychological warfare campaign amid the Vietnam War has only recently been explored in any detail. The United States saw the conflict not only as a military playground for experimenting with chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange but also as a testing ground for psychological warfare.

Modern psychological warfare tactics generally date back to World War I, which is when the printing apparatus used for the mass circulation of newspapers could be wielded to print vast numbers of propaganda posters to inspire troops as well as flyers that were dropped from airplanes to discourage enemy forces during psyops.

The United States adopted psychological warfare as a means of influencing the mind of the enemy during World War II. It chiefly emerged as a tactic in fighting the Japanese and has arguably retained Orientalist elements ever since—such as a strong belief that the enemies’ supposed superstitions could be turned against them. In You Can’t Fight Tanks With Bayonets, Allison B. Gilmore details how U.S. forces effectively used sustained psyops to spread despair and doubt among Japanese troops.

A pair of unidentified U.S. airmen struggle with psychological warfare leaflets blown back into the plane by the slipstream during the Korean War on Feb. 13, 1951.PhotoQuest/Getty Images

For Cold War theorists in particular, psyops represented a way to shape public opinion and break the enemy’s will without necessarily resorting to direct combat. In the Korean War, the “hot” element of the Cold War, the United States fine-tuned its psyops techniques to counter extensive communist propaganda, which included recordings of captured U.S. soldiers who criticized the “senseless” war started by capitalists, and focus on provoking defections—all of which eventually bled into Washington’s approach to the Vietnam War.

According to Frank Snepp, who worked as a CIA assessor of North Vietnamese policy in the early 1970s—before later emerging as a critical whistleblower—information on U.S. psyops during the Vietnam War has not been censored for any moral or political reason, but it remains obscure. Detailed accounts of the myriad psychological warfare campaigns adopted by the United States can only be found in a scattering of little-known archives, Snepp told me.

One psyops tactic, alluded to in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, saw the U.S. military mount giant speakers onto Huey helicopters to blast out nerve-rending music. U.S. soldiers, Snepp said, played raspy rock tracks at such ear-shattering volumes that Viet Cong soldiers would bolt from their hiding places to escape the pain, only to be mowed down by U.S. gunships.

The same helicopter-mounted speakers were also used to broadcast Vietnamese love songs and religious music to tug on the heartstrings of North Vietnamese soldiers, while leaflets promising medical aid to the families of Viet Cong soldiers sought to harness ideas of familial responsibility.

Another ploy was a CIA-run radio station dubbed “Mother Vietnam,” which featured two or three Vietnamese women broadcasting heart-rending messages to enemy forces, often using personal material taken directly from the letters of deceased Viet Cong soldiers.

Leaflets stream from the cockpit of a plane, flown by pilots of the 9th Air Commando Squadron, at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam on July 11, 1967.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Snepp himself also admits using the promise of medical aid to the loved ones of captured soldiers to break their spirits during interrogation—yet insists his promise was genuine.

Yet he says psychological influencers linked to ancestral land were the most persuasive in Vietnam: “The most effective psyops directed at the North Vietnamese Army were always those that reminded them that their ancestral lands were far to the north and if they were killed in the south, their souls would wander forever in limbo.”

Unofficial psychological warfare tactics also bled into the daily reality of U.S. soldiers in the conflict. Paul Mooney, a Vietnam War veteran, said U.S. soldiers regularly threw the “ace of spades” card—also known as the death card—on the corpses of Viet Cong soldiers, as the symbol was said to petrify the superstitious Vietnamese. Mooney added that some U.S. soldiers brutally sliced off the ears of North Vietnamese soldiers before stringing them on a chain to instill fear in the hearts of their enemies.

Over the course of the conflict, the United States printed more than 6 billion propaganda leaflets for air drops in Vietnam, many of which called on North Vietnamese forces to defect or surrender—or else join the wandering souls of the dead.

In reality, the ace of spades card, which is not a traditionally superstitious symbol to the Vietnamese, may have proved more useful to U.S. forces as a self-reassuring ritual for restoring morale. Some American soldiers reportedly placed the card behind their helmet band as a kind of “anti-peace” sign.

People visit a cemetery on the outskirts of Hanoi on the National Day for War Martyrs and Invalids on July 27, 2004. Hoang Dinh Nam/AFP via Getty Images

In a study published in 1997, James O. Whittaker of the Pennsylvania State University said that although “psychological warfare was practiced to a greater degree in the Vietnam conflict than in any other war in history, virtually nothing has been published about it.” This is surprising, considering how—more than any other conflict in living memory—the Vietnam War infiltrated the popular imagination, spurred protests and division in society, and, ultimately, left a lasting mark on the collective psyche of the American people.

The United States also used disinformation and manipulation to shape public opinion at home. The Pentagon Papers revealed how U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about the fact that he was expanding the war while campaigning on a platform of limiting U.S. involvement. Snepp has also revealed how the CIA deliberately leaked disinformation to reporters in Vietnam to maintain support for the war effort and courted reporters at the New Yorker and other major publications in order to share false facts and promote desirable narratives. The U.S. government also presented the Viet Cong as ruthless enemies, using propaganda to dehumanize them.

U.S. psyops raise significant ethical questions. Their use has eroded public trust in the United States, especially as the government and the CIA have abused them to manipulate the public for their own gain with little or no transparency. Psyops are arguably also a violation of combatants’ or civilians’ autonomy, as they seek to influence their thoughts, beliefs, and behavior without their consent. They also risk harming innocent civilians in conflict zones by spreading panic or violence, which could violate international human rights law.

U.S. Army soldiers distribute copies of the official newspaper of the 1st Armored Division from the back of a truck in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, on Feb. 21, 2004. Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images

The United States has also continued to use psyops. In Iraq, a war considered by many to be illegal, it broadcast recordings saying: “Saddam has exploited the Oil for Food program to illegally buy weapons and materials intended to produce nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and for lavish gifts for his elite regime members. The countless pictures and billboards of Saddam that litter the landscape of Iraq do nothing to help the people of Iraq.” Against the Islamic State, the United States blasted out recordings of people crying to unsettle enemy forces.

Some observers have responded with fascination to Ghost Tape Number 10, yet if the tables were turned and U.S. citizens’ deepest fears, such as the sound of mass shootings, were broadcast into American civilians’ homes, this would surely be perceived as a horrifying, unethical act.

This year, the United States has embarked on a diplomatic charm offensive with Hanoi, sending USAID Administrator Samantha Power, Sen. Jeff Merkley, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Vietnam, with the aim of upgrading relations between the two former foes amid efforts to counter China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific. The U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan also visited Vietnam in June. President Joe Biden confirmed the upgrade in relations—to a comprehensive strategic partnership—on his visit to Hanoi last weekend, which means diplomatic ties between the two former foes are now on a par with countries including Russia, China and South Korea.

Yet the United States has never apologized for atrocities committed by its forces during the Vietnam War. Offering contrition for past mistakes, from mass bombings to psychological warfare, would be an important step in improving the relationship.

March 29 marked 50 years since the last U.S. soldier left the country. The remains of 200,000 Vietnamese soldiers killed in the conflict are still missing, their souls believed to be eternally in anguish.

In Ghost Tape Number 10, the disembodied voice of the departed Vietnamese soldier can be heard screeching from the afterlife: “It was a senseless death. How senseless, how senseless. But when I realized the truth, it was too late.”