Operation Wandering Soul and Ghost Tape Number Ten

Content note. This page quotes a recording written as the voice of a dead soldier, including a line that the afterlife is hell. It is shown as the cited English of the tape.

In one line: U.S. units called loudspeaker tapes of a voice presented as a dead soldier Operation Wandering Soul, and later writers call one of them Ghost Tape Number Ten. A 6th PSYOP Battalion sheet dated 24 June 1968 has that voice say he is dead and tell listeners to rally.

What happened

• 28 April 1968. Stars and Stripes, as Herbert Friedman quotes it, prints First Lieutenant Jerry Valentine of the 5th Air Commando Squadron describing a tape his unit calls the "Wandering Soul" tape. Valentine says it lasts about four minutes, starts with Buddhist funeral music, then a wailing voice, a child, and a woman, and that "even the government restricts use of it."
• 24 June 1968. An instruction sheet of the 6th Psychological Operations Battalion, II Field Force Vietnam, which Friedman reproduces from a copy sent by Captain Albert Yanus, numbers a tape 059-6T. The targets named on the sheet are the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army. Friedman says the box label reads "Wandering Soul! Play only at night." The southern-dialect script, in the English Friedman prints, has children call "Daddy, Daddy, come home to us," then a father: "But I'm dead! ... I have come back to you to let you know that I am dead." He tells friends, "Rally now!"
• The later name. "Ghost Tape Number Ten" is the name later accounts use for this tape. Friedman cites a Military History Now story titled "The Strange case of Ghost Tape No. 10." The 1968 sheet he prints is numbered 059-6T, not "Number Ten." In a 1989 Miami Herald piece Friedman quotes, a sailor calls the tape "Number 10," which in GI slang meant the worst thing, not a catalog number. This page does not treat that slang as the sheet's number.
• Who played it. Friedman writes that both the Army's 6th PSYOP Battalion and some Navy units broadcast the messages, from helicopters and from boats, including in 1969 and 1970.

How it works

• Fear appeal: the 059-6T script pairs a dead man's voice with one stated exit, "Rally now!" The cost named in the script is death away from home. The call to action is to rally, the same verb the Chieu Hoi leaflets use. The difference is the speaker. The leaflets name a government. This voice says it is a dead father.

Colour. The voice is presented as a person who is not speaking. That is a falsified persona, so the tape is black. The 24 June 1968 sheet identifies the 6th PSYOP Battalion as the issuer of the recording. Listeners of the broadcast were not told that.

Then and now

The leaflet campaign these tapes sat beside is Chieu Hoi and Radio Hanoi: both sides' propaganda aimed at the other side's soldiers in Vietnam: Saigon and the U.S. mission asked National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese soldiers to rally, in print, by the billion. The other direction, Radio Hanoi's English service to American troops, is Hanoi Hannah (Trịnh Thị Ngọ) and Radio Hanoi's English broadcasts. Radio Hanoi named the station. This tape does not name the battalion. All three use a fear of death. Only this one puts the fear in a voice that claims to be a dead man.

Positions on the record

• The battalion commander. Raymond Deitch, a former commander of the 6th PSYOP Battalion, told a History Channel interview, as Friedman reports it, that the recording exploited the belief that remains must be placed in an ancestral burial ground or the person will wander, and that units were instructed not to play it within earshot of South Vietnamese forces because they were as susceptible as the other side.
• The men who played it. Chad Spawr, a 6th PSYOP team leader in 1968 and 1969, told Friedman that some prisoners later said they had heard the tape and were frightened, and that friendly villagers and militia heard it too, which he says was not the intended effect. He also says local cadres fired on one broadcast to show they could drive the spirits off. Rick Hoffman, of the same battalion, told the BBC in 2017, as Friedman reports the interview, that his understanding was that a first use from a Swift boat was followed by 13 defections. That is his understanding, not a count this page can check.
• What this page does not find. It does not have a measured total of defections, surrenders, or shots fired because of the tape. Veteran accounts in Friedman's article disagree about effect. Valentine called it "guaranteed to raise ground fire." Hoffman and Spawr describe fright and, in Hoffman's account, defections. A former North Vietnamese Army captain, in a BBC Witness interview Friedman cites, said the voices affected spirits and that the fighters were more determined afterward.

Same-method test

A voice that says "I am dead" and "Rally now," and a Radio Hanoi line about being ordered to die or be maimed, are both fear appeals. A Chieu Hoi poster that says ralliers will be welcomed is the same appeal in print, with the sponsor named. The test is the method. The tape is black because the speaker is invented. The station and the poster are white because they name who is speaking. Scale is separate: leaflets were counted in the billions; these were loudspeaker tapes.

How to spot it

• Separate the later nickname from the number on the sheet. "Ghost Tape Number Ten" is not the 059-6T marking Friedman prints.
• A call to rally can be a fear appeal when the reason given is a dead man's voice. The same call, on a signed safe-conduct pass, is the same technique with the source named.

Images

No recording and no photograph are hosted.

Image gaps

• The tape. A Wikimedia Commons copy is taken from a video whose author is not established. It is not used. The English above is Friedman's printed text of the 24 June 1968 sheet, not a transcription made here from audio.
• Photographs of loudspeakers on helicopters and boats. Friedman hosts photographs whose rights this page has not cleared. They are not copied.

The both-sides overview is on Vietnam War propaganda.

Sources

• Herbert A. Friedman, "The 'Wandering Soul' Tape of Vietnam", psywarrior.com. The 24 June 1968 instruction sheet, the Stars and Stripes quotation of 28 April 1968, the Miami Herald piece of 1989, and the veteran and BBC interviews cited above are taken from this article. The original printings of the newspaper pieces were not reached.
• The Chieu Hoi leaflets and passes these tapes were played beside are on Chieu Hoi and Radio Hanoi: both sides' propaganda aimed at the other side's soldiers in Vietnam.