Military Battle Zone

September 9, 2025

Ghost Tape 10

Imagine a Vietcong soldier resting for the night, only to be awoken by the anguish, disemboweled voices of his dead comrades. According to local folklore, it was believed that the spirits of the dead who were not properly buried were cursed to walk the earth in torment until their remains were appropriately interred. Sounds like a great idea for a horror story to scare readers, but reality is something much less supernatural.

This was the work of Ghost Tape 10, deployed by the 6th Psychological Operations Battalion of the US Army during the Vietnam War. Also known as Operation Wandering Soul, this top-secret operation capitalized on pre-existing Vietnamese superstition about death and the afterlife. Here is the recording below to get a better idea:

With the help of South Vietnamese actors, the US army combined different hair-raising messages accompanied by a Buddhist funeral music, shrieks, screams, and moans with an alleged voice of a dying Vietcong soldier speaking in a grief-stricken tone, pleading to his comrades to “Don’t end up like me,” and “Go home, friends, before it’s too late.” This taped broadcast called “Ghost Tape 10” would be blasted from portable PA speakers carried by soldiers or loudspeakers mounted on helicopters, intended to spook any unsuspecting North Vietnamese troops into deserting their positions. In fact, the recordings from Ghost Tape 10 were so convincing that they even terrified friendly South Vietnamese troops and civilians.

Despite its ingenious exploitation of local traditional beliefs, Operation Wandering Soul has mixed results. On the one hand, it can be effective if modified or used in the right conditions. For example, soldiers of the 27th Infantry Regiment using the broadcast managed to trap three trembling Vietcong insurgents in the jungles surrounding Fire Support Base Chamberlain, with a similar recording included an amplified tiger’s growl, which supposedly led to 150 Vietcong insurgents abandoning their position on a communist-controlled hilltop in South Vietnam. However, in some cases, enemy troops who saw through the ruse would tend to concentrate their fire on the source of the noise, such as shooting in the direction of the speaker-laden helicopters to “ward off the spirits.”

Still, Ghost Tape 10, although it may not have had a greater influence in changing the course of the Vietnam War, played upon the anxieties and tragedy of dying far from home. Such messages, even if it is a hoax, can be likely seen as a eerie and demoralizing factor for enemy forces.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/ghost-tape-no-10-haunted-mixtape-the-vietnam-war.htm