US Psychological Warfare in Vietnam

Witness History

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2017

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

During the Vietnam war, the US army's Psychological Operations, or PSYOP, teams were deployed to battle communist Viet Cong guerillas and the North Vietnamese Army. Their goal was to try to weaken the enemy's willingness to fight. They used a variety of methods including playing spooky "Wandering Soul" tapes which preyed on local beliefs about the afterlife. Alex Last has been speaking to PSYOP veteran Rick Hofmann who was deployed to Vietnam in the late 1960s. Photo:Viet Cong guerrillas on patrol during the Vietnam War, 2nd March 1966: (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Transcript

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1:09.3	BBC World Service with me Alex Last history as told by the people who were there.
1:15.8	And today we go back to the 1960s, the American military's campaign of psychological warfare in Vietnam. In the late 1960s the jungles of Vietnam echo to the sound of a nightmare. This was a ghost tape, a part of Operation Wandering Soul, a form of psychological warfare developed by the United States
1:56.7	during the Vietnam War, especially recorded to prey on long-held Vietnamese beliefs.
2:03.0	The basic idea behind the ghost tape, or the ghost tapes, the different versions,
2:10.0	was that in that culture you must be buried according to a certain protocol.
2:16.4	Rick Hoffman served in the Six Psychological Operations Battalion,
	...

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