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Take a look, explore, subscribe, just get more Radiolab at youtube.com slash radiolabpod. I'm Simon Adler, this is Mixtape, and before we start today, do you know that feeling, have you had the experience...
When someone you love or someone you know has died, and then maybe a week or a month or a year later, you hear their voice, their recorded voice again. There's something about that. It's strange. It's eerie, but also precious. Anyhow, this is the story of that feeling multiplied 3.3 million times.
Welcome to this military training tape. This tape is designed to be informative to the soldier about making your own ghosts and spirits and screaming banshees. Disembodied souls lost in a netherworld between life and death. Part one of this cassette focuses on the means by which these realistic simulations can be made.
Understand that this tape is designed to assist you because the Army takes these very seriously. Let's begin.
How are you this morning, sir? Good. You're looking good, Simon. As are you. You're very rosy. We're starting with this man on wind. I am a Vietnamese-American. Today, he's a retired Coca-Cola executive who still somehow loves Coke. It's so fresh for me in the morning, lunch, and dinner. Crazy. Wow. Ice, Coke, Coke.
But back in the 60s, he was growing up right in the middle of the Vietnam War. Oh, yes. The U.S. Marines fought against the Viet Cong in front of our house. Literally in front of your house, there were bullets? Yes, right in front of my house. Wow. And I called him up because of this one story he remembers hearing as a kid that scared the pants off him. My uncles and cousins, they went out.
Their home was a remote village in the valley of these mountains. And like so many other villages in Vietnam at this time, this one had been caught in the crossfire of the war. And so they'd been living under the constant threat of air raid and invasion. Anyway...
Mile after mile into the mountains, picking up wood as they went, only turning to head home after the sun had set. And as they're walking along carrying these heavy loads of wood, all of a sudden... A sound.
The men freeze. Back to back. And crouch low to the ground. It's a weird noise. Like a voice. Very sad crying and screaming. Like a ghost. Finally. Maybe 10, 15 minutes later. The voice stopped. The men stood up, gathered their wood, and hurried home. But the next night, late, when the village was asleep. They heard the voice.
The villagers covered their children's ears. They shut their shutters. And from then on, this voice would return. Now, the sound that these people were hearing was not a ghost. It was actually a weapon. A weapon designed and deployed by the U.S. military and their South Vietnamese allies to target the deepest fears of the Vietnamese people.
It was only used for a brief moment during the war. But rather than fade away into history, this ghost has refused to die. You have to admit, there's something a little sinister here.
Okay, just to back up, this is historian Eric B. Villard. And Eric says this strange weapon was created in part because of the Korean War. Yeah, during the Korean War...
Just over a decade prior, a number of American soldiers and Marines were captured by the North Koreans. And soon after, you can imagine the surprise. Heard on communist radio stations, exhorting us in their own normal voices. Sounding like communists. Fellow Americans, don't go on with this senseless war. Stop being the tools of the rich capitalists who start wars for profit. Join us as guests of the Chinese people's volunteer army. It really spooked a lot of people.
on the battlefield and at home. This anxiety that the communists could brainwash good, solid, decent American sons and daughters. And there was this feeling that, like, we've got to get ahead of this. And so during the Vietnam War, the United States became very interested in what motivated the enemy to fight and then figuring out... What can we do to convince those people to not fight?
This was PSYOP. Psychological warfare. The warfare of the mind. Its mission is to influence the thoughts of the enemy soldier. Idea was, if you could persuade people using words and ideas to put down their weapons, you could win the war while killing fewer people. That's the essence of psychological warfare. And who's the best in the world at convincing people to do stuff? The ad folks of Madison Avenue. At that particular moment, there was, you know, this madman advertising campaign.
Explosion. With TVs and radios now in living rooms across the country. Have some crisp Ritz crack. All of a sudden there were all of these opportunities to understand what makes us tick. What can I do about my hair? Exploit it. Use Halo shampoo. And get us to buy things. Want anything special for your birthday? Just a decent cup of coffee.
And the military took note of this. Well, and do we know, were there actually ad folks that joined the armed services? Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the areas where they would, you know, look for talent. They would go to people and say, boy, lucky strike filters will show you plenty of smooth flavor. Your lucky strike campaign was really effective. Maybe you can tell us something about how to convince someone to turn in their weapon.
And so, all these admen began to search for a weakness in their target audience, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldier. My name is Nguyen Van Su. I joined the military when I was 18, in the year 1971. At that time, the Vietnam War was in a state of...
We hired Vo Truong Dong and Nguyen Van Ha, reporters in Vietnam, to interview a few North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers for us. I am studying for my second year at the School of Industrial Art.
When you think about these soldiers, they were far, far from where they were born and raised. Most of these kids would be farmers or fishermen or maybe live in a place like Hanoi. I was a Hanoian in my sophomore year at the University of Industrial Art.
I was the first of the university to join. My college principal even drove me to the army station. And the students lined up on both sides of the gate, clapping hands. At that time, I didn't think much. I thought that the war wouldn't be too terrible.
But when I had been in the army for a while, I was mentally broken. I mean, your average North Indian soldier, they're not, they never lived in the jungle. They never lived in the mountains. That was crazy.
And so here they are, squatting in the jungle, hundreds of miles from home. Haven't seen their family in six months, a year, two years. I was hoping that I could get out of the war and go home. I felt like a ship that ran aground and couldn't return to the sea. They're incredibly homesick.
So the ad people were like, that's it. That's the emotional appeal. They want to go home. Let's give them an opportunity to quit. And so they start spitballing. Throwing stuff against the wall. Like, what about theater, culture plays, drama skits, live music? They're like, yeah, just try it out. And the Vietnam War very quickly... Becomes this petri dish, this test bed for all these ideas. Oh boy. And by far, the favorite, the number one tactic was...
Leaflets. We had cases and cases of these damn leaflets. That's American PSYOP officer Chad Spahr. We call ourselves the bullshit bombers and the professional litterbugs. He and his team would go up in an airplane with all these leaflets. Fly along 2,500, 3,000 feet over a target area. And we literally threw them out by the handful. You know, you could sit and look out the back, see them streaming out behind you. And there were times when you could hear strong metallic pops.
When the rounds hit your aircraft, start taking fire. And that increases the pucker factor substantially. And just the term pucker factor, what does that mean? Who's going to hear this? If it's inappropriate, we'll edit it out. It's where your sphincter tightens up so bad that it might pull a piece of fabric out. Wow. Okay. That's when you start really throwing stuff out of there.
And so these leaflets eventually flutter down to earth, landing in treetops, in gardens, animal pens, creeks. Leads blanketed to the country and those things. And if someone picked one up, they'd basically be holding a coupon.
There'd be these graphics. And it'd say something like... Come in and bring this little piece of paper with you. All your problems will be over.
So millions and millions of these leaflets were printed and dropped from the sky. But
As for whether they were effective: Here's North Vietnamese veteran Tran Nhat Tho: "You need to understand this. Our hatred was very high, no matter what. We young men and women at the time went to liberate the South and reunify our country
And Nguyen Van Su says that while the United States was appealing to their desire to go home, North Vietnam and their propaganda was appealing to why they'd left home in the first place. This feeling of being called to something larger than oneself.
to their sense of identity and bravery and strength. The goal was to destroy as many enemies as possible. So, these scattered American leaflets falling like leaves, we didn't read them. We were not influenced. But then...
What heck of a day. A special day comes up. That was in 64. This is Major Ram Brojak back in 64. He was a tall guy with a blonde crew cut. I was stationed at the time in a radio station. The official voice of South Vietnam. What are we talking here? Big reel-to-reel recording machines? Yeah, all that. A complete studio. How many reel-to-reel machines are we talking about? There are.
You're talking to a very old man here who was there in 1964, and now he wants to know how many real roots. Forgive me. Forgive me. Well, we were shooting...
You might be able to get a sense of it. We were shooting for four hours of original broadcasting. That's four hours of pro-South Vietnam content a day. That was music, news, commentary. There were comedy routines. Two guys coming on there like Abbott and Costello doing Vietnamese jokes. As well as pretty in-depth little radio plays. This idea of the soap opera. Always sort of ending the same way. Somebody dies.
And then the music would come in. That was pretty much it. And then one day at a staff meeting, everyone was sitting around a table. Maybe three or four Vietnamese. That's South Vietnamese. Three or four of us. And the production coordinator is going over the broadcast schedule and... He said, OK, on this certain date, I think it was about two weeks hence, he said we're going to be on a reduced staff. And we're only going to have, you know, X number of people in here instead of what we usually have in Vietnam.
I said, well, you know, what's that all about? He said, well, they're celebrating this holiday, and they named the holiday. This big national holiday called Trong Nguyen, Wandering Souls Day. And Ray had never heard of it. So he turns to his Vietnamese colleagues, and he says, I'd like to know what that is. And so they said, this is the holiday where we honor our dead.
This was the first time I'd heard about it, and so we took a good part of that meeting talking about this. They told him that in Vietnamese culture, when you died… You had to be buried in your homeland in order for you to have a chance at a good life in the afterlife. And if they don't have that proper funeral, then their spirit is condemned to wander in the ethereal mist forever.
and they'll never, their soul will never be at peace. And, you know, I'm thinking, really? Yeah, well, first thing I thought was, you know, stupid. You should know about that already. I should have known about that already. No, really. You know, because all those hundreds, thousands of soldiers coming out of North Vietnam to South Vietnam, that's where they're going to fight their battles. That's where they're going to, a lot of them are going to die.
And there was no way that they were going to get their bodies back to the north to have a proper funeral. And everybody got excited about that. The ad people are like, spiritual fear of death. This was a handmade vulnerability that could be exploited. I believe in the Lord my Lord.
And not too long after... I got a radio message to come to battalion headquarters at Benoit. Chad Spahr enters this Spartan military office. They said, sit down. We got some coffee. They said, sit down. And the officer in charge said, we've got something new. We've got a tool. We want you guys to start using it out in the field. And he reaches over to this small little mini reel-to-reel recorder on the table and pressed play. ♪♪
And everyone in that room was just sort of mesmerized. Like no one had ever heard anything like it. And most of them didn't know what it was saying. I was the only one who had any language training, so I got it real quick. And what was it saying?
It's essentially the disembodied voice of a soldier, a communist soldier, who's been killed. My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead. Dead. I'm in hell. Just hell. It was a senseless death. How senseless. How senseless.
He's in horrible distress because he's lost, his body's lost. He can't be properly cared for. He can't be properly prepared for burial and properly vitiated by his family to carry him forward into the afterlife. It's a spirit in anguish. To give some context, we're just 22 years after Bing Crosby and Jack Mullen started editing audio on tape for the first time. It seems to me
Just 14 years after Bing released his first track, where he layered his voice on top of itself. I mean, this stuff was still pretty damn new. And so to create this tape, for weeks or months, we're not really sure, a team of sound designers and producers had hunkered down in a recording studio and taken Jack and Bing's techniques to their logical extremes.
using some of the latest sound equipment, including hot off the market, just released. Cheap portable tape recorders. So simple, so convenient, so easy to use.
Armed with this new tool, the producers could go out into the world and collect sound. Let's get some audio of, let's say, a Buddhist funeral dress. Again, historian Eric Villard. Well, you just go down the street, there's one going on, and they run out there with a tape recorder, and you get audio of that. And then, let's say... You see a woman crying on the street. Literally anguishing, and you get that audio. There's scavengers like that. Some of them even hopped on a plane to Bangkok. Because they got a zoo there.
to record the sound of a tiger growling. And then maybe if we, like, put a little echo and flange on that, you know, play around with it, see if we can get something spooky out of that.
This is sort of an early iteration of sound design. For the voices, they hired actors. Or maybe you grab the secretary from down the hall. Got them to read a script, slapped a little echo on there. There's no handbook, per se. And after much trial and error, they'd created a ghost.
capture it on magnetic tape. After we got done playing it, I was talking to one of the Vietnamese who worked there in the office. He was a Vietnamese infantry sergeant who'd been through a lot. And I said, what do you think about it? He said, I don't like it. I said, why not? He says, it hits my soul. And when he said that, I knew that it had some potential power.
So, you know, they gave me a little tape player with some batteries and the tape. And so I packed myself up and went back to Kwanloi to play the Wandering Soul tape. The gates of hell are opened right after a quick break.
This is Ronia from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Mixtape, a special series from Radiolab, is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, the Shanahan Family Charitable Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This is the end of Side 1. The program continues on the other side of the cassette.
I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.
Part two of this cassette guides you through a tape tour of our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Happy stop. You will hear a beep. Here in this city, you can see the scars of yesterday's wars. The V.C. have run out over there in that stream line where it makes the cut back to the east and that thick breeze. Stop one. Stop one.
Our tour will begin. I'm Simon Adler. This is Mixtape. Back with Chad Spahr, who'd just been given the Wandering Soul tape and orders to get it in the ears and the souls of the enemy. Do you remember the first time you used this thing?
Yeah. He and his team had gathered at the Kwan Loy Air Base. It's a dirt-packed runway in the middle of a rubber plantation. The soil up there is full of iron. Everything gets stained red. You know, it gets into your skin, under your nails, in your ears. You can't ever get rid of it. Anyway, they decided the creepiest time to play this tape would be late at night. We went out about two o'clock in the morning.
I had three or four South Vietnamese soldiers with me for security, and I'd showed them on the map where we wanted to go. They headed through the jungle on foot toward a village believed to be sympathetic to the Viet Cong. I had a backpack speaker with the tape and my weapon and some extra ammunition and a couple of grenades at the canteen. And we went at least a kilometer, maybe two, being very careful because it was nighttime and we clearly didn't want to get ambushed.
When the village was in sight, just through the trees, they stopped. We set the speaker up and we angled it up into the air about 40, 45 degrees and then pointed it toward the village. And then started the broadcast. And as the sound came in,
I turned up the volume, so it sounded like it was coming closer to people who were hearing it. It was very eerie. Very eerie. What Chad was broadcasting off that magnetic tape in the middle of the night, seeping into the dreams of those sleeping, was far heavier than he ever could have known.
It was tapping into a long, cruel, very present history. The ghost stories, we don't take it easily. Again, Anh Nguyen, who says Vietnam history is filled with violence. They suffered under Chinese rule for a thousand years. And after that, under the brutal colonialism of France. Back in the late 1930s, the French Navy entered Hue city through the port.
and their navies sailed up the rivers and they killed every Vietnamese in sight. Thousands and thousands of people died for no reason. During the World War II, the French take away their rights, their troops take all the rights. Two million Vietnamese died due to starvation and knowing that they took no action.
And at this point, we're in the middle of the Vietnam War, which would go on for another decade. Families, they lost so much. And the noise of the wandering soul, it reminds them in a personal manner. And An's family is no exception. I had a young cousin who died during the Tet Offensive 1968. His body never recovered.
It disappears somewhere in the mountains. So the ghost wandering around with nowhere to go and just like screaming. And so when Chad was playing this, he didn't know it, but he was tearing at an open wound. And I mean, this tape was played to many quiet villages, to many soldiers hiding in the jungle.
Do we know if this thing worked? I mean, they did studies. They would get these defectors and interview them. Again, historian Eric Villard. And say, you know, what type of message was most effective on you? And so we have some basic data, but like in terms of the wandering soul in particular, that messaging, we're still not entirely sure how successful that was. Okay, got it. I mean...
I've always thought that part of the reason that the United States not only did the sort of wandering souls message in the first place, but why we're still fascinated is almost more about us as a society than it is about the Vietnamese. I've been thinking a lot about what Eric means by this. And here's where I've landed. The Vietnam War still hangs over all of us. Talking to these veterans...
The horrors they endured, the things they were asked and ordered to do is just unimaginable. Yeah, it is. You know, Christ, I'm 21 years old, and it was my job. I still remember clearly the Marines, 19 years old, as well as so many North Vietnamese Army killed in front of our house in Vietnam. Their screaming voice in agony is
and shouting in pain. Each year on Wandering Souls Day, when the veil between the land of the living and the dead is the thinnest, the Vietnamese leave out offerings of food for their dead family members. They sing, they dance, they feast. They release birds from cages, fishes from bowls, and burn ceremonial offerings. For us here in the U.S., there's so much shame, anger, and trauma mixed together that
And no real national, cultural way to deal with these things. We don't speak of the ghosts that haunt us. But they're definitely there. So that's our security door opening. And the souls of those ghosts are lingering right here in our nation's capital. It has a little bit of a feel of like a library. Okay. Take my jacket off.
I went to D.C. to visit Eric. We are at the Center of Military History here in Fort McNair. And the largest collection of raw interviews with Vietnam soldiers in the world. The whole wall is filled with our Vietnam interview collections. Shelf after shelf, row after row of carefully labeled boxes full of cassette tapes. And so when were these captured?
So these are the result of these military history detachment teams. Eric says the military was always trying to improve. And so when a battle was over or an ambush survived, they'd send out these historians who would sit down with the soldiers in tents or offices or wherever they could find a relatively quiet spot.
They'd take out a tape recorder. Pop in a tape and ask, so what happened? Can I just look at one of these cassettes? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let me give you 169. He just pulled one off the shelf at random. It's a beautiful cassette. Saturday, 22 March 1968. This first interview is conducted...
The format of these interviews was just dry, basic, unedited data capture. ...and so forth. The battalion commander...
was on the ground with us behind the elements of Bravo Company for a while and then he'd be behind Alpha Company for a while.
The idea, Eric says, was to preserve as much as they could about a moment in the war so that they could then recreate what had happened, figure out what had gone right, what had gone wrong. And in previous wars, this hadn't really been possible. But by the 60s, you could go out with a cassette recorder, right, that you bought in Hong Kong.
pop in the tape or reel-to-reel and do these interviews. — Thanks to those efforts and technology, we still have all this information. — Spider holes dug in the side of it. Each one of them at different points on the compass. — But Eric says that a happy byproduct of this is that preserved in the information is… — A piece of someone. — Still here on Earth.
It's just one moment in a young man's life. Some of the time he spent on this earth is recorded right here. It tells you something about who they were and, you know, what they went through.
He sounds very solid. He sounds very tired. And less than two months after this interview, during combat in a pineapple plantation, he was hit.
probably by an RPG, and died of multiple fragmentation wounds. He was 29, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these. Testing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Lieutenant Young, would you describe the operation that led to General Bond's death?
We've got like all these ghost voices. And in a way, I feel like these audio tapes are kind of like these wandering souls.
you know, sitting in our archives, on our shelves, just asking us to listen to them. This is when I discovered he was one of them. There was a very big stream of blood pumping with every heartbeat. This is a wrap of the body.
They had to cut off a body that they were raising on a hoist. We're out in the neck and mouth, facial and eye formation.
...
Next week, the story of how the cassette tape created the internet. Mixtape is reported, produced, scored, and sound designed by me, Simon Adler, with original music throughout by me. Indispensable reporting and production assistance was provided by Eli Cohen.
This episode was produced by Annie McKeown with original music by Annie and had original reporting contributed by Trong Dong Vo and Nguyen Van Ha. Our voice actors were David Lee Nguyen, Topher Ngo, Merc Nguyen, and Maggie Hai Trong. I'd like to give a special thanks to Alison Barchia, Jared Tracy, and Herb Friedman, and to Matthew Campbell for introducing me to the Wandering Soul tape to begin with, and to Eric Villard for his help pulling those tapes and voices for us.
I'm Simon Adler, and we will have another tape for you next week.
Radio Lab was created by Jada Broomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer and Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niyata Sambandham, Matt Kilty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Ariane Wack,
Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Tanya Chawla, Shima Oliyai, and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibill.
