During the Vietnamese War, the US devised several uses of psychological warfare tactics, or psy-ops. Perhaps the most famous of these is known as Operation Wandering Soul, or ‘Ghost Tape 10’. In Vietnamese culture, honoring the dead and ensuring that they have a proper burial is extremely important, otherwise the dead will continue to roam the Earth as ‘Wandering Soul’. Knowing this, the US created a sound piece in which the ‘voices of the dead’ can be heard crying out over a soundscape composed of eerie field recordings. They would play this out of speakers, nicknamed ‘the clanger’, in areas where Viet-Cong were active in order to try and scare them out of hiding. Although the operation was not a success, and they stopped using the technique in the early 1970s, the tape itself has allowed me to think about the concept of control using sound, especially in relation to auralism.
My interest in psy-ops, and psychological warfare in general, speaks to my greater interest in control. This is also where the inspiration I take from fetish and from operations like Wandering Soul come together, as I find these different methods of control useful to think about. For Voice Pigs, I wanted to interrogate the link between control, trauma and sexuality hence why I interviewed a dominatrix whose subs fetish is held in sexual trauma. In terms of Operation Wandering Soul, the reason why the US army believed it would work is because of the beliefs that the Viet-Cong hold over the dead. For someone to be controlled by sound, specifically the noise rather than what is actually being said, there has to be some element of trauma attached to it. In Voice Pigs, it is that the singing the dominatrix performs for the sub is the same as songs his mother would sing to him. This comes from a space where he, clearly, is unable to process his relationship with his mother and how this manifests into his sexuality. In terms of Wandering Soul, I find the link between the ways in which traumatic sounds can be used to control someone and how being forced to listen to a sound can elicit various responses fascinating.
The tape itself is a mixture of ambient sound and crying voices. One of a young girl sobbing for her father, another of a soldier telling his friends that he has returned to announce his death. All of them are lost souls, their voices distorted against the ambient grain of the tape. However, what the voices are saying can all clearly be heard. Although the US claimed that the operation was a success, there is no evidence to support this claim. Instead, it has been reported that the Viet-Cong knew that Wandering Soul was a recording. Therefore, they fired and revealed their snipers hiding spots which was not the intention behind the tape. That was, rather, to get the Viet-Cong to leave by tricking them into thinking that their dead were coming back to haunt them. To me, it is a point of interest to consider how using someones loved ones against them can be a form of control and to privilege the superstitions that come alongside this.