Oct 24, 2026 · 21 min · 12 segments
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Philip ThompsonHost
The dead are supposed to be buried in their homeland, near their family, so their descendants can tend the grave and perform the appropriate rites.
A person who dies violently, far from home, with no family presence to perform the correct ceremonies, is believed to suffer what is known as Che Duong, a bad death.
Such a person's soul does not rest, it wanders the earth in torment, unable to reach the afterlife.
Every year on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, families mark Vu Lan Day by setting food out at household altars and floating lit lanterns down rivers at night to help lost souls find their way.
The festival traces back to a Buddhist legend about a young man named Muc Kien Lien who performed a ceremony to free his mother's spirit from torment in the underworld.
By the late 1960s, an estimated 300,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers remained missing in action.
The families of these mostly male soldiers burned incense daily for remains that had never come home and could not be buried.
American military intelligence took notice and began planning to use it to their advantage.
Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army soldiers were not so much afraid of dying, what they were actually scared of was dying unburied and alone in the jungle far from their ancestors, or so American military intelligence believed.
In December 1969, the US Military Assistance Command , the joint command running all American military operations in South Vietnam, compiled and circulated a detailed intelligence fact sheet on Vietnamese folk belief.
Among the details were listed various of the spirits of traditional Vietnamese folklore.
It also identified even more sinister entities, among them the Ma Phi An, an opium ghost tied to death by indulgence and a spirit known as the tightening knock ghost said to whisper Kho Kho, meaning neck neck into a person's ear at night to push them towards suicide.
The job of weaponising that fact sheet fell to the US Army's 6th Psychological Operations Battalion.
This was the unit in Vietnam responsible for producing and delivering propaganda through leaflets, radio broadcasts and loudspeaker tapes.
The dead are supposed to be buried in their homeland, near their family, so their descendants can tend the grave and perform the appropriate rites.
A person who dies violently, far from home, with no family presence to perform the correct ceremonies, is believed to suffer what is known as Che Duong, a bad death.
Such a person's soul does not rest, it wanders the earth in torment, unable to reach the afterlife.
Every year on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, families mark Vu Lan Day by setting food out at household altars and floating lit lanterns down rivers at night to help lost souls find their way.
The festival traces back to a Buddhist legend about a young man named Muc Kien Lien who performed a ceremony to free his mother's spirit from torment in the underworld.
By the late 1960s, an estimated 300,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers remained missing in action.
The families of these mostly male soldiers burned incense daily for remains that had never come home and could not be buried.
American military intelligence took notice and began planning to use it to their advantage.
Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army soldiers were not so much afraid of dying, what they were actually scared of was dying unburied and alone in the jungle far from their ancestors, or so American military intelligence believed.
In December 1969, the US Military Assistance Command , the joint command running all American military operations in South Vietnam, compiled and circulated a detailed intelligence fact sheet on Vietnamese folk belief.
Among the details were listed various of the spirits of traditional Vietnamese folklore.
It also identified even more sinister entities, among them the Ma Phi An, an opium ghost tied to death by indulgence and a spirit known as the tightening knock ghost said to whisper Kho Kho, meaning neck neck into a person's ear at night to push them towards suicide.
The job of weaponising that fact sheet fell to the US Army's 6th Psychological Operations Battalion.
This was the unit in Vietnam responsible for producing and delivering propaganda through leaflets, radio broadcasts and loudspeaker tapes.
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