Bullets and bombs aren’t the only weapons the U.S. military has used in its quest for victory. Ghosts, superstitions and even vampires (and not the kind that “sparkle” and won’t have sex with you) have all been employed to defeat our enemies on the battlefield.
According to this recent piece in io9, the U.S. military has used local supernatural beliefs as an ongoing part of a psychological warfare agenda against its enemies. Following are two examples of how this was done against our Asian brethren; in the Philippines during the 1950s and then again a few years later during the Vietnam War.
Major General Edward G. Lansdale spearheaded the aforementioned effort in the Philippines while fighting the Communist Huk rebels to make it seem as if an Asuang, a traditional vampire-like creature in the Filipino culture that can fly (she has wings) and has a taste for unborn fetuses, was present in the area. Yup, the big military strategy was to pretend there was a vampire lose. Here’s how Lansdale explained it:
