Bob Schwartz

“The horror! The horror!”

Federal Agents Left Behind “Death Cards” After Capturing Immigrants
ICE agents dropped customized ace of spades playing cards, recalling a practice by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.

Nick Turse
The Intercept
February 3 2026

The cars sat abandoned at the side of the road. Their engines idling, with hazard lights flashing, according to a witness who captured video of the incident on his phone. The occupants of the vehicles had been taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers late last month in what a local immigrant rights group calls “fake traffic stops.” During these encounters, ICE vehicles reportedly employ red and blue flashing lights to mimic those of local law enforcement agencies, duping people into pulling over.

When family members arrived on the scene in Eagle County, Colorado, their loved ones had already been disappeared by federal agents. But what they found inside the vehicles was disturbing: a customized ace of spades playing card — popularly known as a “death card” — that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

“We are disgusted by ICE’s actions in Eagle County,” Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of that immigrant rights group, Voces Unidas, told The Intercept. “Leaving a racist death card behind after targeting Latino workers is an act of intimidation. This is not about public safety. It is about fear and control. It’s rooted in a very long history of racial violence.”

During the Vietnam War, U.S. troops regularly adorned Vietnamese corpses with “death cards” — either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for their kills. A 1966 entry in the Congressional Record noted that due to supposed Vietnamese superstitions regarding the ace of spades, “the U.S. Playing Card Co. had been furnishing thousands of these cards free to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam who requested them.”…

The ace card has a long and macabre history. A British tax on playing cards, which specifically required purchasing aces of spades from the stamp office, resulted in the hanging of a serial forger of the “death card” in 1805. Legend has it that “Wild Bill” Hickok held the Dead Man’s Hand — aces and eights, including the ace of spades — when he was gunned down in Deadwood in Dakota Territory in 1876. In 1931, murdered Mafia boss Giuseppe Masseria was photographed with the ace of spades clutched in his hand. By that time, it was firmly entrenched in culture as the “death card.”

The U.S. use of death cards in Vietnam was immortalized in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now” in a scene in which Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, places unit-branded playing cards, reading “DEATH FROM ABOVE,” on the bodies of dead Vietnamese people. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency developed a set of playing cards to help troops identify the most-wanted members of the Iraqi government. President Saddam Hussein, who was eventually captured and executed, was the ace of spades.

Besides the horrible conduct of ICE, mention of Apocalypse Now (1979) inspires some thoughts. If you have seen the movie, see it again, and if not, see it now. It is not only a great movie and insight into the Vietnam War, but an insight into America.

The villain of the story is Colonel Kurtz, based on Kurtz in Josef Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Colonel Kurtz has gone rogue and fled from the Vietnam War to Cambodia. There he leads natives who worship him almost as a god. The U.S. military command has sent Captain Willard to find him and eliminate him with extreme prejudice. Willard’s journey through the war and his encounter with Kurtz is the story of Apocalypse Now.

Kurtz’s dying words are the same in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, words that echo today: “The horror! The horror!”