Shadows on the Wall

By Stan Krasnoff

The adrenalin-pumping, heart-yammering true story of Project Rapid Fire.

'This is no longer a volunteer unit,' Gritz had said. 'You'll be issued a lightweight body bag. A number will be stencilled on the bag to correspond with your number on the roster. I want zippers on the inside and outside. You'll use the body bag to stay dry when you sleep at night. If you're shot you'll crawl into the bag and do your best to zip it up to make recovery of your corpse easier. There are only four ways you can get out. First, you die and we ship your remains out in the bag provided. Second, you're wounded and medivacked. Third, you DEROS (return home after tour of duty), or fourth, you provide me with a suitable replacement.

Welcome to Project Rapid Fire and a life of sleep deprivation, bad rations and the forging of a brotherhood. For the Special Forces gathered together to conduct a daring series of covert, intelligence-gathering operations for the United States government, every day posed the threat of being killed-or worse, being taken prisoner. Under the command of Major Bo Gritz a select group of men lived life on the razor's edge-and in the middle of a war still managed to have more than a few laughs.

This is the gripping true story of life and death in the jungle, and an enemy up close and personal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Sep 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781741765915

Book preview

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‘What the hell are they waiting for?’ the middle-aged man at the table two down from me says loudly. ‘They’re only a mob of goatherders.’ The woman sitting next to the man casts an embarrassed glance at him as he riffles the pages of his paper to emphasise his point.

I sit at my favourite table in Sandy’s Deli on Noosa’s Hastings Street. It’s one month since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and of course the man is referring to the war in Afghanistan, focusing specifically on the lack of ground forces’ engagement of the Taliban by the Americans. I sip my cappuccino taking a moment to consider the comment that discomposed the man’s companion. He’s quite wrong of course, referring to the opposition as nothing but a mob of goatherders; I happen to know.

Let me explain. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two American Special Forces men, Nestor Pino and Bo Gritz, were responsible for the training of the Mujahadeen. And of course the Mujahadeen formed part of the Taliban’s land forces. All this happened with the imprimatur of the US Secretary of State for Security Assistance.

I remember my first meeting with Nestor Pino one afternoon back in late ’67 at our base camp at Tay Ninh, Vietnam. He had emerged glassy-eyed and shell-shocked from his fortified camp of Tien Nghon, five kilometres to the north of us. At night from our base—regular as the nightly dumping of wet-season rain—we heard the rumble of enemy mortars as they pounded Captain Pino’s sad little shithole in the jungle. Pino had served as an airborne company commander in the Cuban Brigade for the Bay of Pigs invasion before moving on to bigger and better things in Vietnam’s War Zone C. At the time he was recruited, Pino was a regular Army colonel.

The other specialist was Bo Gritz, my Special Projects boss in Vietnam. Gritz came from the Bible Belt, steeped in a belief in God and the American Way. With patriotic fervour he set about selecting the array of weapons the Mujahadeen would need to bring them into the twentieth century, some of them with bizarre results. Gritz tells the story of how a project to modify one of the rotating barrels from an A-10 Warthog fighter plane, to be used as a weapon against Soviet tanks, went wrong. The program had gone up in smoke when the gun was brought into Washington for a demonstration. The A-10, which was in a covered truck, accidentally discharged on the main street, its projectile penetrating the vehicle and hitting a gasoline pump being used by a morning commuter. I can imagine the suits on Capitol Hill finding that one a tad difficult to explain to the harassed DC cops swarming the scene.

Anyhow, a remotely piloted system was organised to combat the huge rock-walled forts that were constructed by the Soviets. A radio-controlled 1000 pound bomb would be released at 25 000 feet and fly up to 50 miles, either homing in on a stationary beacon or hand-guided to the target by an observer. The Mujahadeen were also provided with the Barrett, a 50 calibre sniper rifle with a telescopic sight that can knock a person’s head off at a range greater than two kilometres using armour-piercing explosive rounds. With this weapon the Mujahadeen guerillas interdicted bridges spanning the Russian/Afghan border as well as critical targets within Afghanistan. That’s just some of the boys’ toys to be added to the Stinger heat-seeking missile and a few others in the grab bag tossed to our Taliban goatherders, compliments of the Mujahadeen. But I’m getting ahead of