Shadows on the Wall

(Paperback)

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The true story of a top-secret suicide mission successfully carried out by a group of American Special Forces troopers, three Australians, and their Cambodian mercenaries. Called "Project Rapid Fire", the mission uncovered the North Vietnamese plan to mount the Tet Offensive in 1968. In this book, the story is told through the eyes of Stanley Krasnoff, an Australian Army Captain attached to the project. Two other Aussie SAS warrant officers - Sonny Edwards and Jim Cahill were also part of the team. It's 1967 and the Viet Cong are being beaten in the brushfire battles that are being fought throughout the country, yet there are rumours that the enemy is preparing a major offensive. General Weyand needs substantive information. Only one person can raise a unit that can get him the answers quickly - Bo Gritz. In '65 Gritz and two others had located three enemy regiments in the Ia Drang valley and had led the 1st Air Cav to them. In early '67 he had located the black box of a downed U2 spy plane over enemy territory and by mid '67 he had spent 60 days on the Ho Chi Minh trail as the leader of a guerrilla force inflicting damage on the enemy. Gritz is required to raise "Project Rapid Fire" to "find and fix" General Thanh's enemy headquarters somewhere on the Cambodian border in War Zone C. With a base set up in the hamlet of Tay Ninh, Gritz and his troopers, including the three Aussies together with 400 Cambodian mercenaries, begin operations. Every day is a brutal clash at close quarters, culminating in the raid on the Vam Co Dong River where Krasnoff leads a reaction force to pull out a beleaguered team trapped by overwhelming enemy forces of the 80th NVA Regiment and the 141st VC Regiment. Deployed among the bunkers is COSVN and the reaction force manages to snatch 80lbs of secret documents from that headquarters. The story begins in contemporary Noosa on Queensland's Sunshine Coast where Krasnoff lives. He has recurring nightmares over Rapid Fire and tells the story to expiate the ghosts.

Author Bio

Stanley Krasnoff emigrated to Australia in 1949, after spending nine months in a refugee camp on the Philippines island of Tubabaoa. He has spent twenty-two years in the Australian Army seeing service in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam. His tour of duty in Vietnam included a stint with American Special Forces (green berets) where he worked for Bo Gritz, who in an earlier operation became the inspiration for Apocalypse Now, as a member of Project Rapid Fire.