Prize winning playwright and award winning writer, Tony Lazzarini, has written more than your average war story. His new book, "Highest Traditions", takes you along on his tour in Vietnam as a helicopter door gunner where the average life span under fire was an expected 20 seconds. This is not a "glorification of war" documentation. The author puts his readers beside him in the infamous UH-1 (Huey) helicopter and whisks them off to the battlefield to perform a mix of hazardous missions. This is an educational as well as harrowing account of how helicopter operations were done and why. Discover the "A" Company "Little Bears", one of the most decorated helicopter units of the Vietnam War.

Page 71, "Eagle Flights" "Vietnam was your basic hit-and-run, hide-and-seek, war. We could not fight what we could not see. The Viet Cong tactics had been refined by years of fighting the French and Japanese. New search and destroy missions by U.S. troops tried to cope with this style of guerrilla warfare.

Eagle Flights combined the air-mobile units and heavily armed infantry. The idea was simple, one troop carrying helicopter flying low and slow, would create an inviting target for enemy snipers. Rumor had it a bounty had been placed on helicopters and door gunners. The number of bullet holes our Hueys managed to collect served to confirm this. I once heard a story about a ship returning from a mission with an arrow stuck in the tail boom. Getting the enemy to fire on was never a real problem................

Finally it happened. Somebody on the ground with an automatic weapon fired a burst at us. We had the procedure down................

Flying low and fast over the jungle gave us the advantage of surprise. We came back with our ten helicopters and approximately seventy heavily armed troops and landed in the middle of four hundred North Vietnamese Regulars....................