This is Jockel Podcast number one forty three with echo Charles and me,

Jockel Willink. Good evening, echo. Good evening.

War is never what we think it is. It is butchery, stupidity, and hate. It is 90%

boredom. It can be horrible beyond anything you have ever imagined. It can also be ludicrous

and absurd and technologically refined. Tragically, its lessons are always forgotten only to be

refought on still another battlefield. The Vietnam War was our first real media war, spanning

the globe in outraged unreality, bringing videotaped death and destruction into countless homes,

fermenting protests and political justifications.

During the world's generation, it shattered our dreams of abstract morality and in horrible

reality reeducated our youth to a third world of suffering they had never known and had

now felt deep within their own countries worldwide.

Vietnam was a symbol of the times. The best of hopes turned inside out a fear of no return.

But for me and many others, the Vietnam War was much more. It was in a moment our survival

and death. In primitive sophistication our destruction and rebirth. It was in short a

long and imprisoned cry of what we all were not. This is a diary I kept while I was in

Vietnam. It is for the most part unstructured as many of us were, but all of it is true.

We someone once said is trying to tell the truth through the most acceptable lie. But this

book is not about history. It only tells the truth as far as one person felt it. A frozen

spark of time embracing one American soldier in a Southeast Asian war. And that right

there is the introduction of a book. It's a diary and it's written by a guy by the name

of Peter Nash Swisher. A man that was born in Oxford, England. His dad was actually

in the Second World War and was killed coming home after the war. And his mom eventually

...