Rosetta Stone Representative (0:00)

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Apple Representative (1:07)

Today, the Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist whether you're running, swimming or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations. IPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Dan Kennedy (1:38)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. For our listeners in upstate New York, the Moth mainstage is coming to Saranac Lake. Presented by North Country Public radio on Thursday, July 19. For ticketing information and for a list of all our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org this podcast is brought to you by Bing Only. Bing integrates opinions from your friends on Facebook and experts on Twitter to help you make better decisions. For instance, if you want to check out movie options this week, go to Bing.com and enter movies. In addition to trailers, reviews and showtimes, you'll also see movies liked by your friends on Facebook and opinions from movie experts and enthusiasts from Twitter. Plus, easily post questions and comments to your Facebook friends in Bing, all so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. Now search goes social with Bing. Okay, now let's get on to the story. The story you're about to hear by Anthony Swofford was told live when the Moth was in Boston earlier This year, the theme of the night. Was stories of transformation.

Anthony Swofford (2:54)

When I was a kid, my older brother called me War Baby. That was because on the first Friday of November of 1969. My mother got a phone call from an Air Force sergeant. Who said. Hey, Mrs. Swofford, jump on a plane tomorrow at Travis Air Force baseball. And fly to Honolulu to meet your husband. We're giving him a week off from the war in Vietnam. There's disagreement in my family. About where my parents stayed for that week. My mom claims it was the Hawaiian Hilton. My dad is certain he would have been way too cheap to splurge on the Hilton. He thinks it was a cheap military hotel. A few blocks away from the beach. But wherever they stayed, There were frozen drinks. And there was the beach. And that's where all of this started. My mom went back to Fairfield, California. Which is a little town near Travis Air Force Base. And she hung out with the other military wives. And shared childcare duties. And pots of coffee and diet pills. For the next six months. Until my father came home. My father was back in the jungles of Vietnam. And. And he's one of those guys who didn't talk too much about his time at war. But one story he's told me many times. Was about a mission they had out in the middle of the jungle. Someone in the command had decided that a village had been infiltrated by the Viet Cong. And that the best way to get rid of that problem was to blow up the village. So they sent my dad's unit out in trucks. And they built a Runway in the middle of the jungle. And some C130s landed. And my father and his platoon mates hurried all the villagers onto the planes. And they could only bring with them what they could carry in their hands. And at the very back of the plane. My father, as they were about to take off. Ushered on an old Vietnamese woman who had a chicken. A scrawny little chicken under each arm. And that was all she owned. Now, as they began to take off. My father thought the old woman was going to jump off the plane. Maybe she'd left a picture of a loved one in the village. But he couldn't let her do that. And he held onto her tightly. And she dug into his ribs. With her skinny little elbows. And her chickens squawked. And they took off. And then they watched the bombs drop on her village. And decimate it. And I think that was when my father knew for certain. That the thing you call home. Can be gone at any moment. He returned home and I was born in August, and my father was. Was very much shaped by the war in Vietnam. I don't think he knew it. He knew exactly how he was shaped by it, but he was. And so was my childhood. And eventually my parents ended up getting divorced when I was a teenager. But one thing my father always did, from the time I was probably about 5 years old, anytime we were on Travis Air Force Base, whether it was to go to the gym or play some golf or go shopping on the base commissary, he would drive by the hospital and he would slap me on the knee and say, hey, son, that's where you were born, right there, that building. And it would always annoy me. I would say, yeah, Dad, I know. You told me that last week or last month or whatever. And it would be many years before I could understand what a building like that could mean. When my parents were divorcing, my dad did this thing that I've since learned from friends that a lot of men do when they're divorcing and they have a teenage son. He started cursing around me. I guess he thought I would think he was cool if he dropped F bombs every now and then. And then he also decided that it was a good idea to start telling me about the various women that he cheated on my mother with in different cities all over the world. So there was a story about a woman in Taipei and in Copenhagen and in Madrid and Barcelona and Tokyo and Corpus Christi, of all places. Shortly after this, this jerk friend of mine came up to me and he said, hey, let's get out of Sacramento. Let's get out of this hellhole. Let's join the Marine Corps. And I, for some reason, thought that was a fabulous idea. I went down to the recruiter with him, and the Marine Corps recruiter used that same list of cities that my father had to tell me about the places I would go in the Marine Corps and sleep with beautiful, exotic women. And he assured me that that's really all you did in the Marine Corps. And I believed him. I was 17 and horny, and I'd had sex once in the bed of my pickup truck. A 30 second affair that was not very good for anyone. I joined the Marine Corps and I learned to shoot a rifle very well. And I went to War, the 1990, 91 Gulf War. And I returned from that war. And about a decade later, I wrote a book about that war called My Time in the Marine Corps, My Time at Combat, what it looks like when bombs land on people and things. And I was in my early 30s at that time. And I had a little bit of success. And so I decided I should do what I thought all writers do when they're in their 30s and they have some success. I moved to Manhattan to follow a very troubled woman who lived in Brooklyn with a live in boyfriend. And being a writer, I'm an absolute wizard when it comes to managing finances, like many writers before me. So I bought an apartment in Manhattan right at the height of the real estate boom. I guess if I'd waited probably like six more months, I could have paid even more money for the apartment. But I moved into Manhattan, and I did the other thing that I thought men in their 30s do when they have a lot of time and they make their own schedule. I cheated on that girlfriend a lot. I wasted a lot of money. I discovered that for some reason, it's very easy to cheat at lunch. It's much easier to cheat at lunch than at dinner, for some reason. I spent fifteen hundred dollars on lunch once at a Joel Robichon restaurant. And I would do Things like buy $5,000 cases of Burgundy wine. And I bought and totaled a sports car. And at the height of this craziness, I was in Tokyo researching a book, and my girlfriend was over there. I'd flown her over, and we were staying on the 35th floor of the hotel. And on the 25th floor was an ex girlfriend of mine who I'd flown to Tokyo from Baden Baden. And then a few metro stops away in Roppongi was a girl whom I'd been sleeping with before those two women arrived. And somehow, during this week, I managed to see and have sex with all of those women without getting caught. I decided that I was some kind of mad genius, that I'd in fact created a new kind of language of love. But really, what I was speaking was deceit and despair. I managed to live that way for a while, probably five or six more years. And then one day I looked up and I was pretty much flat broke. And I had to sell that nice apartment on West 19th street in Manhattan in order to scrounge up some money. And I gave away most of the furniture. I gave away my designer couch to my favorite bartender at the shitty Little Bar on 19th street where I would sometimes get drunk. And I packed up all my books. I saved my books, but I gave away the designer bookshelves. I gave away my bed. I gave away everything except my books and the art that I had. And there was one drawing by the British artist David Shrigley that had Been hanging on my wall for quite some time. And finally, this drawing meant sense to me. And really, it defined me. It was a drawing of a tic tac toe board. But instead of X's and O's in all the boxes, there were disfigured, monstrous heads. And underneath the tic tac toe box, it said, what are you trying to say to me? I do not understand. So I did the thing that I thought a man should do who was fast approaching 40 and nearly in total collapse. I called my father. I figured that if I could somehow crack the code on my father, I might crack the coat on myself. My father likes to drive around the country in his RV during the summer. And I met him down in Atlanta. Since he left my mother, he'd been a loner for the most part. He'd had a few girlfriends, but mostly he was a man who was alone. He thought of himself as kind of a Clint Eastwood character, an iconic Western loner. And I met him in Atlanta, and we headed west. We stopped in Opelika and visited his mother's grave. And we kept making our way west. And outside Houston, I spent the night in the hotel. And he parked in the hotel parking lot. And I woke up in the morning and I pulled out that pair of tennis shoes from my suitcase. You know, that pair that you bring everywhere on vacation because you're going to run every day? You never run. I know you never run. I usually don't. But this morning, it was August, and I woke up and it was 100 degrees outside, and I was in pretty bad shape. I'd left Manhattan at quite a high with quite a bang, and I was out of shape, and I needed to drop, like 40 pounds, and it was 100 degrees, and I thought, I will drop 10 pounds right now if I go for a run. So I threw those shoes on and I headed out. And I probably made it about a mile, maybe a mile and a half. And I was totally certain that I was going to suffer a massive cardiac event right there on the side of the road. I was bent at the waist, and I swore off abusing my body in any way. And right about that time, an old lady turned the corner in a powder blue Cadillac and she rolled her window down and asked me if I needed help. And I said, God, yes, I need so much help. But right now, if you could give me a ride to my hotel, that would be great. That would be a start. And she did. I got back to the hotel and I jumped in the pool. My father was parked in his rv near the pool. I was floating on my back in the pool, and I looked up, and I saw my father in his RV through the fishbowl windows. My father was in his daily uniform, which was tighty whities and a tight white T shirt. And he was ambling around his rv, and he was a man who was alone. And I loved the man very much, But I freaked out. I looked at him, and I saw that I had really almost become him, that I could be him alone in an RV in 20 or 30 years. And I jumped out of the pool, and I ran into the rv, and I said, hey, Dad, I know I was going to go all the way to California with you, but I need to head back to New York right now. I need to straighten myself out, is really what I was saying. So I jumped on the next flight to New York from Austin. And on that flight, I was thinking about my life, and I was thinking about my failures at love. And I dated women who were doctors and lawyers and hedge funders and the idle rich and whose parents were those very same things. And I realized that the next woman I might date, she needed to have a mother who'd been a waitress, and she, too, needed to be a waitress at some point. And her mom needed to have been a waitress, not just for the fun, but because at some point in her life, she needed that job in order to feed her children. A few days later, I got a call from a friend, and she said, I. I've got this friend, and I'm having dinner with her tonight in Tivoli, and I think you guys might hit it off. So I met them upstate in Tivoli at this really bad Mexican restaurant. And the first thing Krista said to me was, you know, in college, when I was at Bard, I was a waitress in this restaurant. And I thought, wow, this might be her. And then she said, when I was a kid, my mother was a waitress at the Officers Club in Camp Lejeune. And I thought, yes, that's you. You are that woman. You very well might be that woman. And she hugged me on the sidewalk, and she hugged me in a way that I'd never been hugged before. And Krista and I fell in love very quickly, very crazily, some might have said. But we fell in love, and it was right. And we got married in City hall in Manhattan. And then she was pregnant. We had a little daughter named Josephine. And now, whenever I have Josephine in the car with me, I make sure that I drive by the hospital in Rhinebeck where she was born. I make my way there no matter where I'm heading, and I lean back and I say, hey Josephine, hey sweet Jojo. See that building right there? That's where you were born. And I'll do this forever. And I know when she's a teenager it'll drive her crazy. But finally, now I know the importance of a building like that to a man. Thanks.