My Tour In Hell: A Marine's Battle with Combat Trauma (Reflections of History, Vol. 1)

David W. Powell arrived in Vietnam in 1966 expecting to put his computer programming skills to work for the Marine Corps. Instead, he found himself humping rockets through the jungles around Da Nang and Chu Lai for thirteen months. His memoir traces the brutal education of a young man who entered the war with few illusions and left with fewer still, bearing witness to violence that stripped away his sense of safety and, piece by piece, his peace of mind. The decades that followed brought PTSD long before that diagnosis existed, costing him relationships, employment, and stability.

Rory Young narrates with a measured restraint that suits Powell's unflinching, soldier's-eye perspective. There is no melodrama in the delivery, which makes the weight of the material land harder. The conversational tone keeps the listener close to Powell's interior life across the full arc from jungle combat to civilian breakdown to hard-won recovery. At under six hours, the runtime moves with purpose, never lingering for effect when the facts carry enough gravity on their own.