QFT then Inertia

Reading QFT in a nutshell, by Zee. 5 sections into the first chapter he says im not supposed to go on until I understand series expansion which relates to Feynman diagrams. The math is kind of obscure to me now but the expansion seems obvious enough, a particles existence is characterized by an infinite number of creations and destructions... sort of. Ok, I'll try the math.
I have been digging through that reading list below. Went to the library over the break last week and got all the Nature Letters, "Einstein Centenary", "Emperors New Mind", and "Gravitation and Inertia" (Ciufolini and Wheeler) which I just grabbed on a lark. They use a lot of funny words for things in that one. They frame the Mach principle "mass here makes inertia there" but I'm not sure what that really means. Somehow this is a restatement of the equivalence principle -"cant tell the difference between 1g space-ship acceleration and resting on the ground" but how? Inertia is the resistance to acceleration and is physically quantified by mass. If the equivalence principle can be restated as "the inertial mass is exactly equal to the gravitional charge" then that may be the key. Thus perhaps I can reframe the Mach principle as "mass here influences the mass there". They write in "Poor Mans Language" (in which I am fluent) that inertia is the "grip" of spacetime on mass here.
I've thought about this before when I read about vacuum energy and how it might give rise to inertia. But I didnt really understand then how that worked either. It has to do with the local curvature observed in an accelerating reference frame. The energy density of the vacuum in an accelerated reference frame might be an effective pressure in the direction opposite the acceleration. I think this is called Unruh radiation. But I think that it was the wrong strength, plus I would expect inertia to be proportional to the mass not the acceleration.
Maybe I dont understand at all. All of the GR I know has to do with gravitating objects. We use the equivalence principle to get from the rocket to the planet and then just go crazy fooling with black holes and such. How does one do the reverse and ask about physics in accelerated reference frames? What happens to a matter field, say, when you "transform" to an accelerated reference frame? I am still hopefull that Wheeler and Ciufolini will help me understand. However if I have to write a page of blog for every two I read it will take a while. Maybe I should read the book from a rocket travelling at 0.9c.