Yea, Though I Walk

Every night, it begins with the sound.

Not the bugles. Not the shouting.

The wind.

It combs through the elephant grass with a dry, whispering hiss—like breath dragged across old teeth. Then the sun burns through a white-hot sky, and the red dust rises in choking spirals. And Jim Pruitt knows, before he looks down, that his boots are already sinking into the clearing.

LZ X-Ray.

He wakes every morning tasting cordite.

Jim Pruitt is seventy-three years old, with hands that tremble when he lifts his coffee and eyes that never quite rest on the present. He lives in a neat bungalow in coastal Georgia, with blue shutters and a porch swing that creaks in the evenings. The world outside is tidy. Lawns trimmed. Flags out. Neighbors who wave.

Inside, the clocks are covered.

He cannot bear ticking.

He used to tell people he was a photographer in the war. That much is true. He carried a camera slung around his neck and an M16 he never quite trusted. He learned how to focus on men’s faces as they joked, smoked, sweated, prayed. He captured them mid-laugh, mid-grimace, mid-run.

He did not tell them that sometimes he put the camera down too late.

He did not tell them that in his dreams, the shutter clicks and nothing changes.

The first time it happened, he thought it was just memory.

He had read an article in Stars and Stripes about the anniversary of the battle at Ia Drang Valley. He saw the name again—LZ X-Ray—and something in his chest tightened like an old muscle remembering strain.

That night, he dreamed.

He was young again. Twenty-two. The rotor wash of Hueys kicked dust into his eyes. The smell of fuel, sweat, and wet canvas wrapped around him like a damp blanket. The clearing felt smaller than he remembered. The jungle closer.

He looked down at his hands.

They were steady.

A lieutenant barked orders nearby. Men scrambled off the helicopters, crouched low, rifles ready. The blades chopped the air overhead. Someone clapped him on the back—Rodriguez, grinning wide and terrified.

“Get my good side, Jimmy,” Rodriguez said.

The first shots cracked like boards snapping in half.

Jim felt the dream settle into inevitability.

He had studied this battle in the years after. Watched documentaries. Read accounts from both sides. He knew how it would unfold. He knew the North Vietnamese regulars were already there, dug in, waiting. He knew the perimeter would be thin. He knew the air would fill with screams and smoke and metallic fear.

He tried to shout.

“Pull back! They’re in the tree line! They’re closer than you think!”

But his voice came out like a whisper swallowed by wind.

The battle began as it always did.

He woke at 3:17 a.m., heart slamming against his ribs.

It did not stop.

The second night, he tried something different.

He did not step off the helicopter.

He remained seated, gripping the metal bench, as the others leapt into the clearing.

“Pruitt!” someone shouted. “Move!”

He shook his head. If he didn’t enter the clearing, he reasoned, maybe the dream would break. Maybe he would wake.

But the helicopter did not lift off.

The rotor slowed. The pilot slumped forward. A bullet cracked through the cockpit glass.

The Huey tilted, groaned, and fell sideways into the grass.

Jim stumbled out into the same red dust, coughing, ears ringing.

The perimeter was forming without him. Men were already firing. The jungle spat flame.

He had not changed a thing.

He woke with his hands clawing at the sheets.

By the seventh night, he understood.

He was not remembering.

He was returning.

Every night, he woke in 1965.

Every night, the date was November 14.

Every night, he had until sundown to alter history.

Every night, he failed.

He began preparing during the day.

He pulled out old maps of the Ia Drang Valley. Studied topography, tree lines, ridges. He read interviews with survivors. Learned names he had once forgotten. He memorized casualty lists like liturgy.

He began speaking aloud to the empty house.

“Rodriguez. Take cover left of the anthill. Don’t run forward.”

“Sergeant Major, shift the line ten yards back. It’s too exposed.”

“Call for air support earlier.”

He scribbled notes in a spiral notebook.

If he could get just one thing right. If he could prevent one death.

That would be enough.

On the fifteenth night, he found Rodriguez first.

He grabbed him by the shoulders as soon as the helicopters touched down.

“Listen to me,” Jim said. “You cannot go toward the dry creek bed. Do you hear me? Stay behind the termite mound. They’re flanking there.”

Rodriguez blinked. “You hit your head, Pruitt?”

“I’m serious. Swear to me.”

Rodriguez laughed. “After this, beers on you.”

The battle unfolded.

Rodriguez ran toward the dry creek bed.

A burst of automatic fire cut him down exactly where Jim remembered.

Jim fell to his knees in the grass, screaming.

The sky did not change.

He woke with his throat raw.

He stopped sleeping.

He lasted three days on coffee and stubbornness before his body betrayed him. He collapsed in his recliner and woke to rotor blades.

LZ X-Ray.

The clearing did not care how tired he was.

He tried grand gestures.

He sprinted into the jungle before the landing, shouting warnings. The tree line swallowed him. He stumbled into a squad of North Vietnamese soldiers who stared at him in confusion before raising their rifles.

He tried to seize the radio and call in artillery coordinates before the first engagement. The signal fizzled. Static hissed. The lieutenant shoved him aside.

He tried to shoot into the brush at the precise moment he remembered the ambush beginning.

The bullet jammed.

Each night, history corrected him like a schoolmaster snapping a ruler against his knuckles.

The perimeter collapsed in the same places. The same men fell. The same medics crawled through gunfire. The same sun set red over trampled grass.

He began to suspect that he was not there to change it.

He was there to witness.

Again.

And again.

And again.

In waking life, he stopped answering the phone.

The Veterans Affairs office left messages about counseling. A niece in Savannah invited him for Thanksgiving. He let the machine blink.

He sat at his kitchen table and laid out his old photographs.

Black-and-white faces stared back at him. Rodriguez. Ellis. Nguyen—who had translated jokes between men who shared no language but shared cigarettes. Young men with cheeks still soft from adolescence.

He touched each face.

“I’m trying,” he whispered.

On the twenty-third night, something shifted.

He found himself standing not at the edge of the clearing, but at its center.

No helicopters. No men.

Just the grass, tall and swaying.

The sun was lower, the light amber.

He turned slowly.

In the distance, he saw figures emerging from both tree lines. Americans on one side. North Vietnamese on the other. They moved without sound, like actors taking marks on a stage.

He felt a strange calm.

“What do you want?” he asked the empty sky.

No answer.

The men reached their positions. The air thickened with expectation.

He realized, with a sick clarity, that the battle was not only his.

He had read the Vietnamese accounts too. He knew they had sons, brothers, letters tucked into pockets. He knew they had believed just as fiercely in their cause as the Americans had in theirs.

He had been dreaming only his side.

Now he saw both.

The first shots rang out.

He did not run.

He walked.

Through the lines. Through the chaos. Bullets passed through him like wind. Men shouted in languages he half-understood. A medic pressed hands to a wound that would not close.

He knelt beside Rodriguez as he fell.

“Stay with me,” Jim said.

Rodriguez’s eyes flickered.

For the first time, they focused on him.

“You came back,” Rodriguez whispered.

Jim froze.

“What?”

“You always come back.”

The clearing blurred.

He woke gasping.

“You always come back.”

The words echoed through his waking hours.

Had he said that before? Had he dreamed that line on earlier nights and forgotten?

He opened his notebook and flipped through pages of frantic scribbles.

On the margin of one page, in shaky handwriting he did not remember writing, were the words:

Witness.

Underlined three times.

On the thirtieth night, he stopped trying to change anything.

He stepped off the helicopter.

He moved with the men, but he did not shout warnings. He did not seize radios. He did not fire blindly into brush.

He took photographs.

He lifted the camera that hung around his neck and pressed the shutter.

Click.

Rodriguez laughing.

Click.

A medic dragging a wounded man to cover.

Click.

A North Vietnamese soldier crouched behind a tree, fear etched into his young face.

Click.

The sky torn by smoke.

He photographed everything.

When Rodriguez fell, Jim knelt beside him—not to alter fate, but to hold his hand.

“You’re not alone,” Jim said.

Rodriguez’s breath rattled.

“Don’t let them forget,” he murmured.

Jim nodded.

“I won’t.”

The sun dipped low.

The gunfire slowed.

The clearing emptied of sound.

He stood alone in the grass as dusk swallowed the valley.

He did not wake immediately.

He waited.

The wind whispered again through elephant grass.

And then—

Darkness.

He woke at dawn in his bungalow.

The clocks were still covered.

His heart beat steadily.

He lay there for a long time, afraid to move.

That night, he slept.

No helicopters came.

Days passed.

Then a week.

No return to LZ X-Ray.

The dreams shifted. Softer. Fragmented. Faces without gunfire.

He began answering his phone.

He told his niece he would come for Thanksgiving.

He called the Veterans Affairs office back.

He opened a box he had not touched in decades.

Inside were undeveloped rolls of film he had mailed home during the war, forgotten in the chaos of life afterward. He had assumed they were blank or ruined.

His hands trembled as he drove to a photography lab two towns over.

The young clerk blinked at the ancient canisters.

“We can try,” she said.

He waited three days.

When he returned, the clerk handed him a thick envelope.

“They’re… incredible,” she said softly.

He took them home.

Spread them across his kitchen table.

Black-and-white images bloomed before him.

Rodriguez grinning.

Men crouched in tall grass.

The termite mound near the dry creek bed.

A North Vietnamese soldier staring toward the camera, eyes wide and human.

The perimeter.

The sky.

The valley.

Photographs he did not remember taking.

Photographs that matched the dreams.

He sank into a chair.

He had not been sent back to change history.

He had been sent back to remember it whole.

To see both sides.

To witness.

Tears slid down his face, but they did not burn like before.

That night, he dreamed once more.

He stood in the Ia Drang Valley, but it was quiet. The grass was green. The sky unscarred.

Men walked toward him from both tree lines—American and Vietnamese.

Not as soldiers.

As young men.

They stopped a few feet away.

Rodriguez stepped forward.

“You can rest now, Jimmy,” he said.

The North Vietnamese soldier from the photograph stood beside him and nodded.

Jim swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered—to all of them.

Rodriguez smiled gently.

“Just don’t let them forget.”

The wind moved through the grass one last time.

He woke at sunrise.

The clocks remained covered, but he did not mind the silence anymore.

He rose, brewed coffee, and carried the photographs to his porch. The world beyond his blue shutters shimmered in ordinary daylight—cars passing, a dog barking, a neighbor mowing his lawn.

He held the image of the clearing up to the light.

LZ X-Ray.

Not a curse.

A charge.

That afternoon, Jim Pruitt began writing—not about glory or strategy or victory—but about boys in a clearing who deserved to be remembered as more than numbers on a wall.

He wrote until his hand cramped.

And when night fell, and sleep came gently at last, no rotor blades followed him down.