Code Talker

by Joseph Bruchac

  But when Monster Slayer was done with destroying enemies, he became ill himself. Killing those enemies had made him sick. So the first Enemyway ceremony was done to cure him by restoring him to balance.

  After Guadalcanal and Bougainville and Guam I, too, felt tired and sick from war. But there was little opportunity for me to give in to fatigue. As soon as my physical wounds were better I was shipped back to the line. More battles lay ahead before any of us could seek the healing of an Enemyway.

  That old truck and I belonged to the Marines and we had to go back into battle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Pavavu

  “Happy new year, Jarhead,” Smitty said before he poured part of his bottle of beer over my head.

  I had to laugh. He and several of our other Signal Corps guys had put on grass skirts and were swaying their hips to imitate the hula dancers we’d been entertained by on Hawaii—which was now thousands of miles away from us poor lonely Marines.

  My shoulder was still too stiff for me to lift my arm high enough to return the favor to Smitty, so I covered the mouth of my own bottle of beer with my thumb and shook it.

  “Happy 1945,” I yelled as I squirted foam back at him.

  1945. I could hardly believe it. On the one hand, it seemed to me as if it were a few days ago when I was standing in the recruiting office, convincing the Marines that I was old enough to join up. But on the other hand, remembering the battles I’d been through and the many men I’d seen killed or wounded, it seemed as if those days when I was just a Navajo boy going to school and helping his family with the sheep were long, long ago. I wished so much that this war would be over and I could go back to being just a Navajo sheepherder again.

  Along with a lot of other Marines, including a bunch of us code talkers, I was now on a tiny Pacific island called Pavavu. It was as hot as Bougainville and the bugs were even worse. Not only did a lot of Marines get malaria, there was also this disease carried by insects that made your arms and legs swell up. All we could do was spray DDT everywhere. Yes, grandchildren, I know that DDT is a very bad poison. But back then it was all we had to use. We used so much of it that there was a joke I started making.

  “Hey,” I’d say to the cooks in the mess hall, “my food didn’t taste so good today.”

  “Next time we’ll put more DDT in it.”

  The DDT didn’t stop the rats. They were everywhere on Pavavu. Big black and brown rats. After dark the ground rippled with them. If you set foot outside your door at night there was a good chance you would step on one of them. My old friends the giant land crabs were there, too. Just as many of them as there were rats. They were on the ground, climbing up the coconut trees, scratching on the sides of our tents. They never seemed to bother each other, those rats and land crabs, but they sure as shootin’ bothered me. As soon as it started to get dark on Pavavu I went inside and stayed there.

  But during the days we were kept pretty busy on Pavavu.

  “How about biyaató? That means ‘underwater.’”

  “Chal, that’s frog. That would be good for ‘amphibious.’”

  As always, we code talkers had to add to our vocabulary. Some of the new terms we were creating had to do with secret underwater demolition teams, men trained to swim beneath the surface of the water, with air tanks on their backs and rubber flippers on their feet. They looked so much like underwater monsters that it made me uncomfortable to look at them in their gear. Frogmen.

  Those frogmen went quietly at night in small rubber boats into the enemy territory. They did such dangerous things as laying charges on the hulls of enemy ships or placing explosives to clear paths through reefs. We code talkers knew better than anyone what those brave frogmen did, not just because we had to send messages about them. Whenever frogmen teams went in ahead of an invasion, one or two Navajos with radios were with them in their rubber boats. But you can bet that none of us code talkers ever went underwater with them.

  Because our code was used for top-secret messages, I knew about a lot of things. I even had heard mention of new giant bombs being prepared. But I told no one. Our code was only one of the many secrets I kept. That was just the way it had to be during wartime. In fact, every serviceman in the Pacific knew secrets that had to be kept from his civilian friends and relatives back in the States. That is why every G.I. letter home was read by censors who often blacked out big sections.

  The suicide planes that the Japanese were now sending against us were among those secrets kept from those at home. Japanese pilots were no longer just dropping bombs and strafing. Now they were coming in waves of small planes called kamikazes. Loaded with high explosives, their aim was to dive right into the target, especially big targets like our battleships and aircraft carriers. Before February of 1945, the ordinary American people didn’t know about kamikazes. Our commanders wanted to maintain morale back home and did not want to frighten the civilians. It was like not showing pictures of dead American soldiers. For the whole first year America was in the war, there were no photographs of dead American soldiers in any American newspaper. Not even one until 1943.

  It troubled me deeply to think of enemies so determined to kill us that they would give up their own lives. Whenever a Japanese pilot volunteered to become a kamikaze pilot he was given a funeral service before he got into his plane. The Japanese government made it sound as if these men would be great heroes. Their deeds would save Japan.

  As I’ve said before, I have always loved reading history. All through the war, I did research in ship libraries and borrowed books from Marine officers who were history buffs and who liked the idea of an Indian being a historian. I kept on doing that kind of research after the war, too. So, over the years I was able to learn where the idea of the kamikazes came from. Here is the story.

  Seven hundred years ago, Kublai Khan was the ruler of China. He decided that he and his Mongols should invade Japan. He put together a huge fleet and sent it off to Japan. But before it got there, a great typhoon roared out of the Pacific and sank every ship. Seven years later, Kublai Khan sent a second huge fleet. Just like the first, it was destroyed by that giant wind that the Japanese began to call Kamikaze. Kamikaze, the holy wind. They believed that holy wind would always defend Japan.

  The pilots who flew the suicide missions thought they were flying with that holy wind. A Japanese rear admiral, Masafumi Arima, was the first kamikaze pilot. In October of 1944 he tried to crash his plane into the aircraft carrier Franklin. A Navy fighter shot him down into the sea before he was even close. However, the Japanese propaganda machine made him into a martyr. They said that he sank a giant American ship.

  Thousands of people volunteered to be kamikaze pilots. Sometimes those planes were so old they could barely take off. Most of them missed. In the Philippines, only one out of every four kamikazes actually struck a target. No big ships were ever sunk by one. However, in Japan, all the newspapers made it sound as if their kamikaze missions were great successes. Soon, they said, the American fleet would be totally destroyed.

  What the Japanese newspapers said was far from the truth. Slowly, but surely, the tide had been turned. As the first days of the new year of 1945 turned into weeks, and we sat there waiting on Pavavu, I began to believe that we were close to the end. The Japanese were continuing to retreat. Our planes were now bombing the enemy’s homeland. It was clear that Japan was going to be defeated.

  “Chief,” my friend Smitty said as he read Stars and Stripes, the armed forces newspaper given to servicemen. “MacArthur has been kicking butt since he landed at Leyte. Sounds like we’re going to be celebrating the Fourth of July in Tokyo this year!”

  “Y’all think that’s somethin’,” Georgia Boy said, holding up the copy of his own paper. My work in teaching him to read had finally paid off a few months earlier. Now hardly a day went by without him wanting to read something aloud to us. “Listen to this here. Mah New York Yankees have been sold to a sny-dee-kat for two million and eight hundred thousa
nd dollahs. That there’s about enough to buy the whole state of Georgia.”

  I nodded to my friends. Each in his own way was excited about the prospect of the war’s ending. But from what I now knew about the Japanese, I was very worried. When they decided it was hopeless, what would they do?

  Our war in the Pacific was so different from the one fought in Europe. In Europe, when our enemies saw they were losing a battle, they would often surrender. Sometimes tens of thousands of prisoners would be taken. I saw newsreels of long lines of defeated German soldiers, just peacefully walking away from the battle, guarded by only a few Americans. They were abiding by the rules of war. How I wished that the Japanese would behave that way. Their rules, though, were different.

  You see, grandchildren, rules about modern warfare were made up between the nations of the world before World War Two. Those rules said that prisoners of war, enemy soldiers who had surrendered or been captured, had to be fed and housed in a humane way. They had to be allowed visits by the Red Cross. Those rules, called the Geneva convention, were agreed to in 1929 and signed by almost every major nation. But not the Japanese. They had different ideas about war. They had been taught since childhood that retreating, surrendering, or being captured in war was a great shame to your nation and family. A Japanese soldier was supposed to die in banzai charges or kill himself rather than give up. Anyone taken captive by the Japanese was scorned as a coward. I learned after the war that as a result of that attitude the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps were terrible places. Captured American and British and Australian soldiers were forced into slave labor, starved, and beaten. Some were even used for medical experiments. Nearly half of the Allied soldiers who were captured by the Japanese during the war died in those camps.

  In the years since the war ended I have met former Japanese soldiers. Some even came here to Dinetah and told me they were sorry for the things they did in the war.

  “In Japan,” one of those former soldiers told me, “the Army had two million men held in reserve along with thousands of kamikaze planes and suicide boats. Twenty-eight million people in our National Reserve Army, some just armed with sharp sticks. Imperial Command told us to prepare for the ‘Glorious Death of One Hundred Million’ to defend our sacred soil.”

  Although they were eager to get to Japan, a lot of our military leaders also dreaded that thought. Millions of lives, Japanese and American, would be lost in a full-scale invasion. So our leaders were trying to defeat Japan in other ways.

  The first way was through blockades. There were so many people on the Japanese islands that they could not grow enough food to feed everyone. They had to import food, as well as raw materials and fuel. Their fears that they would not have enough to survive as a nation had led them to war so they would be able to control those things they needed. Now their war had cut them off from all their needs. By late 1944, their ships could no longer get into or out of Japan without being attacked by our submarines.

  Our other plan was to bomb Japan’s cities and factories. If their losses were great enough, perhaps the Japanese command would realize that they had to surrender. Our bombers were flying every day from Saipan and Guam to make raids on Tokyo. First, planes flew over dropping millions of warning leaflets, written in Japanese. We are going to bomb your city. Then, after the civilians had been given time to take shelter or leave, the bombers started their runs.

  My fear was that neither of those plans would work.

  Getting back to Pavavu Island, I have to say there was one thing that took my mind off my fears—being with other Indians, including Navajo friends from back home who were ordinary jarheads and not code talkers. There were about 400 Navajo code talkers, but lots of other Navajos served. Usually, because they were Indians, the Marines put them into scout companies. There were at least one hundred other Navajo Marines in World War Two. Several scout companies were on Pavavu and all of them had Indians. On Pavavu, I met Lakotas, Cheyennes, Cherokees, and Choctaws, even a Zuni.

  All of us being Indians in a white man’s Marine Corps meant we had a lot in common. For one, every Indian had the same nickname.

  “What do the guys in your unit call you?”

  The answer was always the same: “They call me Chief.”

  Sam Little Fingernail, who was Cheyenne, was tired of it.

  “We got so many darn chiefs,” he said, “there’s no room for any Indians.”

  Sam had a way to respond to people who called him Chief—as long as they weren’t superior officers who could bust him for insubordination. When someone who didn’t know Sam called him “Chief” he would answer, “What, Mr. President?” Most people got the point.

  I never did that, though. I knew that my own white friends who called me Chief didn’t mean to insult me and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by correcting them.

  We Indians had plenty to share about the things we’d been through—although we Navajos never told any Indian who was not a code talker anything about our secret. Near the end of our time on Pavavu, we all got together and had a sort of powwow. We Navajos did the Yei’ii Bicheii, our ceremonial dance that honors the Holy People and brings them into our midst. The Oklahoma boys did some of their dancing, too, and the Zuni guy sang a kind of honoring song for everyone.

  That was a good time, but I knew it couldn’t last and I was right. Soon after our powwow our orders came to ship out. We were going to Iwo Jima.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Iwo Jima

  Iwo Jima.

  “Wull, it looks jes’ like a lamb chop,” Georgia Boy said, shaking his head.

  It was February of 1945 and Central Pacific Command had just sent down its orders to the troops. The biggest Marine force ever assembled was going to assault the Japanese stronghold of Iwo Jima, only 600 miles south of Tokyo.

  I’d just shown Georgia Boy the map that pictured the island and he was right. The southern end of Iwo Jima was pointed like the exposed end of a bone. There Mount Suribachi rose 550 feet above the ocean. On top of Mount Suribachi the Japanese had placed big antiaircraft guns to shoot at our bombers. Those guns on the mountaintop were accurate and hit many of our planes.

  The flights our new Boeing B-29 bomber planes were now making from the Marianas Islands to Japan and back were very long. It was a 3,000-mile round-trip. The antiaircraft fire was so tough over Japan that many were shot down or so damaged they couldn’t make it back to Guam. For the bombing plan to work, we needed an emergency landing field closer to Japan on their way back. Iwo Jima, Admiral Nimitz decided, was the best place for such an emergency landing field. Of course, we Marines were the ones who’d have to take it.

  North of Mount Suribachi, the rest of the island widened out. Along the straight area of beach on the southeastern shore of the island was where our Marines would take their first bite of the meat of that “lamb chop.” But Iwo Jima would bite back.

  The name of our objective had not been mentioned until two weeks before the actual invasion date. In training, it was just called “Island X” or “Workman Island,” not Iwo Jima. When I first heard that name, for some reason a cold feeling went down my spine. I wondered if it was because I was going to die there.

  Iwo Jima is not a big island. It is only four and a half miles long and two and a half miles wide. Our commanders no longer thought that any small island held by the Japanese would be easy to conquer. But they did believe that what they’d learned from the other island invasions had prepared them for anything our enemies could dish out.

  For months, the little volcanic island had been attacked by our planes and bombarded by our ships. But instead of weakening their defenses, it made the Japanese stronger. Tunnels and bunkers, pillboxes and artillery positions were dug even deeper. Big cannons and machine gun nests were hidden in caves and tunnels that couldn’t be seen from the air. There were sixteen miles of tunnels on that one small island. Dummy positions, wooden frames covered by sand and rock, were constructed to draw American fire.

  Th
e new commander of the island, General Kuribayashi, was determined to fight the Americans in a different way this time. No longer would thousands of Japanese men be thrown at the invading Americans in banzai charges. They wouldn’t try to defend the beaches, but would wait instead until the Marines were massed in front of them and then fire from cover. Their new slogan was summed up in General Kuribayashi’s “Courageous Battle Vow” that was pasted on the walls of every pillbox.

  Each man will make it his duty

  To kill ten of the enemy before dying.

  Until we are destroyed to the last man,

  We shall harass the enemy. . .

  Most of the enemy soldiers now wore white bands around their heads, the same kind of headbands worn by Japanese warriors for hundreds of years. They also wore special cotton waistbands under their clothes and made for each soldier by his wife or his mother or his sisters. They had a special name for those cotton waistbands: sennimbari. “Cloth of a Thousand Stitches.” They believed that those sennimbaris had the power to protect their wearers from being hit by enemy bullets.

  Sam Little Fingernail was on the troop ship with us. He’d been sitting behind me sharpening his bayonet and listening as I explained what a sennimbari meant to a Japanese soldier.

  “Sounds like a ghost shirt,” Sam said, a grim smile on his face.

  He knew what he was talking about. One of his ancestors was a Lakota Indian who went to fight the U.S. Army wearing a special shirt that was supposed to ward off enemy fire.

  “My great-grampa wore one of those when he went against the army,” Sam said, the sound of his whetstone against steel punctuating his words. “Go to the Denver Museum, you can see his ghost shirt hanging there. You can even count the holes in it from the bullets that killed him.”

  The sennimbaris didn’t work for the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, either. By the end of the battle, more than 20,000 were dead. But so were many of our men.