Code Talker

by Chester Nez

  By that time the Japanese had conquered Hong Kong, Guam, and Wake Island. In a move reminiscent of their attack on Pearl Harbor, they had devastated the Australian port city of Darwin. And they had attacked the Philippines, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to remove General MacArthur from that archipelago.

  Both Roy and I knew that a decision made in haste could lead to dire consequences. We talked it over. I wanted to see how people lived off the reservation. I was curious to learn about the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world. And, more than anything, I wanted to serve and defend my country. That was a man’s responsibility. Roy felt the same way, so he and I agreed to take the test offered by the Marines. Three of our friends at school in Tuba City agreed to be tested as well.

  We five young men accompanied Marine recruiters to Fort Defiance, Arizona, the place where I had attended boarding school. There, approximately two hundred more young Navajos, mostly from Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation, eagerly applied to become part of the Marines’ special project.

  Marines require first-time recruits to be between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two. We men had no birth certificates, and several added a year or two to their ages in order to be accepted. At least one man, Carl Gorman, said he was younger than his actual age. He was thirty-five.

  The Marines talked to me, interviewing me in English about my family life and my education. I understood every word and responded accordingly, speaking carefully, using my best English. There were no interviews in Navajo. Apparently the Marines assumed we all spoke Navajo.

  Silently, I thanked the teachers at Fort Defiance for forcing me to learn English. And I thanked my family for keeping me fluent in Navajo.

  When all applicants had completed their interviews, Roy and I waited nervously. Would we make the cut? From the hundreds of applicants, only thirty were to be selected for the secret project.

  I wondered what it would be like to be a Marine. Would I make it through the tough physical training I’d heard about? I had been away from home a good part of my life in boarding school, so I knew I’d handle the separation from my family. But I’d have to leave Navajo country entirely, not just my home. I thought about mixing with white and black Marines, not just with other Navajos. Would I be able to compete with those men who had grown up off the reservation, in a different world, a different culture? Would I make my family proud?

  Word came. Roy and I made the cut. I congratulated Roy. His eyes glowed. Who could have guessed our schoolwork would pay off like this? At boarding school, we had grown accustomed to the constant tension and the need to avoid mistakes. Our ability to stay calm in the face of pressure, to think clearly under stress, had reaped rewards. We were Marines!

  It was the luckiest day of my life. I felt like I was walking in a dream. But what now?

  Two of the other three applicants from Tuba City were not selected for the project, but the third, Allen Dale June, joined Roy and me. Recruits from elsewhere in Arizona and New Mexico made up the rest of the group, which came to be called “the original twenty-nine.” The project plan called for thirty men, and thirty were selected. However, one man dropped out. In all the excitement, I remember that incident only vaguely. I think it had something to do with the thirtieth man not being completely comfortable with the dialect of Navajo we used. In a combat situation, that could be deadly. Books on the code talkers have made other suppositions, one being that he was assigned special communications duty overseas while the rest of us attended basic training, and another that he was excused temporarily from attending basic training while he played high school football. At any rate, “the first (or original) thirty” became “the original twenty-nine,” a label that would stay with us for the rest of our lives.

  On May 4, 1942, we new recruits were taken by bus to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, the same place I had lived while attending junior high in Gallup. I had not yet told my family about enlisting in the Marines. They had no telephone, and there was no time to make the trip home to Chichiltah.

  At Fort Wingate, we ate lunch and were sworn in as United States Marines. Then we climbed into a bus bound for the Marine Recruit Depot just outside of San Diego, California. Most of our families didn’t know of their sons’ new military status. My heart pounded. I looked around the bus at my fellow recruits. I was a man now. We all were, even baby-faced Wilsie Bitsie. We were men who would fight for our country.

  “Make good use of your free time, men. Basic training starts tomorrow.” It was Sunday, and our superior officer left us twenty-nine men to our own devices. We were assigned bunks at the Marine Corps Recruitment Center in San Diego, the city that would soon house Camp Pendleton, home of the 1st Marine Division.

  We claimed beds, stowed our gear, and set off for downtown San Diego. A hodgepodge of new sights and sounds bombarded us. Most of us had never been outside the bounds of the four sacred mountains. The buildings in San Diego towered above us, their man-made peaks dwarfing nature. Trucks and cars roared along the endless network of streets. And the lights! It was like daylight, even at night. This was a far cry from Navajo land. We were seeing the world.

  The nature of our mission remained a mystery. Several men guessed we’d be assigned desk work. After all, the selection process had involved our skills with English and Navajo. Some thought we’d join the actual fight overseas, a chance to prove our courage.

  Civil engineer Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary couple, grew up on the Navajo Reservation. He is credited with proposing the idea for the secret Navajo mission. He convinced Marine brass that the Navajo language—unwritten, and spoken by only those who had lived with us Navajos—could become the basis for an unbreakable code.

  Since the language was not written, it couldn’t be learned from a book.24 It was estimated that only thirty non-Navajos spoke our language. Even that estimate was contested by many Diné, who believed that the language was so complex it could be learned only if one began in infancy. Johnston himself was a fine testimonial to this belief. Although he’d moved to the Navajo Reservation at the age of four with his parents, and although his playmates were all Navajo, he had learned the language only well enough to be considered a speaker of “trader” Navajo. He never became truly conversant with the deeper complexities of the language.

  Pronunciation of even one Navajo word is nearly impossible for someone not used to hearing the sounds that make up the language. During his first year of life, a baby grows accustomed to the auditory variations from which his native language is composed. As time goes on, children become less able to distinguish sounds from unfamiliar languages. Thus it is difficult for a non-Navajo speaker to hear Navajo words properly, and virtually impossible for him to reproduce those words.

  Native American languages, notably Choctaw and Comanche, had been used in a very limited way during World War I. In Europe, Native American fighting men were asked to transmit messages in their complex languages in order to stymie the enemy. This effort involved no code, but was an on-the-fly idea utilized only by several innovative commanders. After the war, the Germans discovered which native languages had been employed, and they sent “tourists,” “scholars,” and “anthropologists” to many tribes in the United States to learn their languages. Navajos were not among those tribes. That, too, worked in favor of using our Navajo language in developing a code. And we had another advantage. We had resisted adopting English words and folding them into our language. We made up our own words for new inventions, things like radios and telephones, keeping our language pure and free of outside influence.

  Despite the skepticism of some Marine officers, communications officer Major James E. Jones agreed to get the necessary equipment and to arrange a trial for Johnston’s idea. Major General Clayton B. Vogel, commander of the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, would observe the trial and rule on the potential of Philip Johnston’s proposal. Knowing that his Marines would be heavily involved in the fighting in the Pacific, Vogel had alrea
dy initiated discussions with Commandant Thomas Holcomb about the need for secure communications in that arena of the war. Vogel was eager for fresh ideas involving unbreakable codes.

  In Los Angeles, a city where many Diné had moved seeking employment after the livestock massacre, Johnston found four men who spoke fluent English and Navajo. The men accompanied him to Camp Elliott, near San Diego.

  In February 1942, at Camp Elliott, the Navajo men were given an hour to come up with Navajo words representing several military terms for which there was no direct translation in Navajo. Then, with Major General Vogel and Major Jones as witnesses, the Navajos and the Marine communications men both transmitted several identical messages resembling in style and content the military messages that would be needed in battle.

  The standard “Shackle” code was written in English, encoded via a coding machine, and sent. Then the receiving end decoded the message, again via machine, and wrote it out in English. It took an hour to transmit and receive the test messages. When the same messages were transmitted and received in Navajo—with the men themselves acting as coding machines—it took only forty seconds for the information to be transmitted accurately. The Marines were convinced. Major General Vogel became a champion of the proposed code. He requested two hundred Navajo men for the pilot project. Due to some continuing doubts about the practicality of the project, he was granted only a trial number of men: thirty. The active recruitment of Navajos began.

  The military asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs for advice on recruiting men for this special project. The BIA felt that we Navajo Marines should be reserve specialists who didn’t have to go through basic training. The Marines didn’t much care for that suggestion. As members of their attack forces, they wanted us to prepare rigorously for battle and survival, just as other recruits would prepare. Then the BIA offered to provide two men as instructors and interpreters for the new Navajo recruits. The Marines decided that this recommendation made no sense, since the corps would provide us with instruction and the selection process required that we must all speak excellent English.

  After that, the Marines pretty much ignored the advice offered by the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. They recruited the special-assignment Navajos as they recruited other men, except that they promised us a secret mission. Like other new Marines, we would go through the necessary physical and mental rigors of basic training. The other Navajo recruits and I were not to be tasked with simply transmitting and receiving messages in our native language. The Japanese had cracked every code the United States had used thus far, and the Marines in charge of communications were skittish. What they needed, they decided, was a new code, one that used the Navajo language as a base. Our group of twenty-nine Navajo men had some serious work ahead of us.

  But we still had to complete basic training before we learned about our challenging mission.

  The sound of our drill sergeant’s voice—a 5 A.M. wake-up call—jolted me from a fitful sleep. Monday. Basic training. My feet hit the cold barracks floor, and I looked at my new Marine buddies. Their faces were solemn. Would basic be as tough as we had heard?

  Yesterday, we men had lined up, and barbers shaved our heads nearly bald. We joked about how the Marines gave us the same haircut we’d had in boarding school. I relaxed a little. So far, I knew this routine. Then my twenty-eight fellow Marines and I were issued uniforms. The dress uniforms were dark blue, had a belted jacket with brass buttons over matching pants, and included a white hat with a visor, a raised band, and a flattened top. Very sharp looking. The working uniforms, the ones we would wear during basic training, were a very light brown jacket and pants of the same fabric and color. Our rifles were Springfield bolt-action’03s like the ones used in World War I.

  We were also issued Ka-bars, fighting knives, about a foot long with a seven-inch blade. Those were excellent knives, sharp and strong. The grooved leather handle fit well into our hands, and it had a guard that kept fingers from slipping onto the sharp blade. Later, overseas, I was issued a .38 pistol that I hung on my belt and a .30-caliber Browning sub-machine gun that took ten-round and fifteen-round clips.

  The recruits who’d finished with basic training at the depot always shook their heads and laughed when they saw us new guys. “You’ll be sorrrrrrry,” they’d say in a singsong voice. I don’t know how they knew we were new recruits. We thought we looked just like them in our Marine-issue fatigues. But they knew just as surely as if GREEN RECRUIT had been stamped across our foreheads. I can still hear that “You’ll be sorrrrrrry.” And they were right. But today it makes me laugh.

  At 5:30 A.M. sharp, training began. We ran along the beach, carrying pails of sand and salt water. We ran for a half hour. Not so bad.

  Next we did a half-hour stint on the obstacle course. Rigorous, but still not any worse than the daily physical trials we’d endured at home. We performed various exercises in half-hour segments throughout the morning.

  After lunch, the drill sergeant informed us that everyone must learn to swim. That raised a few eyebrows. Growing up in the desert, many of the men were uncomfortable in deep water. I was lucky. As a twelve-year-old, I’d taught myself to swim in a reservoir my family had built for the sheep on Grandmother’s land.

  Once everyone could swim, or at least stay afloat, we practiced abandoning ship. Jumping into the water from thirty feet up was not easy for any of us. It required real resolve. But we did what we were instructed to do without question.

  Physical challenges were something all of us men were used to. The early mornings, too, we took in stride. Doing laundry with a scrub brush wasn’t so bad either. The exhaustion that conquered many Marine recruits did not beat us Navajos.

  Our training days lasted until around seven-thirty at night, with a half-hour break for lunch and a break at the end of the day for dinner. At meals, we were required to eat everything on our plates. A sergeant stood by the trash can to keep us from throwing food away. Many an Anglo Marine stood over that garbage can, finishing his leftovers. Not us Navajos. The food was delicious and plentiful. We ate it all with enthusiasm.

  After dinner, we had one precious hour to ourselves. Bedtime was at eight-thirty.

  One afternoon, after we’d been in basic training for a few days, an instructor, a corporal, told us Navajo recruits to line up. Then he walked down the line, punching each of us in the gut.

  “Let’s see if you’re getting tough,”25 he said.

  When the corporal reached Carl Gorman, Gorman hit him, knocking him down. He and Carl put on boxing gloves. We Navajo men cheered for Carl, who held his own with the Marine corporal.

  Soon we learned that the real challenges in the military were cultural, not physical. Marine officers looked us in the eye and expected us to look back. To a Navajo, doing this was very bad manners. The drill instructor confronted us recruits, his face inches from ours, and yelled at the top of his lungs. We had always been taught to keep our voices modulated. The unaccustomed shouting rattled us, making it difficult to respond. There were times we men, accustomed to reservation life, felt like we’d arrived on a different planet.

  The constant shouting and hassling took a toll on us. Several men feared they had made a mistake in joining the Marines. Some talked with me about how out of place they felt in this new “white man’s” environment. And many had begun to wonder whether they’d make it out of the war alive. I listened to their fears, knowing that they were voicing the same doubts I felt. But we encouraged each other, together conquering any misgivings. We had not made a mistake.

  Still, close-order drills proved to be a challenge for all of us. The drill instructor barked out marching commands. The shouted commands were confusing, and when one of us made a wrong move, he bumped into the rest of us, drawing attention. The drill sergeant’s consequent yelling didn’t help to clarify things.

  But we were determined. When we got a break from training, we practiced close-order drill commands. The purpose of the drills was to get us to re
act quickly and to work well together, as one seamless entity, not many. Gradually we became comfortable with the routines.

  The discipline at boot camp reminded me of those harsh days at boarding school. But I understood the reason for the strict Marine training. Soon our lives would be at stake. It wasn’t like school, where the meanness had seemed arbitrary.

  My buddies and I worked hard at learning everything we were supposed to learn. It paid off. The Marine Corps Chevron, the Marine newspaper in San Diego, carried an article about our platoon, number 382. It was kind of embarrassing, but at least it let us know that we were doing okay. An excerpt:

  Magnificent specimens of “original American” manhood, they are already farther advanced than recruits usually are . . . Sgt. L. J. Stephenson, who has been handling new Marines as they passed through Recruit Depot for more than a year now, is unstinted in his praise of these men.26

  Platoon 382 won over even the most crusty drill instructors. Every man in the platoon worked hard. The instructors bragged about our rapid progress. I’d always been pretty easygoing, and I began to feel confident about my place—and my buddies’ places—in the Marines.

  We recruits became good friends with our instructors. The drill sergeants got a huge kick out of commanding us to “count cadence in Navajo” as we marched. On the parade grounds, the heads of surrounding troops snapped around, everyone curious about what was going on. What was that strange cadence?

  I especially liked the rifle range. It was like a game, with everyone competing. We men took turns setting up targets and recording the results of each recruit’s practice volleys.