Code Talker

by Chester Nez

  Mountains ran the length of the island, dominating the scene before me, and conifer trees, a rare sight on a tropical island, lined the beach. They reminded me of the piñon and juniper back home. I quickly squashed that thought. The challenging job at hand required my entire focus. I didn’t need to be homesick for New Mexico.

  Onshore, we ten code talkers from the USS Lurline reunited with others who had come on different vessels. It felt good to be together again. Through Marine boot camp, followed by the serious job of designing and memorizing the code, we men had forged a real bond.

  Of the original thirty-two men who had worked together at Camp Elliott (including the three—Ross Haskie, Felix Yazzie, and Wilson Price—who’d been added to our ranks during the development of the code), thirty were sent to war in the fall and winter of 1942. We all served in the South Pacific. Only John Benally and John Manuelito were missing from the ranks of the fighting men. Those two had stayed in California to train new Navajo recruits in the secret code. It wasn’t until later that they entered the war as combatants.

  On Grande Terre, we code talkers continued our combat training. We were warned early on not to stray from the base. Some of the French occupants of New Caledonia didn’t like Marines, and there had been several instances of unfriendly confrontations with the inhabitants of the island. The French were our allies in Europe. Germany and Italy had declared war on the United States just a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I never quite understood the unfriendliness of the inhabitants of New Caledonia, but they definitely did not want us there.

  We Marines stuck together, working hard at our training, swimming, roughhousing, and occasionally sitting around a bonfire and telling stories or singing songs. We provided our own entertainment.

  Roy Begay and I, soaking wet, lay on the beach. We’d just practiced abandoning ship, a drill that we had to complete several times while on New Caledonia, just in case we’d forgotten all our practice back in San Diego. Our uniforms dried quickly, but later that night, again dripping wet, we crouched and slithered along the beach in the dark. It was our third night-landing practice since our arrival on Grande Terre. We moved with stealth, avoiding the spotlights trained on the beach—lights simulating enemy surveillance.

  Next morning, I woke early, unfastened my mosquito net, and nudged Roy.

  “Wake up, lazybones.”

  Roy groaned and turned toward me in the foxhole. “Is that you, Grandmother?”

  We grabbed our mess kits—two sectioned plates that fit together with utensils inside—and crawled out of the foxhole. All of us code talkers walked together to breakfast. The mess hall was located some distance from camp, down the beach.

  I nodded at the man lined up ahead of me for food.

  He wrinkled his nose and pressed his mouth closed. “Jeez, eggs from a can, again.”

  Another Marine chuckled. “Don’t forget Spam.”

  Roy craned his neck to see the food. “Those little hot dogs, too.”

  I’ll admit it was a limited menu. But the food, big barrels of it, was—for me—one of the best parts of being in the Marines. It was good and it was plentiful, a real treat after boarding school. I know most enlisted men complained about Marine food, but I liked all of it. Spam was my favorite, and Vienna sausages were great, too. So was the canned corned beef. I even liked the crackers.

  After eating, we dipped our mess kits in boiling water and returned to the beach encampment.

  In a half hour, the instructor arrived with that day’s orders. Each day was similar to the one preceding, but the anticipation of battle hung heavy in the air, and we knew that this training was important. I concentrated. I intended to survive.

  That day we practiced hand-to-hand combat. The steamy island—populated with tropical birds, snakes, fist-sized spiders, lizards, monkeys, mosquitoes, and flies as big as my thumbnail—was a different world from any I had ever experienced.

  After lunch, we attended classes, learning in depth about our waterproof radios. I, like most of the other Navajo men, had always lived in a home without electricity. But I memorized everything the instructor said about the electric crank radios, adding it to the store of knowledge I’d already gathered in basic training. I focused all of my energy, knowing that even though I was tired from last night’s maneuvers, this knowledge could save my life. And the lives of other Marines.

  Physical and mental challenges were constant. Drill sergeants advised us that we’d face the same kind of challenges in battle, only then our lives would be on the line.

  I slapped at a mosquito on my arm, then scratched a bite on my neck that had swollen to the size of a quarter. Whooping, I ran into the ocean fully clothed. Roy, Wilsie, and Eugene followed. No mosquito would follow us there. We desert-bred men dunked and splashed each other, finding some relief from the heat. The water was warm, though, too warm to be really refreshing. It held that warmth even at night. When we staggered out onto the beach, our fatigues dried almost instantly in the mind-numbing heat.

  That night, crammed with Roy into a foxhole maybe three feet deep and four feet wide, I actually managed to sleep. I liked knowing Roy was there. Partnering with my roommate from Tuba City was good, when everything else was so foreign. It was tough sleeping in a semisitting position. But both of us had grown up sleeping on desert ground, ground baked harder than the sands of New Caledonia.

  We woke up to a pleasant morning. The temperature was less wilting than it would be later in the day. Here on Grande Terre, no sounds of bombing or guns disturbed our sleep. We knew we’d better enjoy the silence while we could.

  By late October 1942, we felt ready. The code was indelible, engraved into our brains. We had practiced night landings and hand-to-hand combat. Thirteen of us code talkers from the New Caledonia training camp, me and Roy among them, received our orders. We would join the other members of the 1st Marine Division who were already invading Guadalcanal. I looked around at my buddies, noticed the sudden stiffness in their posture. Everyone was scared.

  The Japanese who held Guadalcanal were trained not to surrender. Their war strategy revolved around the Bushido code, an ancient “way of the warrior” first developed by the samurai. This code of conduct extolled loyalty and obedience. Soldiers were required to fight to the death and to take as many of their enemies with them as they could. Even facing impossible odds, Japanese soldiers chose to blow themselves up—hoping to kill American soldiers in the process—rather than surrender. They would die for the emperor. Their Shinto religion taught that this behavior was both expected and honorable.

  The Japanese believed that they, by divine right, should rule the world. Their societal structure was perfect, and all other nations should be subjugated to the Empire of the Rising Sun. Their belief in Hakkō ichiu, Japan’s manifest destiny, taught them that all eight corners of the world would one day be under one roof—that is, the control of Japan’s imperial and divine emperor.

  The Yamato race, the dominant race in Japan, had taken its name from the Yamato Court in fourth-century Japan. Sixteen centuries of history and culture had given the Yamatos a feeling of solidarity and entitlement. Their bloodline was pure, while according to their propaganda, that of many Americans had been mongrelized by crossbreeding. In the minds of the Japanese, Americans were weak, materialistic, and unwilling to die for their country. The people of the Land of the Rising Sun convinced themselves that the Americans were subhuman. For a soldier of this pure race to return from war alive when his peers had been killed in battle was a disgrace. To drive this point home, it was not unusual for a Japanese commander to beat one of his own soldiers senseless.

  Soon the barbaric behavior of the Japanese, whose wounded soldiers would try to kill Allied corpsmen who came to their aid, made them seem less than human to the Americans.

  Americans did not share the Japanese desire to die. U.S. soldiers fought valiantly, but when the odds became impossible, they knew that capture was no dishonor. Some thought of it as p
referable to death, while others, having observed the cruelty of our enemy, feared capture more than death. At any rate, there was no judgment rendered by United States troops against a man who was captured. Facing an enemy who thought so differently from the way we did was scary.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Secret Code Passes Muster

  Early November to December 1942: Guadalcanal

  Roy and I had made it to the beach alive, wading among floating bodies. We’d dug our first battle-time foxhole and now sat, soggy and scared, in that hole.

  The Japanese preferred to attack at night. We had been told that almost every night, at midnight, a single bomber flew over. “Midnight Charlie,” the island veterans called him, although there were undoubtedly many “Charlies,” each taking his turn at keeping U.S. troops awake. Midnight Charlie flew slowly, his siren wailing and navigational lights blinking, making sure everyone knew he was there. Men on the islands would fire artillery at him, but he generally flew too high to be in range. Then he’d drop his bombs.

  If the enemy attacked that night, Roy and I had our equipment ready. Each of us had been issued three hand grenades, a small packet of bullets, dextrose and salt tablets, some sulfa pills and sulfa powder in case we got shot, a field dressing, and K rations. We’d been instructed to take a sulfa pill and sprinkle sulfa powder over any open wounds if we got hit. The powder was supposed to keep the wound from getting infected. Popular word was that the powder felt cold on the skin, and it helped to alleviate pain. We all hoped that was true. Sulfa drugs were the precursors of penicillin.

  Ironically enough, one of our staples was a bar of Fels-Naptha, the same brown soap we’d had our teeth brushed with in boarding school. We were expected to do our own laundry whenever we got a chance, using that lye soap. A waist-belted pouch held some of the necessities, specifically ammunition, and we wore a cartridge belt as well. We placed our mess kits in a top-opening haversack that we carried on our backs, and our canteens hung from a loop on the back of our belt. Our folding shovel was attached in an upright position to one side of the haversack. A bedroll coiled in an upside-down U around the top of the haversack, and a poncho was either slung around the bedroll or stuffed inside.

  In the wet foxhole, each of us had his ammunition pouch belted on and his haversack within easy reach. We could put our hands on anything we needed in the dark. In addition, we each had two mosquito nets, one for our head and another to cover our body.

  “You awake?” I whispered.

  Roy whispered back, “Ouu.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “About to check on my grenades,” Roy said, thrusting one hand into his ammunition pouch.

  “Yeah. I got mine.” I felt for my hand grenades, encountering three spheres, furrowed like pineapples. For a moment I could almost feel I was back in boot camp, where I’d first hefted a grenade. Heavy and deadly. “I’m all squared away,” I said, using the lingo we’d learned in boot camp.

  Roy tapped his rifle. “I hope this thing fires okay wet. No way to keep it dry. I might have got some sand in it, too.”

  “It’ll fire,” I said. “No sand. You just cleaned it. Don’t worry.”

  “You think I should zip it into that sack?” Roy referred to the long leather sack that zipped open to accept a rifle. Although the sacks were designed to keep water and sand out of the rifles, we hadn’t used them on Guadalcanal because we wanted our weapons to be easily accessible. None of us wanted to fumble with a zippered case when we needed our rifle now.

  “What if the Banzai come?” I asked him.

  Both of us had heard horror stories about the Japanese suicide attackers whose name, Banzai, was shorthand for the phrase Tennō heika banzai, meaning “May the emperor live one thousand years.” They struck on foot, at night. When we heard them yelling, “Banzai! Banzai!” we knew we would witness a suicide, unless they killed us first. The anticipation of either possibility was awful, demoralizing.

  “If they come, and your rifle is all zippered into that case . . .”

  “You’re right,” said Roy. “I’ll keep it out.”

  I felt inside my ammo pouch. The packet of bullets was soaking wet. But they, too, would fire. Everything had to work, even underwater. Uncle Sam had planned for that.

  “You think they gave us enough bullets?” asked Roy.

  I shrugged. “They must know how many.”

  “You think we’ll use them all?”

  My jaw tensed. “I hope not.” Shooting a man wouldn’t be like shooting a coyote. Or a porcupine.

  The next morning before sunrise, Roy, still crouched in the foxhole on Guadalcanal, pulled out his medicine bag. I reached into my pants pocket and did the same. The soft thumb-sized object, buckskin stitched into a cylindrical shape, gave me comfort. Designed to protect me, it had been made by my family and blessed by a medicine man. That medicine bag connected me to home, to the prayers of my relatives. It protected me, and gave me confidence that I would survive. I rubbed the tiny black arrowhead attached by a wrap of rawhide to the outside of the bag. A white rock and several other small objects tucked inside had special meaning for me. The bag also held corn pollen, taken from the tassels of corn plants back home.

  Roy’s medicine bag was different from mine, but they both had the same purpose: protection. No two medicine bags were identical, because their contents were personal, but one ingredient was always the same—bright yellow corn pollen. The other elements were specific to the person who owned the bag. Perhaps a small piece of turquoise, or other small mementos. No one talked about the contents of his medicine bag. Someone who disliked you could use their knowledge of the bag’s components to cause you harm. Only people real close to you, like your children, should know about the contents of your medicine bag. There’s a lot of power in those things. It’s something you don’t play with.

  Inside the medicine bag, my finger touched the pollen, a velvety-smooth powder. It hadn’t stayed dry—nothing had during the landing—but it was safe. Good. Keeping it in the heavy pocket of my pants had been the right move. I pinched some pollen, touching it to my tongue and the top of my head. Like the other Navajo men, I always knew which direction was east—where the sun rises, where life begins. I gestured to the east, the south, the west, and the north, completing my first morning blessing sitting in a wet hole in the South Pacific war.

  A white T-shirt hung on a branch, maybe twelve feet away from Roy’s and my foxhole. Someone had tossed it there the night before. Other arriving Marines had dug in farther down the tree line—some ten or twenty, others thirty, forty, and fifty feet away from Roy and me. During the night, the men all seemed to notice the shirt at different times. Was it a Jap? Shots, aimed at that shirt, rang out all night long. They zipped just over our heads.

  I tapped Roy’s shoulder and gestured toward the shirt with a movement of my lips. “Look.”

  “Ouu!” Roy shook his head.

  The shirt flapped, a torn rag in the breeze. As dawn broke, someone pulled it from the branch, counting the twenty-one “friendly fire” bullet holes. Roy and I had made it safely through a night riddled with bullets. We’d slept very little, if at all, but the blessing helped to refresh us. We needed to be sharp. Today was the day we were going to start using the new code in battle.

  Some communications officers on Guadalcanal greeted us Navajos with skepticism. Yes, they’d been given notice about the arriving code talkers. And yes, the old Shackle coding system was slow. Yet the notion of changing to something new during the heat of conflict filled battle-weary minds with doubt.

  My group of code talkers was assigned to just such a doubter, Lieutenant Hunt, signal officer under General Alexander Vandergrift. When we Navajos assigned to him had arrived, Hunt just shook his head. He knew of our mission, but he had never worked with a group of Indians, and he had faith in the old code. Also, he was one of the officers who hated the idea of switching tactics in the middle of a major military operation.

  He
had decided to test the new code immediately and had given us a message to send out on our first night. Directly after the transmission began, panicked calls came in. Hunt’s other radio operators jammed our Navajo speech, thinking the Japanese had broken into their frequency. By then it was dark, and the annoyed Hunt postponed the test.

  That next morning Lieutenant Hunt continued with the trial of the code. He ordered his radiomen not to jam the transmissions, then told us code talkers to do our best. The test would determine whether or not he could use us! Both the code talkers and the standard communications men were given the same message, one Hunt estimated would take four hours to transmit and receive using the old Shackle protocol.

  With the Shackle method, a mechanical coding machine was used to encode a written message. The encoded message was then sent via voice. These encoded messages were a jumble of numbers and letters, and unlike the Navajo code, were meaningless to the person transmitting them. At the receiving end, a cipher was used to decode the message. The entire process was cumbersome and prone to error.

  While the men utilizing the Shackle code waited for the encoding machine to accomplish its work, one of our men, I think it was William McCabe, transmitted the message to another code talker. I can’t remember who. The message that Hunt had estimated would take four hours by Shackle took only two and a half minutes by Navajo code—an impossible feat by current standards. And the message was transmitted accurately, word for word. Lieutenant Hunt was impressed.

  But we Navajo code talkers already knew our code was good. None of us wanted it to go unused. With a code that could keep military plans and movements secret, our country would outmaneuver the Japanese. We were sure of it.