Code Talker

by Chester Nez

  Even after Hunt’s test, American fighting men who overheard the Navajo messages continued to be alarmed, thinking the Japanese had broken into the U.S. frequency. Communications men tried to jam the strange sounds. To identify ourselves as U.S. troops, and to keep our transmissions from being jammed, we code talkers needed a clear tag. We initiated our messages with the words “New Mexico” or “Arizona.” That was followed by the time and date, spoken in Navajo. We finished off with the time and date again, then with either gah, ne-ahs-jah, the letters R and O, standing for “roger and out” or with simply ne-ahs-jah for “out.”

  None of us liked to think about it, but we had also planned a strategy in case we got captured. If the Japanese ever forced a code talker to send a message, he would alert the person on the receiving end by embedding the words “do or die,” in Navajo of course, somewhere inside the message.

  When I looked around me at the other men, I could easily pick out the members of the 1st Marine Division who’d been fighting on the island for three months. They moved like zombies, their eyes focused straight ahead. None smiled or changed expression. They seemed not to notice us new guys—or anything else.

  That first full day on Guadalcanal, after we passed Lieutenant Hunt’s test, runners began arriving with messages. The runners, also called spotters, performed the dangerous assignment of scouting ahead of U.S. lines into enemy territory and reporting back on the locations of Japanese troops and armaments. They delivered messages involving combat details to communication personnel, to the front lines, and to the rear echelon. It was a dangerous job, especially at night, when they could be mistaken for Banzai. It was a job originally assigned to us code talkers, one we had trained for, and occasionally we went out on a run. But generally we were too busy sending messages.

  Roy and I grabbed the radio. We both wore headsets. We moved to a position close to a Japanese nest of eighty-millimeter machine guns. A continuous barrage of shells from those Japanese guns wrought heavy damage on our U.S. fighting men.

  A runner approached, handing me a message written in English. It was my first battlefield transmission in Navajo code. I’ll never forget it. Roy pressed the transmit button on the radio, and I positioned my microphone to repeat the information in our code. I talked while Roy cranked. Later, we would change positions.

  “Beh-na-ali-tsosie a-knah-as-donih ah-toh nish-na-jih-goh dah-di-kad ah-deel-tahi.” Enemy machine-gun nest on your right flank. Destroy.

  Suddenly, just after my message was received, the Japanese guns exploded, destroyed by U.S. artillery.

  I shouted, “You see that?”

  “Sure did.” Roy grinned, but didn’t stop cranking the TBX radio he held. The radio, the size of a shoe box, weighed thirty pounds. It stored up electricity generated when the crank was turned. Both of us wore headphones so we could hear each other. Thin red and yellow cords attached the microphone and headsets to the radio. There was a button for transmitting and one for receiving.

  “U.S. artillery nailed them,” I said.

  As I viewed this small victory—a direct result of my transmission—the wet, the fear, the danger . . . all receded for a few seconds.

  Roy and I ran and crawled to a new position, knowing the Japanese were experts at targeting the locations from which messages had been sent. The enemy picked up U.S. radio signals and delivered mortar shells to those locations. We never stayed on the radio a second longer than we had to. And the frequencies we used changed every day. Each day we were careful to dial in the new frequency on the TBX box.

  Immediately we focused on sending the next message, moving, then sending the next. Bullets zipping around us kept the level of noise high but that didn’t keep us from hearing incoming messages. Luckily both the headsets and our ears were good, and we heard the Navajo words in spite of the war exploding around us.

  Occasionally, I looked over at Roy, who tirelessly carried and cranked the radio. He nodded, still cranking.

  After a couple of hours, we switched positions. I cranked and Roy spoke. My head reeled with Navajo and English words, with coordinates, with messages sent. It was good just to crank for a while, good not to worry about slipping, making a mistake that could cost lives.

  Artillery shells whistled past us. I dived, the radio under me. Roy lay flat out on the ground. We never stopped transmitting.

  More than twenty-four hours passed before we were able to grab a few hours of sleep.

  We woke, still exhausted, in the hole we’d dug two days before.

  “I’m starving,” said Roy.

  Snaking our way to the mess tent on all fours, we ducked bullets and artillery shells. At the mess we grabbed some cold food for fuel, waved the omnipresent flies away as best we could, and ate ravenously.

  “Not like the hot food in boot camp,” I said.

  “Heck, no. That food was good,” said Roy around a mouthful of cold Spam.

  “Yeah, well, I’m eating everything I can hold,” I told him. “You better do the same. No extra meat on those bones.” I pointed at Roy’s lanky frame with my thumb.

  Roy grinned. “I weigh more than you do, I bet.”

  I shoveled a forkful of cold eggs into my mouth and swallowed. “Not too bad.”

  We returned to relaying messages. My throat grew raw with talk. Never before had I spoken so many words without a break. I gestured to Roy. He handed me a half-full metal canteen that looked like an overblown whiskey flask. I drank, grabbed the TBX radio, and started cranking. We tried to ignore cramped muscles, gnawing stomachs, and the ordnance exploding around us.

  Warships crammed the once-tranquil ocean along Guadalcanal’s north shore. Bodies covered the beach. Then darkness moved in, thick with smoke, masking the grisly products of war.

  Our messages relayed calls for ammunition, food, and medical equipment back to the supply ships waiting offshore. Messages transmitted the locations of enemy troops to U.S. artillerymen. Messages told of something unexpected that had happened in battle. Messages reported on our own troop movements. Messages forwarded casualty numbers, the Navajo code keeping the Japanese from learning of American losses in each foray. Throughout the days of battle to come, we sent those numbers back to our commanders on the ships each night.

  After being in operation for just forty-eight hours, our secret language was becoming indispensable.

  The hilly terrain on Guadalcanal posed real problems for the men operating mortars and artillery. Muzzle-loaded mortars were low-velocity, short-range weapons with a high trajectory, particularly well suited to uneven terrain. A mortar could drop into an enemy trench that artillery fire flew right over. Shells fired by field artillery reached a higher velocity and followed a flatter trajectory. Howitzers were similar to mortars in function, but larger.

  The men firing all of these weapons dealt with a serious issue. Artillery, howitzers, and mortars targeted an enemy who was frequently nose to nose with the American soldiers at the front. Marksmen had to clear the hills and the heads of our own troops, causing them no injury, while drawing an accurate bead on the enemy. This became especially ticklish when we were “walking fire in.” That meant that our weapons were shooting behind the enemy and drawing them closer to the American troops at the front line. As they drew closer, we continued to fire behind them, moving both our fire and the Japanese troops closer and closer to our own troops. There was no room for error in a maneuver like that. The old Shackle communications system took so long to encode and decode, and it was so frequently inaccurate, that using it for the transmission of on-the-fly target coordinates was a perilous proposition. Frequently, in the midst of battle, instead of using the Shackle code, the Marines had transmitted in English. They knew the transmissions were probably being monitored by the Japanese, so they salted the messages liberally with profanity, hoping to confuse the enemy.

  We code talkers changed all that.

  Roy and I traveled close to the mortars. And the mortars, due to their short range, placed us well within
the enemy’s line of fire. Not as close as the riflemen, who were always out front leading the attack, but still close.

  Sweat streamed down my back. I transmitted coordinates detailing the locations of Japanese and American troops. I knew men’s lives depended upon the accuracy of each word. I wiped my brow with a sleeve, but never stopped talking. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw a flash of fire. Sand and shrapnel kicked up into the heavy gray sky. I kept talking.

  Just then, a spotter, sent out to locate a pocket of Japanese soldiers and artillery, returned. Someone handed a slip of paper to me, bearing the exact Japanese location. The same paper also reported the location of forward U.S. troops.

  I squinted, rubbed my eyes, read the paper again. Any error could cause the death of my fellow fighting men. I’d sent hundreds of messages. Messages swam in my brain, jamming and tumbling over one another. I shook my head to clear it.

  I translated the data into Navajo code and spoke into the microphone that fit neatly into my fist like a baseball. I glanced in the direction my transmission would travel. Roy and I crouched so close to the American artillery and mortars that I could almost have shouted the information.

  I spoke clearly, carefully. I pictured the code talker who received my message translating it back into English for the gunnery men. I imagined those men planning a trajectory, one that would fire over the heads of the Americans and hit the Japanese.

  If a soldier was shot right beside us, we had been warned not to stop and help. Our transmissions could not be interrupted.

  That day, as the afternoon waned, communications slowed. Roy and I whispered in Navajo, joking with each other, trying to stay awake. Messages generally started coming in around 5 A.M., so we woke up and plunged right into work. When things were busy, nothing else entered our minds, just the delivery of information. Lulls were more difficult than a steady stream of messages. Periods of quiet allowed exhaustion to creep into our brains like a work-worn dog, turn around three times, and settle down, demanding sleep.

  We lay on our stomachs, on a relatively level stretch of land. Normally we tried to stay away from flat places, because they afforded poor protection. But we had a clump of bushes for cover, and the enemy had been lobbing constant fire, hitting the ground only a dozen yards away, so we didn’t dare run to a more protected place.

  I rested my Springfield bolt-action ’03 rifle next to my torso. I knew the hardware well, the smooth metal and wooden parts fitting together like the work of a fine craftsman. I had taken that rifle apart and put it back together blindfolded, in complete darkness. But the well-made weapon—of World War I vintage—was less important than my communications gear. I knew I would have to use that rifle, especially at night when the Banzai came. Yet even though we code talkers had proven ourselves to be excellent marksmen in basic training, our responsibilities differed from those of other combat Marines. Our primary job was to talk, not to shoot.

  The red light on the TBX radio blinked on. A small beep sounded, loud enough for Roy and me to hear, but not loud enough to alert the Japanese. A message. I pushed the receive button, and we both listened. It was Roy’s turn to talk, mine to crank. An explosion flared, not three hundred feet away. It was a daisy cutter, the kind of bomb that threw shrapnel out sideways, exploding outward rather than up. A jagged piece of shrapnel dug a hole in the beach nearby, but Roy didn’t seem to notice.

  I whispered to myself, “Damn Japs.”

  Roy pressed the earphones to his head, obviously straining to hear the Navajo message. He nodded, translating the message in his head to English and writing it down.

  “Artillery lieutenant,” Roy said, turning to me.

  I signaled a runner, who grabbed the message. “The lieutenant,” I said, raising my chin in the direction of a U.S. tank bearing ninety-millimeter guns. The runner took off.

  A few minutes later, he was back with a response. Roy read the English note, and—as all of us did—simultaneously translated it in his head to the Navajo code. He transmitted it.

  The Navajo code words were never written when we transmitted messages. That made us men living, walking code machines. And even if the enemy somehow managed to link our Navajo language to the new code, there was nothing written to help them learn the unfamiliar words.

  If the Navajo oral tradition had not been as strong as it was, human error could have rendered this method of communication impractical. But we code talkers called upon powers of concentration that had been developed by the constant exchange of unwritten information. As far as I know, we generally transmitted our messages flawlessly. If someone did make an error, someone else in the Navajo network would catch it and send an alert. And we never relaxed, never let up.

  I looked around and realized it was growing dark. Roy and I had been transmitting all day and would continue through the night and the next day with—if we were lucky—an hour or two to decompress before starting in again. I pulled a roll of tape from my cargo belt and bit a piece off with my teeth. I stuck the tape over the message light of the radio, masking the red light from Japanese eyes in the dark.

  “You think we’d get more sleep on board ship?” Roy asked.

  “What?” I chuckled. “And miss all this fun.”

  We men worked in pairs. Officially, two pairs of men who partnered together were coupled into a group of four, and two groups of four worked together with two rotators, bringing the total number in each band to ten. Generally, we ten sailed together on the same ship. When we reached an island, four of the code talkers in our band remained on board ship and the other six disembarked. Our positions—land versus ship—changed with different campaigns. Once onshore, the land-based men stayed in touch with those on the ship and with each other so everyone knew what was happening.

  I spent most of my time onshore, actively sending messages. And I, like the other code talkers, stayed in communication with all the talkers as much as possible, regardless of assigned groups. We’d report what was happening in battle around us. We’d let the rear echelon know when we needed reinforcements and give them the hot dope on whether a particular strategy was working. If someone screwed up and our men were targeted by friendly fire, we’d send a message through requesting a halt. That type of message was always heeded when sent by Navajo code, because the Navajo men receiving our messages knew the Japanese could not fake them.

  Our staying in touch had another advantage: if a man heard an error being made in a transmitted message, he’d click the transmit and receive buttons on his TBX radio several times. That click acted as a signal, telling the transmitter to recheck and retransmit his message. When messages were flying, it was difficult to tell where the click came from and to determine which message might contain an error. But we were fierce about deciphering any problems and correcting any misunderstandings. People make too much of how difficult the code was. We knew it like we knew our own names, so it wasn’t difficult for us. But every man worried about making some sort of error. The strain of having to be perfect ate at us. It weighed upon us every minute of every day and every hour of every night. Every bit of information had to be accurate: where the Japanese were, which way they were going to move, how many men they had. No one wanted any mistakes to get through and to endanger our own men.

  In addition, we had a battle liaison, a communications man, to whom we reported the day’s events, especially during periods of fighting. Each morning, he attended strategy sessions and tried to prepare us for what to expect of the day ahead. The Marines cared well for us men and attempted to fully utilize our skills in gaining an advantage over the enemy.

  Despite my exhaustion and the danger on Guadalcanal, I was glad to work the land position rather than the sea. When there was a communications lull aboard ship, I knew the code talkers there were assigned other duties. They might be ordered to unload cargo or inventory the supplies. Their attention was diverted from the battle at hand. On the island, there was rarely a lull, and we concentrated on one crucial thing only: relayi
ng the needs of troops in the midst of combat.

  A spotter arrived. He ducked down next to me to hand me a message. I now manned the microphone.

  “Fighter pilots,” he said.

  American planes were scheduled to drop bombs ahead of the American line. The message I held gave the coordinates of forward U.S. troop locations on the island. Before we code talkers arrived, some of the pilots had dropped their bombs as soon as they reached the island, hitting U.S. troops with “friendly” fire, then reversing course and flying back to their aircraft carrier. I’d heard how the brass got all over the pilots’ butts when they almost bombed my 1st Marine Division. Now we code talkers were utilized, relaying coordinates that would be forwarded to the pilots, making sure that the pilots knew the locations of their own troops.

  The runner took off, crouching low to avoid enemy fire. Exhausted, I took a sip of water from my canteen and translated the information into code. I relayed it to an aircraft carrier sitting offshore. As I finished, another runner arrived with another message to be sent.

  Roy reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a crushed packet of crackers. “Here. Eat something. You look like hell.”

  As it grew darker, we moved in closer to a couple of Marines who wielded a machine gun. Around nine at night, we heard footsteps. We made out a Japanese soldier running towards our position, waving a sword. He began screaming, “Banzai!” He ran straight up, his full height, not even crouching to try to protect himself. When he was maybe a hundred feet away, one of our guys opened fire. Several bullets hit the Banzai warrior, but he didn’t drop. He took his sword with both hands and plunged it into his stomach. Then he dropped. A sacred death. It made me feel sick, seeing that, seeing how a Japanese would gut himself rather than be captured by the Americans. I thought about American men I had seen butchered by the Japanese, trying to feel like it was okay that the guy had stabbed himself. But it never felt okay. Seeing death come, on either side, was something I never forgot.