Code Talker

by Chester Nez

  [It] has come to my attention that the occasion will feature a special tribute to the Marine Corps Navajo Indian Code Talkers. I welcome this opportunity to reinforce the best wishes I extended to you, with special personal tribute to these outstanding citizens whose successful mission earned them the gratitude and admiration of all Americans. Their resourcefulness, tenacity, integrity and courage saved the lives of countless men and women and sped the realization of peace for war-torn lands. In the finest spirit of the Marine Corps, their achievements form a proud chapter in American military history. My congratulations to them on behalf of all their fellow citizens.

  But somehow my sleeping enemy awoke. The nightmares returned. They quickly grew more frequent, until I again dreaded sleep.

  “You need a ceremony,” Ethel told me. “Chinle is a place with a lot of magic. We can put up an Enemy Way there.” Ethel’s relatives lived in Chinle, Arizona.

  Another Enemy Way sing would combat the bad dreams, so my oldest brother, Charlie Gray, traveled to Chinle. There, he directed preparations for the sing. A cookhouse—a type of lean-to with a tent at the back—was built with two east-facing doors, one for my family and one for Ethel’s family.

  A hogan was prepared for use in the ceremony. Each person entering the hogan had to move clockwise around the room, careful not to step over anyone. That was considered disrespectful, bad manners.

  Charlie Gray acted as my guide during the ceremony, telling me where to go and what to do next. By tradition, as the patient, I did not sing and pray with the others during the ceremony. Also, no one could touch me, although they could acknowledge my presence by a nod or a yá’ át’ ééh greeting.51

  Despite Charlie Gray’s best efforts, things went wrong. Somehow, the balance was off.

  First, the pot drum broke. The man in charge of the drum had soaked the skin used for the drumhead to keep it supple. But when he checked the drum, the taut skin was cracked, as was the base. My relatives took the unusable drum way off into the mesa and left it there. Somewhere they managed to get another.

  A young girl led the Squaw Dance, carrying a prayer stick with a gourd rattle, called a rattle stick. No one was allowed to dance unless the young girl was dancing, holding the prayer stick. When the afternoon sun grew hot, she fainted. The dance was stopped until she recovered, got back onto her feet, and was able to again lead.

  Young kids drank alcohol under the cover of night—something strictly forbidden in any ceremony. Their lack of respect further damaged the efficacy of the sing.

  A rattlesnake attempted to enter the hogan where my family and I stayed. The man assigned to guard the door stepped on the snake’s head, killing it. That conflicted with the Navajo belief that all things should be respected. The guard should have caught the snake and released it somewhere away from the participants.

  Those unorthodox happenings worried me. Someone who didn’t like me or my family had undoubtedly caused the bad things to happen. I worried all the way through the Enemy Way sing, knowing there was something wrong somewhere. I didn’t say anything to anyone, though, just kept it to myself. I reasoned that the bad things happened because someone hadn’t come to the ceremony with a good heart. Negativity always threw everything out of balance.

  After the disappointing Enemy Way, my relatives decided to put on a Good Way ceremony to set things right. The ceremony, the Holy Way, was held immediately. It lasted for another two or three days, with many participants.

  By the end of the Holy Way ceremony, I felt that the unfortunate things that had occurred during the Enemy Way had been cleared. After that, my bad dreams, for the most part, disappeared. I believed in the power of the ceremony, knowing that if one believed, it would work.

  As Stanley, Mike, Ray, and Tyah got older, Ethel grew discontent. While they were young, she had worked from home, making jewelry and taking in laundry.

  With the children all in school, she started to work outside the home. Over time, she worked at several different jobs—a car mechanic, a secretary, and a waitress at a local bar. Sometimes she partied with the people she met at work. She and I began to pull away from each other.

  I spent more and more time with my kids.

  One sunny afternoon, I nailed a basketball backboard to the back of the house while Uncle George held the ladder. I climbed down and stood back. Good. The rim looked level. George and I waited impatiently for the boys to get home from school. A few hours later, the children arrived.

  “Come on out back,” I said, barely able to contain my smile.

  “Whoa! Look at this,” Mike said. “This is great.”

  Mike, Stanley, and a group of friends played basketball for hours.

  Although I worked, I made sure to spend lots of time with my children and their friends. Our family had moved to a house on Sixty-first Street Southwest, in Albuquerque, a quiet area. On weekends, the children and I played football and baseball out in the street. I never tired of their company. We generally played until sundown, with Ethel sitting on the porch and watching while she crocheted.

  I guess I never grew up completely, because I was always ready to get down on my hands and knees to play marbles. Sometimes I let the boys try out my boxing gloves. Our house became the hangout for all of Mike’s friends.

  Mike told me that his friends said they wished they had a dad like me. I figured I was lucky to have great kids of my own and a neighborhood of their friends who enjoyed hanging out.

  Even when our family took trips, we took the children’s friends along. I had learned to drive an old stick shift, after graduating high school, by watching how other people did it. I learned how a clutch and a gearshift worked, before actually trying them out. I put this knowledge to good use once I had a family. Ethel and I took them camping and to visit Aunt Dora. Everyone had a good time, and the tagalong buddies always wanted to go again. I viewed several of the children as honorary sons.

  But I was strict. I expected my sons to do well in school. They could miss class only if they had a very good reason. They were expected to obey their mother and me without argument.

  Soon, however, their mother was no longer there to watch over them. I didn’t know how to tell the boys. I gathered them in the living room.

  “Your mother and I are going to get a divorce,” I told them. Our relationship hadn’t improved, and Ethel had moved out.

  “Why a divorce? I never even heard you argue,” Mike asked.

  “We’re just not happy together,” I told him.

  I scheduled court proceedings to make the divorce final. The boys and I waited in court, but Ethel never appeared. The judge allowed me to keep my four boys. They were good kids. We divided up all the chores, and everyone did his part. I was happy to have them with me.

  1974 to 1990s

  I woke up and checked on the kids. Stanley, my oldest, wasn’t home. Where had he gone last night? Oh yeah, a powwow. Stanley was twenty-one, a man, so I didn’t worry.

  That same day a policeman knocked at the door. My gut clenched. Why would the police come to my house?

  “Mr. Nez? Father of Stanley Nez?” the officer asked.

  “Yes.” I felt my heart weighing heavy in my body.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Nez, but Stanley was killed in a car accident.”

  It wasn’t until a week later, when one of the men involved in the accident came forward, that I pieced together the events leading up to Stanley’s death.

  Stanley had attended a powwow. Afterward, he joined a bunch of friends for a party out on Albuquerque’s West Mesa. The land was an empty expanse of desert, populated by Native American petroglyphs—carvings in stone—but not by people or houses.

  There was no drinking allowed at the powwow, but the “after” party was not so strict. Stanley and his friends drank and sang songs. The gathering, termed a “49-er,” grew lively as the young people sang forty-nine songs.52

  Apparently, Stanley left the party on foot. A car sped up on one of the many dirt tr
acks that crisscrossed the mesa, and Stanley hitched a ride. The driver was drunk, and someone in another car chased them. They smashed into a cement culvert, killing Stanley in the passenger’s seat and the driver. Someone in the backseat survived, but he hitched another ride and told no one about the accident. Not until the next day were the car and the two bodies found.

  A week passed before the third man gave the facts of the accident to the police, facts that wouldn’t bring Stanley or the dead driver back.

  I remembered what a good boy Stanley had been, how he’d protected his little brother Mike, walking him to elementary school every day.

  Stanley had inherited the artistic talent that had inspired me to be a fine-arts major in college. At twenty-one, full of ideas, he already had a collection of paintings and drawings that he’d created over the years. I thought about a drawing that Stanley had started, one that brother Mike—then a senior in high school—especially loved. In it, a Native American man rode on a white horse. In the background an American flag faded into the clouds.

  For some reason, just days before his death, Stanley had talked with me about the picture. “You’ll have to finish this drawing for me,” he said.

  The drawing was never finished. For a long time after Stanley died, I couldn’t make myself care about life. My sons Michael, Ray, and Tyah graduated and moved out of our home. I felt the need to escape the city of Albuquerque, where I’d lived when three of my children had died. In the mid-1970s, after suffering from a series of blackouts so that I could no longer climb a ladder safely, I had retired from the VA. I moved back to Chichiltah to help Dora with the heavy tasks of living on the Checkerboard. There was wood to cut and split and livestock to tend.

  In 1982, President Ronald Reagan gave the code talkers a certificate of recognition and declared August 14 to be National Code Talkers Day.

  Ethel, my ex-wife, died in the late 1980s. A year or two after her death, I moved back to Albuquerque, living with my son Michael (Mike); Mike’s beautiful wife, Rita; and their three children, Latham, Shawnia, and Michael.

  On September 17, 1992, an exhibit honoring the code talkers of World War II was dedicated at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Slowly, over the period of years since the declassifying of the code in 1968, more and more people learned of our wartime story.

  2000 to 2001

  Once our code secret had been out for a while, many people began to see us code talkers as heroes and as one of the most effective weapons the United States had utilized in fighting the Japanese. In April 2000, Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico proposed the “Honoring the Navajo Code Talkers Act,” Senate Bill 2408. It was signed into law on December 21, 2000, by President Bill Clinton. The act called for the recognition of the code talkers, and authorized the awarding of gold medals to the twenty-nine original code talkers and silver medals to the ones who followed. Soon, those honors were bestowed

  We “original twenty-nine”53 and our families boarded a Marine jet in Albuquerque. Four of the five surviving original code talkers were making the trip: John Brown Jr., Lloyd Oliver, Allen Dale June, and myself. All four of us were in our seventies or eighties. Within hours, we arrived in Washington, D.C.

  My son Mike; Mike’s wife, Rita; and their three children, Shawnia, Latham, and Michael, waited with me in the Capitol Rotunda. The other three code talkers and their families waited, too. A fifth living code talker, Joe Palmer (formerly Balmer Slowtalker), was in the hospital and too frail to attend. He was represented by his son, Kermit.

  As we anticipated the arrival of the president, the Rotunda filled with people. I wiped sweat from my brow. This award would bring the events started in 1941 at Pearl Harbor full circle. It was July 26, 2001, just forty-seven days before our country endured another brutal attack—the 9/11 terrorist assault on New York and Washington, D.C.

  We craned our necks, watching for President George W. Bush. I surveyed the room from the head table where we were seated. It was a standing-room-only audience. I wondered about the men who had died never having told their families that they were code talkers. Some of them had not been identified in their Marine records as being code talkers and so they received no recognition. How strange it must have felt to be a code talker and to die with that secret, knowing your family would never know.

  When President Bush arrived, he gave a speech praising us—our character and service. I listened carefully as the president spoke.

  . . . Today, America honors 29 Native Americans who, in a desperate hour, gave their country a service only they could give. In war, using their native language, they relayed secret messages that turned the course of battle . . .

  At home, they carried for decades the secret of their own heroism. Today, we give these exceptional Marines the recognition they earned so long ago . . .

  In presenting gold medals to each of them, the Congress recognizes their individual service, bravely offered and flawlessly performed . . .

  With silver medals, we also honor the dozens more who served later, with the same courage and distinction . . .

  Above all, it’s a story of young Navajos who brought honor to their nation and victory to their country . . . On active duty, their value was so great, and their order so sensitive, that they were closely guarded. By war’s end, some 400 Navajos had served as Code Talkers. Thirteen were killed in action, and their names, too, are on today’s roll of honor . . .

  Native Americans have served with the modesty and strength and quiet valor their tradition has always inspired.

  That tradition found full expression in the Code Talkers, in those absent, and in those with us today. Gentlemen, your service inspires the respect and admiration of all Americans, and our gratitude is expressed for all time, in the medals it is now my honor to present.

  May God bless you all.

  After speaking, the president awarded us the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow. The first recipient of that medal had been George Washington, back in 1776. When it was my turn, I snapped to attention and saluted. The president saluted back. The audience cheered.

  “Why did you salute instead of shaking his hand, Pops?” Mike asked me later.

  The other four men had shaken the president’s hand when they received their medals.

  “He’s our commander in chief,” I said, “and you salute your commander in chief. You don’t shake his hand.”

  A reception, hosted by MGM Studios, followed the ceremony. MGM announced their soon-to-be-released epic movie Windtalkers, a war movie involving the World War II code talkers.

  Harry Tsosie was the only one of the first 29 code talkers to die during the war. Of the approximately 390 code talkers who followed the original 29, 12 were killed in the war, bringing the total deaths to 13. Given the deadly Pacific arena where we all fought, and given the fact that we were in the thick of every battle, we men did well. The fatality numbers are not as large as might have been expected.

  Later that year, the 320 documented code talkers who followed us original 29 were awarded Congressional Silver Medals, many of them posthumously. Quite a few code talkers—a number estimated to be from 70 to as high as 100 by some—are thought to have been undocumented and, subsequently, unrecognized.

  After the gold medal presentation, I was in even greater demand as a speaker. I traveled all over for interviews, wearing my official code talkers’ uniform. A red peaked cap represented the Marines. A gold shirt, with a 3d Division patch on the arm, stood for corn pollen. Navajo jewelry showed respect for the Navajo people, the Diné. Light-colored pants recalled the earth and all of its inhabitants.

  Among the places I visited were Washington, D.C., Boston, New York City, Dallas, Georgia, and California. My son Mike accompanied me. In addition to speaking engagements, I appeared on Larry King Weekend on June 8, 2002, with another code talker, Roy Hawthorne. I also appeared on the television show 60 Minutes and was interviewed by Hoda Kotb for the Today show. National Geographic magazine intervie
wed me twice. In 2004, the Boston Red Sox—who had suffered from the “Curse of the Bambino” since the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees—asked me to bless their team. Major David Flores, who had arranged several speaking tours for me in the Boston area, and his son rode with Mike, Rita, and me in the car approaching Fenway Park. A police motorcycle escort accompanied us, sirens blaring and lights flashing. We navigated the Boston traffic, and I arrived in time to give the team a Navajo blessing and toss out the game ball. It was April, and for the first time since 1918, eighty-six years, the Red Sox won the World Series.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Celebration

  June 28, 2009

  Sunday dawned cloudy, with the promise of wind and rain. I woke early. My family—son Mike, daughter-in-law Rita, grandson Michael, and great-grandson Emery—dressed in party clothes, and helped me to dress in the red cap, gold shirt, and tan pants of my code talker uniform.

  I had been honored by the U.S. Congress, but on this day my extended family was hosting a celebration in my honor. It was a big deal, something for which they’d planned and done fund-raising. It was to be held in Chichiltah, the Checkerboard Area where I had grown up. I wanted to get there early so I could socialize with my relatives before the other guests arrived.

  Outside the truck window, en route to the reservation, were sweeping vistas of mesas and distant mountains, all colored in a thousand shades of red and purple and tan. The sun, slanting through heavy cloud cover, transformed familiar landmarks into burnished jewels. As we approached Chichiltah, the piñon pines grew taller and more abundant, occasionally interspersed with regal ponderosa pines. Rock outcroppings emerged from hills like fabulous sculptures.