Navajo Code Talkers
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| Route 163 in Monument Valley, Utah - One Portion of the Code Talker's Highway |
At the age of eight, along with other native children in the region, Chester was taken from his home and sent to a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Obligated to learn English, the students were forbidden to speak their native Navajo tongue or practice their culture while at school. Nevertheless, Chester continued his education into his late teens, returning home to his family every summer. .
After Japan invaded Pearl Harbor in 1941, Chester and his best friend Roy Begay felt compelled to join the war effort:
"We, like other Native Americans, had been born to the warrior tradition. Like other Navajos, we saw ourselves as inseparable from the earth we lived upon. And as protectors of what is sacred, we were both eager to defend our land." *
And so, when Marine recruiters arrived in the region in the spring of 1942 seeking young Navajo men who were fluent in both Navajo and English, Chester and Roy enlisted.
Theirs was a special and secret mission. Up until then, the Marines had been using a standard "Shackle" code in the Pacific: the code was written in English, encoded via machine, sent, received at the other end, decoded, and written down again in English. The entire process could take an hour or more, and the code was vulnerable to being broken by the Japanese, necessitating repeated changes.
A Marine civil engineer named Philip Johnston, who had spent part of his youth on a Navajo Reservation with his missionary parents, is credited with coming up with an alternative plan. The Navajo language was spoken by only a small population, and - more importantly - was an unwritten oral language, meaning that the Japanese could not themselves learn it from any published source. Chester and 29 other Navajos were subsequently challenged to come up with a code based on their native tongue.
The book goes on to describe Chester's experiences in the fox holes of Guadalcanal and other Pacific battles, and then moves on to his life back in the U.S. after the war. I'll end the narrative here, but there are some takeaways from Chester's story that especially impressed me:
- As indicated in the quote above, Chester and his friends were proud to serve our country in the Marines. However, as members of the Navajo Nation, they were not even allowed to vote at the time; Native American weren't granted full voting rights in every state until 1962.
- The Code Talker mission remained secret even after the War's end; it was not declassified until 1968. What it meant for Chester Nez and the others was that, unlike other veterans, they could not openly talk about their specific experiences and important role in helping win the war. The silence weighed heavily on them, as all that the heroes could convey to their families and friends for more than twenty years was, as he put it: "The Marines isssued me a gun and some ammunition and told me to go hunt down and kill some Japanese".
- It took until April of 2000 before the Code Talkers were officially honored for their heroism. A bill introduced by New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman titled "Honoring the Navajo Code Talkers Act" was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in December of 2000, and in July of 2001, the surviving Code Talkers were awarded with the Congressional Gold Medal by President George W. Bush.
In recent years, the states of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah have dedicated portions of their state highways to the Code Talkers, and August 14 has been designated as the annual "Navajo Code Talkers Day"
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| Navajo Code Talkers Monument |
What I wish we had known while we were travelling in that part of the country is that there is a Navajo Code Talkers Monument in Window Rock, Arizona, just a half hour detour from our path along I-40.
We'll just have to plan another trip!
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* Notably, the Navajo Tribal Council issued a resolution in the Spring of 1940, while the war in Europe raged but well before the U.S. entered the war. It reads in part:
"Whereas, the Navajo Tribal Council and the 50,000 people we represent, cannot fail to recognize the crisis now facing the world in the threat of foreign invasion and the destruction of the great liberties and benefits which we enjoy on the reservation....
....Now, Therefore, we resolve that the Navajo Indians stand ready as they did in 1918, to aid and defend our Government and its institutions against all subversive and armed conflict and pledge our loyalty to the system which recognizes minority rights and a way of life that has placed us among the great people of our race."
