Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWIIDetailsCode Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two FREE Shipping on orders over . “Gripping in its narrative, Code Talker is history at its best.”—Colonel Cole C. Kingseed, U.S. Army (Ret.), co-author of Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters“A fascinating inside look at one of WWII’s most closely guarded secrets…This is an important book, a previously untold piece of our history.”—Marcus Brotherton, author of Shifty’s War “You don’t need to be a fan of World War II literature to appreciate this memoir…a fascinating melange of combat in the Pacific theater, the history of the Navajo people and the development of a uniquely American code.”—The Associated Press “A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.”—Kirkus Reviews“A remarkably affecting first-person account of the Navajo Marines who served their country with distinction through some of the worst battles of the Pacific theater.”
My friend, Navajo code talker Chester Nez, died on June 4, 2014, at the age of 93. He was laid to rest in the National Cemetery in Santa Fe. To honor him, New Mexico flags were flown at half mast. Police closed the 55 miles of freeway leading from his funeral in Albuquerque to the cemetery, so the funeral cortege could pass. Drivers, pulled to the side of the highway, stood by the road saluting, while 400+ motorcycle honor guards followed the casket. A fine farewell for a humble man who was not even issued a birth certificate back in 1921.I first met Chester in January, 2007, and recorded his stories for three years. Writing Chester's memoir changed both of our lives for the better. I gained a second family and a deeper understanding of a culture different from my own, and Chester was thrilled that readers would learn how he and his fellow Navajos, the WWII code talkers, helped their country win WWII. This is a story that remained a secret for too long. I hope that you will enjoy reading our book as much as we enjoyed writing it!!
The book's dedication says a lot about Chester's desire to have all code talkers recognized:This book is dedicated to the 420 World War II Navajo Marine code talkers - men who developed and implemented an unbreakable communications system that helped ensure the American defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific War.When the war ended, other combatants were free to discuss their roles in the service and to receive recognition for their actions.But the Marines instructed us, the code talkers, to keep our accomplishments secret. We kept our own counsel, hiding our deeds from family, friends and acquaintances.Our code was finally declassified in 1968, twenty-three years after the war's end.This book may be my story, but it is written for all of these men.May they and their loved ones walk in beauty.Reprint edition (August 7, 2012) 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) #42,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > Native American
in Books > History > Americas > Native American in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Military > World War II 5 star78%4 star18%3 star3%2 star1%1 star0%See all verified purchase reviewsTop Customer ReviewsBe very careful ....| Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two In Search of History - Navajo Code Talkers (History Channel) The Navajo Code Talkers (25th Anniversary Edition) See and discover other items: military memoirs, the first americansNot fully declassified until 1968, the Navajo code remains the only oral military code that has never been broken.Mr. Nez’s death, at his home in Albuquerque, was confirmed by Judith Schiess Avila, the co-author of his memoir, “Code Talker,” published in 2011.For Mr. Nez and his fellows, World War II was quite literally a war of words. Their work, and the safety of tens of thousands of American servicemen, depended crucially on the code that they had created during 13 fevered weeks in 1942, as the prospect of Allied victory in the Pacific seemed increasingly uncertain.
Members of other Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Choctaw and Winnebago, using codes based on their languages, were also recruited for the war effort, serving in Europe and North Africa. But the Navajo, who served in the Pacific, furnished the war’s single largest contingent of code talkers. About 400 Navajos followed the original 29 to war; of that later group, about 35 are still living, The Navajo Times, a tribal newspaper, reported this week. Serving on the front lines in the Pacific’s key battles, Mr. Nez and other members of the Marine Corps’s 382nd Platoon — made up entirely of Navajos recruited for their fluency in the language — used the code to relay movements of American and enemy troops, casualty reports, coordinates of strategic targets and other vital intelligence to Marines in the field. “There were no machines or other devices that could scramble voice communications that could be used on the front lines,” David A. Hatch, the National Security Agency’s historian, said in an interview on Thursday.
“What the code talkers did was to provide absolute security for the information we transmitted on the radios, denying to the enemy vital information that we were picking up from their communications.”In 2001, Mr. Nez and the 28 other creators of the code were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, most posthumously, by President George W. Bush. The men of the 382nd have been commemorated in a string of recent books; a Hollywood film, “Windtalkers” (2002), starring Nicolas Cage and Adam Beach; and even an action figure, Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe.What remains less well known is what took place before they went off to war, when the 29 present at the code’s creation built a covert communications system whose crystalline simplicity belied its linguistic impenetrability. Nor did every account of the code talkers’ work focus on what happened when they returned to the United States. There, for Mr. Nez and others, hardships included post-traumatic stress disorder and marginalization by the very country they had served.
Chester Nez was born on Jan. 23, 1921, in Chichiltah, N.M., known in English as Two Wells, and reared on the Navajo reservation nearby. His mother died when he was very young. His Navajo given name has been lost to time; his surname, pronounced “nezz,” means “very tall” in the language. The Nez family had been fairly prosperous, and Chester grew up herding its large flock of sheep. But in the 1930s, responding to what it deemed overgrazing in the region, the federal government slaughtered tens of thousands of Navajo sheep, including the Nez family’s. They were reduced to subsistence farming.At 8, Chester entered the first of a series of Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that he would attend in New Mexico and Arizona. Assimilation into white society was the goal of such schools, and he was assigned the name Chester, after President Chester A. Arthur.Students were forbidden to speak Navajo. The penalty for doing so, Mr. Nez recalled, was a beating, or having one’s mouth washed out with “a bitter, brown soap.”
In 1942, when Mr. Nez was a high school student, a Marine Corps recruiter visited his school. The Marines were looking for young men who were bilingual in English and Navajo. He enlisted in May.“When joining the Marine Corps, I thought about how my people were mistreated,” Mr. Nez said in a 2005 interview. “But then I thought this would be my chance to do something for my country.” After boot camp in California, he and the initial Navajo cohort were sent to Camp Elliott, in San Diego, and told to come up with a code based on Navajo.The plan was the brainchild of a World War I veteran named Philip Johnston. The son of missionaries, he had been reared among the Navajo and spoke the language fluently. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Johnston persuaded the Marine Corps that Navajo — whose syntax and tonal contours differ vastly from those of English — would be the perfect vehicle for encoding spoken communication. Charged with creating a code that was fast, accurate, memorizable and uncrackable, the 29 Navajos set to work in the spring of 1942.
The code they conceived used two layers of encryption. The first layer was the Navajo language itself, known to be understood by only a handful of non-Navajos, none of them Japanese. But what the men developed that spring went far beyond ordinary Navajo, and that was where the second layer of encryption came in.First, they created a glossary of hundreds of words used in battlefield communication. While some were simply Navajo translations of their English counterparts, many others were poetic circumlocutions.For “America,” for instance, they substituted “ne-he-mah” (“our mother”). “Lieutenant colonel” became che-chil-be-tah-besh-legai (“silver oak leaf”). “Battleship” was “lo-tso” (“whale”), “submarine” was “besh-lo” (“iron fish”) and “destroyer” was “ca-lo” (“shark”). The men also developed an encrypted alphabet that could spell any English word. For each letter of the Roman alphabet, they substituted one or more Navajo words;
the words’ English translations began with the encoded letter.To indicate “A,” a code talker would say “wol-la-chee” (“ant”), “be-la-sana” (“apple”) or “tse-nill” (“ax”); B was “na-hash-chid” (“badger”), “shush” (“bear”) or “toish-jeh” (“barrel”), and so on.The result was a system that sounded nothing like Navajo yet could be employed with great facility by those trained in its use.“The Japanese tried, but they couldn’t decipher it,” Mr. Nez told CNN in 2011. “Not even another Navajo could decipher it if he wasn’t a code talker.” Handed a written English message, a code talker took to his radio, relaying that message, encoded, to a compatriot at the front. The Navajo on the receiving end, having memorized the entire code, rendered the message back into English and passed it on. The written English copies were destroyed immediately.“We could never make a mistake, because many communications involved bombing coordinates.”
After Guadalcanal, Mr. Nez was sent to the battles of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea; and the islands Peleliu and Angaur.It was no soft service. On Angaur, an American service member mistook Mr. Nez for Japanese and put a gun to his head before a superior intervened. The code talkers were considered so indispensable that they were given little respite, often working 35 hours straight without food or rest, hunkered down in foxholes or dodging bullets.“We would land on the beaches, which were littered with dead Japanese bodies,” Mr. Nez told The Arizona Republic in 2011. “My faith told me not to walk among the dead, to stay away from the dead. But which soldier could avoid such? I walked among them.”About a dozen code talkers were killed in action.Mr. Nez returned home from the war to less than ideal conditions. He was unable to vote: New Mexico did not grant suffrage to American Indians until 1948.When, in uniform, he went to the Federal Building in Gallup, N.M., to register for the identity card that Indians were then required to carry, a white civil servant told him, “You’re not a full citizen of the United States, you know.”
Prohibited, like all the men of the 382nd, from discussing his service, Mr. Nez was plagued by nightmares and spent more than five months in a San Francisco military hospital. “My condition was so severe I went psycho,” he said in a 2005 lecture. “I lost my mind.”Yet of the returned code talkers, he considered himself among the lucky ones. “Some turned to drinking or just gave up,” Mr. Nez said in an interview last year. His father came to his rescue, explaining that his nightmares were caused by the spirits of dead Japanese. Mr. Nez underwent a traditional healing ceremony, and the dreams largely ceased.He studied art at the University of Kansas, but left before graduating when his money from the G.I. Bill ran out. (The university awarded him a degree in 2012.)After serving stateside in the Korean War, Mr. Nez worked for many years as a painter and muralist at what is now the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque. Mr. Nez’s marriage to Ethel Pearl Catron ended in divorce.