Code Talkers erased from Pentagon History
Note: Washington Post reports that the Pentagon has just erased a vital part of our American history by deleting pages celebrating the code talkers who used their language to help win WWII, especially the Battle of Iwa Jima. Pfd. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian Marine, was one of six Marines in the iconic Iwa Jima flag-raising photo.
This story is excerpted from the new novel, Railroad Girl by Brenda Peterson. Selected as an Editor’s Choice in Cutthroat Literary Journal, Arizona
CODE TALKERS
In this spacious and mysterious desert, we journeyed to meet a Navajo code talker. Stubby lichens pushed up through sand to embrace sharp rocks and purple spikes of thistle; sagebrush somersaulted alongside the reservation road like fellow travelers. With the fierce desert wind, the skeletal tumbleweeds made swifter progress than our battered pickup.
We bumped along a road so rutted that my teeth chattered with each pothole. Soon the dirt road was a little more navigable. Signs of habitation. The desert turned an unexpected green in an oasis of willow trees and grass. Three humped red rock ridges loomed ahead. Right in the middle of one cliff was a massive round window through which the azure sky shone like a wide-open eye.
“Window Rock,” my Navajo friend, Slim, confirmed quietly, with pride. “Not much farther to my Uncle Leo’s.”
Now the desert was populated with occasional round, mud-made hogans, their single stovepipes smoking. Bands of sheep trotted along, herded by young boys and a few nipping dogs. At last, Slim pulled up to a well-kept hogan with a red truck parked outside. No one came out to greet us.
“Remember, it’s our tradition to wait until the person we’re visiting knows we are here and welcomes us,” Slim informed me.
We waited until a tall man opened the wooden door to his hogan and politely motioned us inside. The round room was so smoky I couldn’t make out the man at first.
His face was shrouded somehow; but he was handsome and self-possessed. There was an authority in his sculpted chin, his shoulder-length black hair like a curtain hiding his face, his oval eyes steady and penetrating behind large glasses. He seemed both studious and strong. The Native man was obviously an elder, but he moved with the athletic grace of someone much younger. A man who still worked with his hands.
“Slim,” Uncle Leo’s voice was low and unexpectedly melodious. His tone held some fondness, but also some sly humor.
“Uncle,” Slim nodded and gave him a hearty embrace. “I’ve brought a friend to hear your war stories.”
Leo nodded and motioned to a stool near the wooden table that was covered with sheep’s wool. Slim and I took our seats. Leo now turned to me. The smoke around his face cleared and I could see kindness in his dark eyes. And something even more unexpected: curiosity. “Didn’t get your name?”
“Miranda.”
“Good to meet you, Miranda,” he reached out to shake my hand.
His handshake was firm. It steadied me somehow.
He smiled faintly and nodded at his nephew. “Like my nephew, you can just call me ‘Uncle Leo.’”
At last Uncle Leo turned his full attention to Slim. What passed between them was unspoken, but the very definition of close family. Tribe. At last Uncle Leo said something to Slim in Navajo that I couldn’t follow. Maybe Slim was assuring his uncle that he could trust me, a stranger. Someone who longed to hear history told by those who lived it.
“Our loyalty is always to family first . . . tribe . . . homeland . . .” Uncle Leo paused, and then added, “that’s what the war reminded us.”
He was talking about World War II and the role his tribe’s code talkers played in winning it. But just as I was about to ask him direct questions, Uncle Leo turned away to his kerosene cook stove. “Hungry?” he asked.
As he puttered with the skillet, waiting for the grease to hiss so he could make fry bread, Uncle Leo began to talk in that low, musical voice of his. His tone was so level, he might as well have been giving us a recipe for some traditional meal; but there was a quiet intensity to each word, as if it cost him something.
“I was about the same age as you kids, when the soldiers came to our boarding school looking for recruits,” began Uncle Leo. “Navajo kids had been stolen from their parents and forced into these white schools . . . more like prison camps. If we spoke our own language, we were brutally punished . . .” He didn’t turn around to face us, but his voice rose a little above the sizzle of the stove.
“The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor and their troops controlled the South Pacific. They were winning the war because they could decode any of our messages.”
“Stop,” Slim said suddenly. “Didn’t you sign a secrecy oath, Uncle Leo. Sure you want to tell the whole story to an outsider. A reporter?”
“It’s time to tell it all so we won’t be forgotten,” the elder’s voice dropped, and again that strange tenderness in his tone toward his nephew, as if he were teaching him something Slim had simply forgotten. Or perhaps never learned.
“But you promised the government,” Slim said nervously.
“The government signs treaties that are made to be broken,” Leo said softly.
Leo turned back to the stove, pouring fry bread batter into the skillet with a practiced flourish.
“So . . . you couldn’t speak your own language?” I asked, raising my voice above the frying pan sizzle to urge Uncle Leo on.
“Right . . . but somebody got the idea that the Japanese would never figure out Navajo . . . so few people spoke it and it’s really complicated. I was one of the only boys in ninth grade who hadn’t given up secretly speaking my own language.” Uncle Leo expertly used a spatula to flip the fry bread. It was a golden brown and smelled delicious. “Next thing I knew, I was tossed into a train with Marine tags around my neck bound for a boot-camp barracks at Camp Pendleton.” Here, Uncle Leo stopped and turned to me. He offered me the first of the fry bread.
“We Navajos created a code, an alphabet based on our obscure language,” he continued, “that same language they’d systematically tried to eliminate.” He served Slim the rest of his fragrant fry bread. He paused as we slathered the bread with butter and some homemade apricot jam. After satisfying himself that our hunger was sated, he added proudly, “The Japanese never did break our code.”
“Tell her about Iwo Jima,” Slim demanded, his mouth full of fry bread.
Uncle Leo poured more batter into his skillet. “Such a tiny island, Iwo Jima . . . and so much sacrifice,” Uncle Leo began, his voice almost a whisper. His face was fierce with memory. It was how people look when they were trying to remember something too painful to feel all over again. “Only eight square miles . . . and deep into that tiny island, twenty-two thousand Japanese had dug out hundreds of tunnels. They had to protect this island because if Americans captured it, we could use Iwo Jima as an airfield to bomb Japan directly.”
Uncle Leo paused to gaze out the small door of his hogan. “Some of us code talkers figured it was a suicide mission. Black men, red men, we were always sent to the front lines first. But we code talkers volunteered to go there.”
I realized I was witnessing the passing on of history and leaned nearer.
“On the boat to Iwo Jima, I said my prayers with the corn pollen my mother gave me for protection,” Uncle Leo explained. “There were about 100 of us code talkers dispatched with our short-wave radios. It was 120 degrees. We never slept for two or three days at a time. So many men died on that little island. Some of them my friends.”
We all fell silent, eating our fry bread. It was as if the war were still going on.
“If it hadn’t been for the code talkers,” Uncle Leo concluded, “the Marines would never have captured Iwo Jima and raised that famous flag . . . that blasted island was the bloodiest battle of the whole damn war.”
“But you saved millions of lives,” Slim laid a hand on Uncle Leo’s shoulder.
“For all the good it did Navajos.” An expression crossed Uncle Leo’s brow that I’d not seen in him before. Bitterness “No parades when we came back home . . . we had to sign those damned secrecy oaths. For decades we were not allowed to tell our story. Most people in this country still don’t know it. So, the story hides deep inside . . . mostly nightmares.” Uncle Leo turned to Slim. “Some of the other code talkers have died without anybody even in their families knowing how important they were in winning the war . . . that’s why I’m telling you now.” He called Slim by his Navajo name and the boy straightened in his folding chair as if suddenly taller.
For the first time, Uncle Leo looked his age. “Do you know that it took years and many visits to Washington D.C., for Navajo soldiers who fought to get any veterans’ benefits?”
“Do you regret it?” I asked. “serving a country that denied you so much?”
The elder was quiet, contemplative. At last, he turned to his nephew, his face blank with love. “He’s here. You’re here. I’m still here,” he said, his chin set as if in stone.~
Update: In response to public outrage from this Pentagon erasure, the government says it will restore these code breaker pages. Stay tuned! ABC News:
Brenda Peterson is the critically acclaimed author of over 20 books, including the novel Duck and Cover, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year.” Her memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth was chosen as an Indie Next “Best Top Read” and named among the “Top Ten Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year” by The Christian Science Monitor. Forbes chose Peterson’s Wolf Nation as a “Best Conservation Book of the Year. Library Journal gave Peterson’s new book, Wild Chorus received a starred review. Peterson’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Orion, and Oprah magazine. She is at work on a new novel, Railroad Girl, and a non-fiction memloir on healing. www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
