Code Talker Memoir Project

Navajo Beliefs

• The Right Way- balance must be found between people and between people and their world

Beliefs

• Connection to nature
• Warriors and protectors of homeland
• No contact with the dead and the dead are just "unavailable"
• Cut hair and fingernails and old clothes should be hidden or burned because they believed in witchcraft and they could be used to inflict harm on the owner.
• Looking in the eye is disrespectful
• To walk in beauty was the traditional prayer
• Corn pollen and the four directions (East was where life began, South was where they got warmth, West was how the day was spent and what was ahead and behind, and North was where everything was put to

rest)

• The four mountains
• sweat hut coming-of-age ceremony at five years old

used the four elements (page 70)

• Personal medicine bags
• page 51 traditions for each season

Oral Tradition

Oral Tradition

• The creation story
• Only told during winter, hunting season
• The arrival of the Spanish and other Europeans who

pushed them into small reservations

• His grandma told about the “Long Walk” and fighting against

the white settlers

• Kit Carson destroyed crops, livestock, and told them to surrender and gather together at Fort Defiance, Arizona. Anyone who didn’t would be hunted down and captured or killed. They were forced to march 350 miles from there to Fort Sumner in New Mexico. It took 20 days and hundreds died. If someone got sick, they were killed. Pregnant women were killed for stopping to deliver her baby. Anyone who tried to help her was killed. If someone collapsed

from thirst or hunger, they were killed. At the fort, there were

over 8 thousand Diné, and a large number of Apaches. The

resources they were given were horrible and there

wasn’t enough to go around, an estimated

2 thousand Diné died in captivity

from disease and hunger

Language

Language

• Navajo is only spoken, and wasn't written yet
• In the story, the Navajo language played an important

role in the creation of the world, similar to Christianity

• Creation story on page 36 and 37
• People are rarely called by name, rather kinship terms like brother or grandmother
• "Last names" were from the mother's clan name
• Navajo is an incredibly complex and tonal language (high and low) but have many unique prononciations for each word
• Navajo is spoken less frequently today, but the boarding schools still did not succeed in erasing the language from children
• Page 104 and 105 differences between English and Navajo
• Several white marines who grew up on the reservation and

knew quite a bit of Navajo still could not be code talkers

because they still couldn’t pronounce things correctly

all of the time

• you could only be fluent if you were Navajo and

grew up listening to it since birth

Nature

Animals and Environment

• The Right Way suggests that people are equal to

the environment and animals.

• Originally had 300 ewes, some goats, kids and lambs,

a few rams, and a horse, Snow and six dogs

• Coyotees are evil
• Deep friendship and care for the herd
• Corn pollen
• Anything they kill or cultivate gets used completely without waste
• They let any animals into their houses when they were cold,

hungry, or sick

• Strong alliegance to the land and what it provides, different from Christians only thanking god's creations for being

expendable

• Did not ever ask from more from nature, just to walk
• in its beauty
• Whenever he was in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable

place, he always imagined the countyside and

his beloved herd

Community

Community

• In the late fall, neighbors and relatives would get

together and bring food and gifts to share along with

stories together around the fire. They did not have electricity

or radios so this was how they would spread news like births,

deaths, the prices of things to trade

• They raised their sheep together and rotated grazing grounds

and used the land as one collective

• This sense of community doesn't apply just at home. Through the

war and his time at school he immediately connected with the other

Navajo people there and developed their own community

• Sense of community was challenged after the livestock massacre people put up fences, many went against the Navajos who

worked for the government, they could not rotate grazing

grounds now

• Because of their collective hardships and sense of

connection, there is a strong sense community

wherever they go

Livestock Massacre

Livestock Massacre

• Bulldozers, operated by BIA Navajo men dug 3-4

trenches 150 feet long and four or five feet deep

• Thought it could be some new ceremony
• They had to herd their sheep and goats into the trench

otherwise they would be thrown in jail

• They were doused in flammable material and set on fire
• It took his grandma years to get about a thousand in the herd and relied on them for jobs, materials, food, and happiness. Sheep were

a measure of wealth. Their family survived the depression with them

• All herds over 300 had to be reduced to 300 in the entire area, including horses and cattle which were shot rather than burned
• Many thought there was no point in working hard

and felt powerless

• FDR's New Deal programs
• Dust bowl concerns, creating a national park,

public-works jobs, and Reorganization Act

Religion

• Two and a half miles to church Thursday and Sunday

without fail

• Chester and his friend were altar boys and they memorized

every prayer and could do everything perfectly after 4 years. His

incredible memorization abilities play a major role in the effectiveness

of the code

• Chester questions the connection between Navajo and Catholic pg. 61
• He loves singing and was in the choir for 3 years
• They all loved Christmas and the school did a lot for the holiday (or as

Chester calls it, “the big day”)

• Disliked that the Christians did not have a strong connection to the earth,

just god’s creations and son

• Torn between cultures, not knowing which one they belonged in,

confusion, both looked down on the other pg 62

Religion

English

English

• They were not taught the correlation between Navajo

words and the English translation, they just wanted to wash

the entirety of the language from their minds through extreme measures

• They could not understand instructions and were punished immediately
• They brushed his teeth with soap for speaking Navajo and he could not taste anything else for 4 days
• It was best not to answer any questions, but the teachers caught

on and randomly called on students instead

• This way of teaching discourages learning and only teaches

kids to resent teachers and other students

High school

High School

• He had to attend public high school for 4 years in

Gallup, New Mexico and students freely spoke Navajo in the

hallways, and there was no corporal punishment

• Classes were only in English, but since there were so many

Navajo students, he spoke both English and Navajo

• Football!!
• Partway through tenth grade, the Hopis gave a deteriorating

school to the Navajo in Tuba City, Arizona, that was closer to his

home. He never grew to like it because the building and food was

awful and there wasn’t much to do except watch the news

• In late spring of 1940, the Navajo Tribal Council, not waiting for

the US, said (84) that they would stand ready to aid and defend

the US government and fight for all that recognizes and

respects minority rights, and the motherland, Navajo

Nation, and family

Basic Training

Basic Training

• They still had to complete basic training against the

Bureau of Indian Affairs’ advice that they should not fight

• There were a lot of similarities between boarding school and

basic training that they felt at ease, and also compared to the basic

tasks they did at home

• The exhaustion that conquered many Marine recruits did not beat the Navajos because the physical tasks that they had to do were routin
• One day they were all lined up and were punched in the stomach to “see if they’re getting tough” Chester believes that this was all in good fun
• Carl Gorman instead hit the corporal and they boxed it out, and Carl

stood his ground

• The cultural differences they experienced during basic training was the

most difficult part (96) but through friendship, they persevered

• An excerpt from The Marine Corps Chevron on page 97
• Platoon 382 earned one of the highest scores in marksmanship

of any Marine platoon in history

• One expert, 14 sharpshooters (including Chester), and 12

marksmen

• Learned morse code and semaphore still
• page 99 final inspection

Leaving the Checkerboard

Leaving the Checkerboard

• Downtown San Diego was definitely an experience with

all of the new sights, lights, and tall buildings compared to their

life only in the Four Mountains

• They were free on the weekends after working on the code.

They mostly explored San Diego and went to bars. On the base

there was “The Slop Chute” restaurant and bar

• If they weren’t in uniform, native americans could be refused

service

• They often also went to Tijuana, Mexico where there is a bar

right on the border. Marines returning from Mexico always had

to be checked out because they were assumed to have gotten

into trouble

• The code talkers never got into trouble or got

too drunk, but the military police always had to

watch over them

The Team

The Team

• Of the original 30 selected, only 29 went to basic

training

• Only one of the 29, Gene Crawford, had been in the reserves

and worked with codes before, and he and John Benally, and

John Manuelito set the direction for the group to develop the code,

both of whom stayed behind to teach the code to new recruits

• Many words were difficult to translate on page 109 so they had to

ask three Navajo-speaking military men to help them (Felix Yazzie,

Ross Haskie, and Wilson Price)

“Indistinguishable in my mind from the original twenty-nine... they

deserved as much credit for the code just as much as any of us did”

• Descriptions of the guys page 110-112 the buddies!!
• so many of them were just silly guys
• They all had to be allies to each other, none could fall

behind or feel excluded. They were like brothers

• Many of their unique experiences through the

war are now lost in time

Creation

Creating the Code

• Double encrypted
• Started with words for the English alphabet- 5 days
• No dissention in the room, they worked together
• They quizzed each other every night, all the time, and they had to

devise English phonetic spelling for the previous unwritten language and

practiced writing in upper case and they all had to look the same

• Memorization was second nature because of oral tradition
• No writing in battle- English messages would be encrypted and translated

into Navajo by radio and back into english when received

• A lot of planes, boats, and equipment did not have direct translations so

they used animals or other objects to represent them (battleship- whale and

bomb- egg)

• Later, new code talker recruits added two more words to represent

each letter (because one word per letter might make it easy to figure

out they represent letters, and based on how often they are used,

figure out each one) and over 400 additional military terms.

Ended up with around 700 code words total

Testing

Testing the Code

• They had to memorize it to the point where they

only thought about the code word. They had to be fast,

accurate, living coding machines

• There was an incident where, during a practice where they

were on ships and land to transfer code, and someone not involved

heard the messages and had everyone ready with weapons thinking

that the Japanese had invaded the US mainland. A couple of code

talkers had to be taken to headquarters to clarify that it was not

Japanese, and instead Navajo.

• Generals were “troubled” by the foreign sounding words, but they

witnessed the efficiency and were so impressed that they thought

that they were cheating. They worked so hard to be perfect, and

were so dedicated, to the point where others were suspicious.

• They were separated so they couldn’t see each other when

transmitting code and guarded. They were still

transferred the same perfect way.

• Expert US code breakers were put to the test,

but they in no way could break

the code

Japanese

• Differences of the Japanese on page 124 and 125. Warriors,

was an honor and goal to die in battle. Supreme race. Manifest

destiny, you get it

• Banzai men-suicide attackers who came on foot in the night. They

neither wanted to die by them, nor even witness them.

• Capture was worse than death
• Constant fighting day and night
• The injured still killed Americans who came to their aid
• The code talkers had a lot of empathy for the native people of the island,

also being victims of colonization and war (pg 161)

Japanese

Code in Battle

Using code in battle

• The communications people there were very

skeptical about changing the code, even though it

was much more efficient, this was its first time used in

battle. They hated changing tactics in the middle of the war.

• They decided to test it out immediately and sent a message on

the first night. Hunt’s other radio operators panicked and

jammed the radio thinking that the Japanese had broken into their frequency.

• They compared their code to the shackle code, which would take 4 hours to transmit the same message, they only took 2.5 minutes
• Shackle code explanation 131 and 132
• They needed a tag before they transmitted code because other communications guys were still worried, so they said either

New Mexico or Arizona and the time and date in Navajo

• Crank radios
• Runners
• Assigned new code talkers halfway through

Physical and

Mental Challenges

• What war felt like after a while on page 147
• Fought crocodiles and huge crabs as well (page 154 and 155)
• Disease, rain, and rot
• Sending messages while fighting in close quarters on the bare

minimum amount of sleep with no time to stop

• When the radios didn't work or the messages weren't recieved,

they had to be their own runners

• Surrounded by dead bodies
• Had to teach and adjust to new comrades constantly
• The incredible importance of the messages put a lot of stress
• Still had no idea if his family knew or how they were

Physical and Mental Challenges