“Code Talker,” by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila
Navajo Chester Nez has bad memories of boarding school. But without boarding school, he never would have become a code talker, because boarding school is where he learned to speak English. As a small child, he spoke only Navajo. I grew up in Albuquerque and knew a few Navajo personally, so I was drawn to read this memoir.
Nez’s 2011 memoir about his experiences as a code talker during WWII utterly absorbed my attention from the first pages. At Guadalcanal in WWII, the 1st Marine Division is battle weary. The guys that began talking to themselves in a steady stream “weren’t going to last,” Nez writes. He prays for safety to the “Navajo Gods” and to the “Anglo God.” Constant rain falls in thick sheets. There are clouds of insects, and crocodiles and huge crabs that bite. Bombs and bullets are flying. Almost everyone suffers from sores that fester on their bodies, dysentery, and typhus. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes attack in swarms, so the men are given bitter yellow pills—atabrine. The smell of death is everywhere. Men grow emaciated and weak. When the division is finally awarded some R&R in Australia, the code talkers aren’t allowed to join their comrades, because having the code talkers around to keep manning their radios is vital to the campaign’s success. But the Navajo men accept their fate with stoicism.
The Japanese have no clue how to break the code. Nez and his partner are sent to another island called Bougainville. At one point, a sniper’s bullet whines by Nez’s head. One of the code talkers is shot and killed by friendly fire, having been mistaken for a Japanese suicide warrior, or Banzai. Time and time again, on different islands, Nez also faces death. He describes the horrors of war—dead bodies, screaming Japanese soldiers running from bunkers with their uniforms on fire—and his own emotional reactions. One time, Nez himself was mistaken for a Japanese soldier, and nearly shot by one of our own soldiers.
What was most interesting to me was Chester Nez’s spiritual beliefs and the mythology of his people, the “Diné.” The Navajo believe in the “Right Way” of life. They hold ceremonies conducted by a medicine man or woman, with sand paintings, singing, chanting, rattles and drums. After the war, when Nez says he suffers from attacks by “the devil spirits of my dead enemies,” he believes that only a special ceremony can cure him—one of the “Bad Way” ceremonies. I highly recommend this memoir to anyone interested in the Navajo culture, the code talkers and the history of World War II.