CODE
TALKER
Life
of
WWII
Navajo
Code
Talker
Chester
Nez |
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Ballad In Three Voices
Chica In The Promised Land
Life Raft Blues
Secrets of the Dreamcatchers
Code Talker
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CODE TALKER
Life of WWII Navajo Code Talker
Chester Nez
by Judith Avila
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Chapter 1: Guadalcanal Invasion |
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Chester Nez's hands - hands that held the secrets of the Allies during World War II - fumble with the dime-sized microphone that connects him to the recorder. It is so different from the World War II microphones Chester was accustomed to, microphones that fit into his palm like a baseball.
His son, Mike, leans in and clips the tiny object to his father's shirt.
Chester clears his throat. "They told us the seasickness would go away by the time we got to the South Pacific," he says. "And it did."
***
(November, 1942: Approaching Guadalcanal)
Nothing ever dried. Marine Private Chester Nez's damp combat uniform chafed at the waist and the back of his neck. He stood on deck in the dark, the railing of the cargo ship dripping with rain. In the tropical climate, the wet railing - and everything else - was warm to the touch. The ship rolled slightly in the South Pacific waters, a constant unsettling movement that, just weeks ago, would have made him sick. But his stomach remained steady.
Physical equilibrium was good, but Chester worried about a larger balance. Like other traditional Navajos, he believed in the "Right Way." Balance must be achieved not only between individuals, but between each person and the universe. His hands gripped the rail. The ship's steady progress brought him inexorably closer to Guadalcanal. For three months, battle had raged there. How could anyone find harmony in a world at war? Within hours, Chester and his fellow Marines would join the fight.
Below decks, landing boats, machine guns, earth movers, and other heavy equipment filled the ship's belly. The military supplies, along with General Vandegrift's 1st Marine Division, were en route to Guadalcanal, an island in the Solomon chain off the northeast coast of Australia. At Guadalcanal, the Japanese enemy waited.
I could have stayed in high school, he thought. Maybe he should have. But he was Navajo, a warrior. Warriors protected their land and their loved ones, so how could he ignore the fact that his country had been savagely attacked?
He'd enlisted in the Marines just seven months ago, in April, 1942, only a few months after the Japanese strike against Pearl Harbor. Until joining up, he had never left the reservation, except for a few hours en route to boarding school. His muscled frame, barely meeting the Marine's minimum weight requirement of one-hundred twenty-two pounds, straightened. He was a man, now. His jaw set.
Chester pulled away from those thoughts. The ship would not reach Guadalcanal for a couple of hours. He walked to the mess hall, where the nervous faces of the other twelve code talkers aboard ship greeted him.
Wilsie jabbed a sharp elbow into his ribs. "Sure could use a beer right now. How about you?" He hesitated, obviously trying to lighten the mood. "Pabst Blue Ribbon or Budweiser?"
Chester chuckled. While in San Diego, on liberty from Marine basic training, the men had frequented bars, wearing their uniforms so they wouldn't get thrown out like other Native Americans did. Many of them had never had a drink before joining the Marines.
"Budweiser," said Chester. "Always Budweiser." He laughed, the laugh ending in a drawn-out, musical note. He shook his head, and switched from English to Navajo. "That place in San Diego. The Slop Chute, enit?" He glanced around at the other code talkers. "Wish we were there instead of here."
English came easily now, ever since boarding school when they were kids. Chester and his fellow code talkers knew the white words, but among themselves, they generally spoke in Navajo. They didn't do much moving around the ship or mingling with other Marines. Instead, the Navajo men gathered together on shipboard, practicing their code. Always practicing.
All thirteen men had had a hand in designing the clandestine code, together with sixteen other Navajo Marines, back in the States. Recruited for their fluency in both Navajo and English, they'd been locked in a room after basic training and told to develop a secret military language using their native Navajo. Now, each man was determined that the code would guarantee the United States' victory over the Japanese in the South Pacific.
"Jackass." Chester laughed. "Whose idea was 'jackass'?" The Navajo word for jackass - phonetically spelled tkele-cho-gi - stood for the English letter "J". Chester looked around at the smooth, dark faces. They all grinned. Whose idea had that been?
The white man's military had accepted the Navajos as tough Marines. Hardened by the rigors of life on the reservation, they out-performed their white peers. In basic training, Marine Sergeants bragged about the prowess of Platoon 382, the Navajo recruits. And their code was part of a bold plan to take the South Pacific Islands back from the dominant Japanese.
Cutting through endless ocean toward his first battle, the code's acid test, Chester and his twelve buddies studied and re-studied the entire vocabulary of two-hundred-plus words. All were fluent, yet all continued to practice. They could afford no doubts, no hesitation. Their accuracy and speed were a matter of life and death.
They practiced transmitting messages among themselves and to code talkers on other ships. The new language became solid and unshakeable, embedded in their minds as firmly as childhood memories. Messages were transmitted, deciphered, responded to almost without hesitation. The men were ready.
Chester chuckled to himself, thinking about the shipboard radio operator who'd heard the strange code and warned his commanding officer that the Japanese had broken into U.S. communications. Officers on the flotilla of ships compared notes. Had the security of their vessels been breached? They shut down all communications in order to isolate the Japanese transmissions. They listened, but heard only silence. Had the strange messages come from a Japanese submarine lurking in bottomless ocean waters?
Communications resumed, and there it was again, that strange language.
Not even the shipmates of the code talkers knew of their secret mission. But Admiral Nimitz and some of the other Admirals had been informed of the code developed by twenty-nine Navajo Marines. They finally realized that what they were hearing was that code. Forbidden to divulge this new secret weapon, they simply spread the word to other high ranking officers that a group of Native Americans had joined the Marines. And the United States Marines were speaking Navajo!
Four or five miles north of Guadalcanal, everyone gathered on deck in the rain. Chester looked around at his fellow code talkers and wondered whether his face was as taut as theirs. A couple made jokes in Navajo. The laughter was muted.
All the men on board were briefed on what to expect - in the water and on the island - when they landed.
I will be brave, Chester promised himself.
The air pulsed with apprehension.
A chaplain addressed them, blessing the men. Chester held the small buckskin medicine bag his father had sent and said his own silent prayer. Give me courage. Let me make my country proud. Let me live to walk in beauty. Around him the other Navajos seemed to be doing the same, each hoping to "walk in beauty" again in their native homes - Arizona and New Mexico.
After the chaplain spoke, a high-ranking officer, either a colonel or a general, stepped up to address his men. Chester nodded at Roy Begay, his partner for the landing, and tried to smile. The tall, swarthy Navajo, a skinny frame belying his strength, smiled back, but his expression looked forced. Though they'd been friends since boarding school, Chester had never seen good-humored Roy look so scared.
The officer talked straight, not trying to minimize the danger. "Some of you will not return from this battle," he said. "But always remember, you are defending your country. The Japanese attacked your land, your home. And now you will make your country proud."
Despite the peril they faced, the officer tried to put his men at ease, tried to help them understand what faced them on Guadalcanal. "It's okay to be scared," he told them. "It would be foolish not to be scared. And you men are anything but fools." He hesitated. "Just remember your training."
The frightened men nodded.
***
"It was hard to listen to," Chester recalls. "He spoke like a father talking to his son. Honest. He told us we might die." Chester's fists clench in front of him on the table. "We were scared."
A librarian peers into the window of the small study room and holds up ten fingers: ten more minutes until our time in the reserved room will end.
Chester grins. "I would have given a lot to see my home, with all those sunny days so pure and clear, back then. Not the constant rain and fog on Guadalcanal."
***
I can do this, Chester thought. He tucked his medicine bag back into the pants pocket of his fatigues.
When the officer stopped speaking, Chester walked off by himself. One of the Navajos called his name, but he kept walking, pretending not to hear. He thought about his father and grandparents, his younger sister, Dora. He pictured the dazzling sun of New Mexico, wishing he could feel its dry warmth baking his skin. He whispered a prayer of beauty:
In beauty all is made whole.
In beauty all is restored.
He thought about what he was to face in just a few moments, wondering whether he'd be one of the men to die. It was five o'clock in the morning, the most terrifying day of his life to date.
The Japanese couldn't know that the ship approaching Guadalcanal carried one of the United States' deadliest weapons: thirteen Navajo code talkers.
They approached the northern shore of Guadalcanal. Gray tones of daylight revealed black smoke drifting thick over the island. Good, thought Chester. American pilots had bombed the enemy, hoping to drive them away from the shoreline where the Marines planned their landing.
As they drew closer, the black smoke settling on his skin, he saw a helmet floating in the water. He tried not to look too closely, not wanting to see whether it was American or Japanese.
Chester and his buddy, Roy, watched as the first wave of men, laden with gear, climbed down heavy nets to their landing craft.
"We can do that," said Roy quietly. "Nothing to it."
"Ouu," said Chester in Navajo, biting the word off like the English word "oat." Yes.
Of course they had practiced landing lots of times, the climb down the nets, the rifle, the grenades, packs jammed full of the necessities of war. But this time enemy fire tore into the water and ricocheted off the ship. Men cried out - wild, incoherent shouts.
Their legs and hands shook. Nothing was the same.
The code talkers did not disembark in the dangerous first wave. Marine command deemed their mission too critical. As the Navajo men looked on, the landing boats filled, forming a circle offshore and waiting until all the craft in the first wave were manned. Then the boats hit the island all at once.
It will get better, Chester told himself, once we're in the Higgins boat, once we're moving.
But everyone in Chester's landing craft, the third wave, looked real worried. They had been briefed. The Japanese were masters of the South Pacific. Their dominance meant the United States had no bases on the islands. Bases, needed for refueling craft and provisioning the troops, were critical if the United States was to eventually attack the island monarchy of Japan.
*
The U.S. strategy was to conquer the South Pacific islands one at a time, thus becoming the commanding force in the area. So, three months before, on August 7, the first Marine invaders landed on a very different Guadalcanal. Back then only 2,200 Japanese occupied the island. Most were not soldiers, but construction workers building an airfield.
That first landing of the Marines met with little resistance from the construction workers. But within a day the Japanese sank four of the five United States cruisers that sat offshore, ships that supported the Marines on the island. U. S. transports and carriers withdrew in a panic, leaving the men on Guadalcanal exposed with no air cover and no reserve provisions of food and ammunition.
Even so, the hungry Marines used every bullet and drove the Japanese from the airfield. In two weeks, they completed the work begun by the enemy, christening Henderson Field on August 20, 1942.
The Japanese war strategy depended upon that airfield as a supply base. The enemy persisted in defending the remainder of Guadalcanal, bringing supplies and reinforcements from Bougainville, a large island to the northwest. Enemy ships maneuvered "The Slot" - the nickname for a strip of sea separating Guadalcanal from the Florida Islands to the north - in the dark of night. These night attempts at re-supply became known as "The Tokyo Night Express."
By the end of the third week of August, 900 Japanese reinforcements, eager to kill for their Emperor, had landed at Taivu, situated twenty miles east of the American-held beachhead. By mid-October, the Japanese had delivered 20,000 soldiers to the island.
When Chester and the other code talkers arrived in early November, the brutal fighting had already taken heavy tolls on both sides.1
***
Chester looks down at the library table, his face hidden by the bill of his cap. When he looks back up, his eyes lack light, his face is solemn. "It's a terrible thing to see someone that you just had a conversation with floating dead, beside you in the water.
"Sometimes your feeling is so low, and you get tears in your eyes and you think about the guys that you used to know, and how they got hit, and how they died. It's a terrible thing. You try not to think about those things, you know, but you look up ahead, you look around, guys getting hit. Bullets or hand grenade or artillery fire. How they died. It fills up your mind."
***
The code talkers' flat-bottomed, bulletproof Higgins Boat pitched steeply in the surf. Chester and Roy rode side-by-side, mute. Roy's good-natured features had frozen in a blank expression. No one made a sound.
When they neared the beach, a ramp-like door opened, and the men rushed out into chest-deep water, holding their rifles above their heads in the continuing rain. Japanese artillery shells exploded around them. Too close! Way too close! They waded among the bodies of Japanese and American soldiers, smelling death, as bullets pinged into the water.
Blood stained the tide washing onto the beach.
A Marine floated nearby. Chester had spoken with him only moments before. His sightless blue eyes stared up at a foreign sky. With the heavy water filling their boots and dragging against each step, Chester and Roy forced themselves to struggle forward.
Navajo belief forbids contact with the dead, but Chester and Roy waded through floating bodies, intent on not becoming one of them. Close your mind, Chester told himself. He tried not to think about the repercussions - all those dead men, their chindi violently released from this life. You are a Marine. Marines move forward. He mustn't let the horrors of war immobilize him. He had to make himself numb.
With bodies and parts of bodies filling the water, the two Navajos ignored the proscription against contact with the dead. They pushed the floating corpses aside, finally falling gasping on the beach.
On shore, the Navajos found the unit to which they'd been assigned. Each man hastily hauled a small folding shovel from his backpack. Kicking body parts aside, they made themselves as small as possible, crouching on the beach about 150 yards from the surf. There they performed their first battle duty: digging foxholes. Every thrust and twist of the shovel brought them closer to crude shelter. Enemy fire exploded around them. Rainwater filled the holes as they dug.
"All those bodies in the water," Chester said to Roy.
"Yeah?"
Chester stabbed his shovel deep into the sand. "We didn't really have a choice."
"No."
Chester lifted the shovelful of sand. Neither man needed to say more. It was good, having Roy with him. Roy understood.
That first night, the partners crouched in their foxhole, facing in opposite directions, so the knees of one man were near the shoulders of the other. The water crept nearly chest high. The two desert boys had heard tales of rain like this.
Chester bumped Roy's shoulder with his own. "Remember in boarding school? The white man's Bible," he said. "All this rain."
Roy chuckled. "Yeah. Noah and the flood."
"Ouu. Noah." Chester hesitated. "I'd volunteer to board his ark right now."
Neither man slept. Gunshots sounded in intermittent bursts, tearing the dark, heavy fabric of the night. In the soggy murk, Chester tried to picture himself back home in sunny New Mexico.
"Do you think we'll be scared like this all the time?" Roy asked, his voice breaking.
Chester answered simply. "Yes."
Roy sighed. "I'm going to pray," he said.
"Me, too."
Chester felt hot tears burn his eyelids, and noticed that Roy wiped at his eyes with both fists. "You and I, we're going to get through this," Chester said.
Roy just nodded.
Chester moved his lips, making no sound.
In beauty I walk.
With beauty before me I walk.
With beauty behind me I walk.
With beauty around me I walk.
With beauty above me I walk.
With beauty below me I walk.
His prayers brought him back home to Chichiltah, and he walked with the sheep in the place whose name meant "Among the Oak Trees." He could picture it so clearly. The view from Grandmother's land was beautiful in all seasons. Patches of bright green in spring, with the new buds on the oaks and scrub oaks. Masses of silver-green in summer, with the chamisa and sagebrush growing as tall as a small adult. Splashes of gold and red in autumn, when the oak trees changed color. Red and white in winter, the snow deep and nourishing over the brick-colored soil. And always, the low purple-red mesas watched the changing seasons, way off in the distance - a view you drank in like cold water on a sweltering day.
He smiled, remembering the sheep and goats, the sound of their bells. The baby sheep and goats wore jingle bells, and the adults a kind of small cow bell, nothing too loud, just enough noise to reveal their location if they wandered off. Chester loved the sound, like soft chimes in the dark. Maybe, if he concentrated, he could block out the gunfire and hear, instead, the bells.
______________________________
1 The Chronological Atlas of World War Two, Charles Messinger (Macmillan, New
York, 1989), p 124.
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