The Japanese did try to figure out the code from captured Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code.

The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not normal spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible.

And there was little or no internationally published linguistic work on the Navajo language. Sometimes it gets put out that there was no written Navajo. In fact an early written version existed by about the 1890s. By 1937 a full and formal writing system had been created by a Navajo linguist and an Anglo American linguist. Books, a dictionary, and newspapers and other material were being published.

When the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them— even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him. All he could tell was that some of the transcriptions seemed like Navajo nouns. There was no grammar that made sense—and Navajo has very complex and necessary grammar. Japan had advanced universities and linguistics departments. They had an idea it might be an Athabaskan language. Only Navajo and Western Apache would have had enough young men who were fluent Native language speakers who were also fluent English speakers. At first they thought Kieyooma was a Japanese American and treated him badly. Then they found out he was Navajo. They then brought him some transcriptions of recordings. He identified a few words. He could not tell them what it meant. Then the tortured him and he could not nd would not help any more.

He was in New Mexico’s 200th Coast Artillery unit when the Philippines fell. He had a horrible war as a POW on the Bataan Death March. Then he was later held at POW camps near Nagasaki and was there during the bombing. He survived the bomb and was released three days later. He returned to the Navajo Nation and lived a long life, dying in 1997 at age 77.

The reason capturing Navajo did not work was that it was a code, not spoken Navajo. The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized by the Navajo Code Talkers. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. The US Marines only wanted to use such a code if it could send exact, word for word, and letter for letter transmissions. There were about 400 words in the Code.

First they recruited 31 Navajo who were fluent in English and Navajo to go through US Marine training at Camp Pendleton. Then they recruited them for the Code program. The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code in a Marine base in the San Diego area (Camp Elliott) with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. He suggested they create a version of the Navy verbal alphabet but instead using Navajo words and having three different versions (like Able, Baker, Charlie). The first idea of the Code was brought to the Marines by Philip Johnston. He was a WWI veteran, and engineer in L.A. and he spoke Navajo and had Navajo friends and contacts because he had grown up as a missionary kid on the Navajo Reservation.

The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were assigned three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter. Then those words were translated into Navajo words. In this way, English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For example, using the letter substitution part of the Code, the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog” on some days. Or on other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense.

It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words in the Code have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical in Navajo.

In English , you can sometimes guess at the meaning if the words are in the correct order, even if the conjugation is a bit wrong. Like “I Flagstaff go”. In Navajo, and many other agglutinative or polysynthetic languages, often all, or most of the sentence is said in one word that is properly conjugated. And in languages like Navajo you often need to put more information in the sentence than you might normally do in English. So, in Navajo you need to decide the aspect and subaspect and mode and as well as tense for the verb. Navajo sentences have the verb at the end. Often you don’t need the subject (I or you) because it is conjugated onto the verb. The Navajo verb is formed by a stem preceded by prefixes which include inflectional prefixes. The mark subject, object and distributive plural. Then there are lexical prefixes, and a classifier. All stems are monosyllabic and begin with a consonant. Voice and aspect are more important than tense. So you might say “Flagstaff I-went-round trip-repetitively-in self propelled wheeled vehicle-as I customarily do”.

Then, to speed the Code transmission up, and make it even harder to break, the Navajo Marines who made the Code substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. Almost none were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” in Navajo. Other things were less obvious like for “Battleship” the word for “Whale” in Navajo (łóóʼtsoh) was used. A “Mine Sweeper” was the Navajo word for “Beaver” (chaaʼ). That would be pretty impossible to guess

A note here, as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines (tsin naaʼeeł táłtłʼááh naagháhígíí –”boat, under the water, the one that goes”), and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the US military before WWII. They had words for everything in the world that existed in 1940. And they have words for all the newer things today.

The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. In English we customarily borrow many words. In Navajo it is easy to generate new words. Most nouns are made by conjugating verbs so they indicate what the object does. They borrow very few words and they have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for “telephone”, or “train”, or “nuclear power” are all made from Navajo stem roots. The movies Star Wars and Finding Nemo have been dubbed in Navajo.

There are practically no words that come from English.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The US Marines were careful about that. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Code Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

Here is more that I wrote on the creation of the Navajo Code. It is an interesting story:

How did the WWII Navajo code talker program get up and running?

In 1942, a man named Philip Johnston (1892 – 1978) thought up and presented the idea of the Navajo Code Talkers to the US Marines. The first 29 Navajo Marines were recruited, and with help from a Marine cryptographic officer, created the code in San Diego using Navajo nouns as the basis for the code. Philip was the son of a missionary, William Johnston.

He brought Philip and his family from Kansas to the Leupp (Tsiizizii in Navajo), Arizona area in 1896 when Phillip was 4. It is on the Navajo Reservation east of Flagstaff. He learned Navajo from playing with Navajo kids. In that time and place almost all Navajo were Navajo as a first language, and most were not comfortable with English, or did not speak it at all.

The area was 98% or more Navajo, and it is still that way even today. Phillip’s father helped broker a peace in the Padre Canyon Incident in 1899. This was when three white cowboys and county lawmen went off and killed two Navajo and one ranch hand was killed.

This was on land that the Anglo cattle people moved into and were trying to take from the Navajo. Rev. Johnston acted as mediator between the Navajo and the authorities in Flagstaff. He promised the accused for Native American men that they would get an adequate defense.

They surrendered and were brought trial at the Coconino County Courthouse in Flagstaff in September, 1900. On April 11, 1900 an indictment was handed down by the grand jury for the three surviving Navajos for the murder of Montgomery and the serious wounding of two of the posse members. U.S. Attorney for Arizona Territory Robert E. Morrison was assigned to defend the Navajo.

He was assisted by E. S. Clark, an attorney provided by the Indian Rights Association of Philadelphia. District Attorney James Loy handled the prosecution The injured Navajo, Haastiin Biwoo Adini, addressed presiding territorial Judge Richard E. Sloan and Johnston’s son, Philip, age 9, translated the speech for the judge.

The judge was impressed with the Navajo’s stature and words. Judge Sloan found all the Navajo men innocent. On Sept. 20, they were acquitted of all charges. They were acquitted in a town that was mostly made up of white ranchers and lumber people who had not looked favorably on the Indians prior to the trial.

This gave the family, and Phillip, good will among the Navajo in the area. Here is Biwoo Adini Below 1904 picture with Biwoo Adini at far right with Rev. William Johnston next to him. Mrs. William Johnston is at far left with son Philip Johnston next to her on her right.

The incident got national publicity. News went to Washington D.C. In October, Johnston and a contingent of interested parties, met with President Theodore Roosevelt. They carried a map showing where the Navajos lived and how long they could remember their ancestors being there. Philip Johnston translated the Navajo message for the president.

The president issued an executive order on Nov. 14, 1901, setting aside more land between the Hopi reservation and the Colorado River and putting it into the Navajo reservation boundaries. These lands became known as the Leupp Extension.

It was named in English for Francis E. Leupp who helped get the reservations lands increased in this area in 1901 (the the Leupp Extension). Leupp was a member of the Indian Rights Association, a former muckraking journalist, he was appointed Indian Commissioner by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

The Navajo name for the area, Tsiizizii, means “hair sack”. It comes from the Navajo name for a BIA official in the area who was named Joseph E. Maxwell —he was famous for his toupee. As a gesture of appreciation for Rev. Johnston’s mediation efforts, Leupp residents invited him and his family to establish a mission settlement at Tolchaco, seven miles downstream from the present-day community of Leupp on the Little Colorado River.

That is where Phillip spent the rest of his childhood. Phillip Johnston went the Northern Arizona Normal School,(now NAU). In 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Army for WWI. He trained in Camp Fremont at Menlo Park, California and then went to France as part of the AEF. He might have heard about Comanches being used to talk on in Comanche on the radios (not in code) in WWI France. After the war he went to USC and got a graduate degree in civil engineering degree in 1925.

Then he worked for the city of Los Angeles water department. Here is Phillip Johnston as an adult. He continued to keep contact with his Navajo friends both on the Navajo Nation and in the LA area. Many Navajo and other Natives moved to the Greater LA area for war work, and earlier for the rail. After the start of WWII and Pearl Harbor, Johnston heard of the American codes being broken.

Secure front line radio communications quickly became an issue since many of the Japanese military were proficient at English and traditional codes were too slow and cumbersome for battlefield use and Japanese code breakers had success. He had the idea to use Navajo language. He was still fluent and knew that no one spoke it outside of America. It was known that there were no good studies of the language in Japanese or German.

He presented this idea to the Marine Corps. They asked for a demonstration. He recruited four Navajos he knew who were working in the Los Angeles shipyards. By the end of WWII over 24,000 reservation Natives and another 20,000 off-reservation Natives had served in the military. In addition, another 40,000 left the reservations to work in the defense industry.

Here are some Native Americans in WWII. Philip’s idea, at first, was that Navajo language could be used unmodified to transmit military communications. That would have been just speaking in Navajo. Before the demonstration, after the four Navajo men got some sample messages, the Navajos said that they would need to use word and letter substitution methods to convey the messages in any sort of exact manner.

The men discussed it a while and came up with some agreed substitution words. At the demonstration was Communications Officer Major James E. Jones, USMC at Camp Elliott (next to Camp Kearny, now Miramar) in San Diego; and Pacific Fleet General Clayton Barney Vogel. The test was done by installing a telephone connection between two offices. Vogel wrote out six messages that were typical of ones during combat. One read “Enemy expected to make tank and dive bomber attack at dawn.” This was transmitted as: “Enemy tank dive bomber expected to attack this morning.”

The remaining messages were translated with similar proficiency. It was done in a few minutes. The other codes in use at the time took a long time with a code book on both ends. After the demonstration, someone (it is not clear who), decided that a coding system for Navajo had to be created and used instead of conversational Navajo. General Vogel was convinced and he wanted to have the code made. He asked for the Marine Corps to recruit 200 Navajos. He was given authorization to recruit 30 for a pilot project. At the time, military field radios were not equipped with encryption/decryption technology. The enemy could just listen to radio traffic. The Japanese were continually breaking the American codes, often with terrible results. In the letter above Vogel says they were the only “tribe that has not been infested with German students during the past twenty years.

These Germans, studying the various tribal dialects under the guise of art students, anthropologists, etc., have undoubedtly obtained a good working knowledge of all tribal dialects except Navajo.” Here is Phillip Johnston on a recruiting tour of the Navajo Nation in Oct 1942. Here are the first Navajos enlisting for the Code project 1942. Here is First 29 Code Talkers of 382nd Platoon after boot camp at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside Here are some of the Navajo Marines at Camp Elliot where they worked out the Code. The first group of 29 that were recruited first did seven weeks of standard Marine recruit training (boot camp). The first all-Navajo Platoon 382 graduated from MCRD, SD on June 27, 1942. The Platoon was then sent to Camp Elliott for about eight weeks of basic communications training. In that time the men were to develop the code. Three more Navajo joined them.

The men were guided by a cryptographic officer in the basics of employing letter and word substitution encryption methods. The 32 Navajo created the code. The names of the first 29 Navajo who used the code in battle are: Charlie Sosie Begay, Roy Begay, Samuel H. Begay, John Ashi Benally, Wilsie Bitsie, Cosey Stanley Brown, John Brown Jr., John Chee, Benjamin Cleveland, Eugene Crawford, David Curley, Lowell Damon, George Dennison, James Dixon, William McCabe, Carl Gorman, Oscar Ilthma, Allen June, Alfred Leonard, James Manuelito Sr., Chester Nez, Jack Nez, Lloyd Oliver, Frank Pete, Balmer Slowtalker, Nelson Thompson, Harry Tsosie, John Willfe Jr. and Yazzie William. The Navajo Code had at its base a letter substitution code. A teaching code book was developed in San Diego, but it was never taken into the field.

There was no code book to be captured. The Navajo had to memorize the whole code. Ultimately it was 411 words. Each letter in English was given three (or two) possible English words that started with that letter.

Then each word was translated into Navajo. For example, for “A” the English words, ant, apple, or axe were chosen to be used. Those words were then translated into Navajo. In this example, “ant” was red ant = wóláchííʼ. “Axe” was tsénił. And “apple” was bilasáana.

The words were randomly rotated for each letter. The Navajo words, nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh all translated to words that start with B in English (badger, bear, and barrel). The coders had to memorize 78 letter substitutions.

For some words, the translation being used was difficult to decide. It would be hard to know for a Navajo who did not know the code. For example one of the words for “D” was chʼįįdii. This is normally translated as ghost. It is a cultural idea about the bad disease-causing spiritual residue that remains on or near a person’s bones or a dead body. It is a Navajo cultural idea.

However, the coders used it for Devil=D. The others for D were bįįh=deer and łééchąąʼí =dog. Personally, I would have never guessed that a chindi stood for D. Then, there were word substitutions to speed transmission. There were about 211 of these at first, and eventually 411 or so in the total code. For example, the word “submarine” was “metal fish”= béésh łóóʼ.

A fighter plane was a “hummingbird”= dahiitįhii. Sometimes the story of this gets mangled. Navajo is, and was a living language. At that time they already had names for cars, tanks, and airplanes. It is not that “they didn’t have names for things”.

They did not use the standard Navajo words- they made up code words. For a Navajo speaker who did not know the code, and there were a lot of other Navajo on the military in WWII, the code sounded like a long list of words with no Navajo grammar and verbs that were not conjugated and in the wrong place.

For non-Navajo the phonemes and tones are very difficult. For speakers of Japanese or English it is hard to tell where one word ends and hard to verbally reproduce or write down. The insertion of code words instead of letters in places made it a little harder. So one would need to know that “cha” (beaver) did not stand for B but was for a cruiser (naval ship).

And then one needed to tell it from “chʼah” which means hat and was one of the words for H. The others for “H” were atsiighaʼ (hair), and łįį́ʼ (horse). After the creation and memorizing of the Navajo code, about half the men were assigned to the 1st Marine Division, and 16 were assigned to the 6th Marines and the 2nd Signal Company of the 2nd Marine Division.

Three men stayed in San Diego to recruit and train Navajos to become code talkers. Around 400 learned and used it over the war, occupation of Japan and into the Korean War. On Aug. 7, 1942, the first Marine division hit the beaches of Guadalcanal with 15 Navajo Code Talkers.

This was the first offensive move in the Pacific arena. The battle was the first where the Navajo code would be tested in actual battle. The Coders worked in teams of two on each end of the radio. One to work the radio and one to transmit the code. “ The Code Talkers successfully translated, transmitted and re-translated a test message in two and a half minutes.

Without using the Navajo code, it could take hours for a soldier to complete the same task. …the Code Talkers were used in every major operation involving the Marines in the Pacific theater. Their primary job was to transmit tactical information over telephone and radio. During the invasion of Iwo Jima, six Navajo Code Talkers were operating continuously. They sent more than 800 messages. All of the messages were transmitted without error.

The Navajo Code Talkers were treated with the utmost respect by their fellow marines. Major Howard Connor, who was the signal officer of the Navajos at Iwo Jima, said, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” From the CIA website—Navajo Code Talkers and the Unbreakable Code Most the Navajo had traditional ceremonies done for them.

These ceremonies are designed to protect them physically, emotionally and spiritually. A study found that “surprisingly little evidence of serious psychological problems or combat fatigue among the returning Navajo veterans.” On the battlefield, they carried medicine pouches containing an arrowhead and corn pollen.

Most prayed in Navajo to the east with pollen every day. Philip Johnston was not yet on active duty with the USMC and was not present during the creation of the code, even though it was his idea. He asked the USMC to serve in the Navajo Code Talking Program as a Staff Sergeant. He then served as a school administrator for the “confidential” program and a recruiter with a Navajo man, Corporal John A. Benally.

The next all-Navajo Marine platoon to go through boot camp was Platoon 297 in March 1943. The work of the Navajo Code Talkers was not recognized publicly until after the declassification of the operation in 1968. Until then the men were not allowed to even tell their families what the had done in WWII.

For a lot of the 400 men who were Code Talkers, this was hard because the were not allowed to say what they had done in the war, even to family members, until 23 years after it ended. As of 2019 there are 5 still alive.

When we got out, discharged, they told us this thing you that you guys did is going to be a secret. When you get home you don’t talk about what you did; don’t tell your people, your parents, family, don’t tell them what your job was. This is going to be a secret; don’t talk about it.

Just tell them you were in the service, defend your country and stuff like that. But, the code, never, never, don’t mention; don’t talk about it. Don’t let people ask you, try to get that out of you what you guys did. And that was our secret for about 25, 26 years. Until August 16th, 1968. That’s when it was declassified; then it was open.

I told my sister, my aunt, all my families what I really did. —Chester Nez, Navajo Code Talker, National Museum of the American Indian interview, 2004 President Ronald Reagan gave the Code Talkers a Certificate of Recognition and declared August 14 “Navajo Code Talkers Day” in 1982. In 2000, the United States Congress passed legislation to honor the Navajo Code Talkers and provided them with special gold and silver Congressional Medals.

The gold medals were for the original 29 Navajos that developed the code, and the silver medals for those that served later in the program. A statement in the Navajo language on the back of the medals translates to: “With the Navajo language they defeated the enemy.”

President Bill Clinton signed the law which awarded the Congressional Gold Medals. President George W. Bush presented the medals to the four surviving Code Talkers at a ceremony held in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington in July 2001. Oh, yes, I’m proud of it, particularly when I shook hands with President Bush in Washington three years ago.

He gave me the gold medal. He shook hands with me and then afterwards I spoke. So I spoke in English and then when I got through with my speech I spoke in Navajo, it amounted to about 3 minutes.

I said, “You Navajo people that are now on the reservation between the four sacred mountains, I want the people should thank you for using our sacred language. This language was given to us by the Holy People, I don’t know how many thousand years ago,” I said. “We use it for they, to help win for the United States.”—John Brown, Jr., Navajo Code Talker, National Museum of the American Indian interview, 2004 Here are some of the remaining Navajo code talkers in 2014.

In 2018 some of the Navajo Code Talkers who were still alive included Thomas H. Begay, John Kinsel, Sr., Peter MacDonald, Samuel Sandoval and Joe Vandever, Sr.

There were eight alive at that time. Here, below, is about Chester Nez (1921 – 2014). He was the last surviving man of the original twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers and one of the Code creators. He was born in Chichiltah, NM (Chéch’il Łání). He was Dibéłizhiní clan (Black Sheep), and born for Tsénahabiłnii clan (Sleeping Rock Clan).

He was sent to boarding schools, where he’d had his mouth washed out with soap for speaking Navajo. At BIA boarding school in schools, in Tuba City, Arizona, Nez was recruited into the Marine Corps.

He was 122 pounds in 10th grade, and he barely met the minimum weight requirement for the Marines. The volunteers went directly into basic training without any goodbyes. Nez left behind his sister Dora, his father and his grandmother, who wouldn’t know he was fighting until two years after he left. He saw combat first in Guadalcanal.

He said that sometimes, on the battlefield, he could hear the bells of the sheep back home and knew people there were praying for him. Nez wrote in his memoir, “Their prayers were carried across the miles as the pure, bright chime of the bells.” When a battle was over, the rest of the Marines in their division got R&R, while Nez and his fellow code talkers shipped off to another battlefields: Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu.

He was at the Battle of Bougainville in New Guinea on November 3, 1943, and then Guam on July 21, 1944, and then on to Peleliu and Angaur in September 1944. He was honorably discharged in 1945. When the Code Talkers got out of the service, “they told us not to talk about what we did,” Nez said.

The mission was top secret. He couldn’t talk about it even with other Marines with whom he served; not with his family, even after the war. He did not even tell the paper-pusher back home who, when Nez applied for a civilian ID card, smugly told the decorated war veteran that he still was not a full citizen of the U.S. That man was utterly incorrect.

All Native people had been full citizens since 1924 (before that about 60% were). From 1946 to 1952, Nez used the GI Bill to attend the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., to study commercial arts. Nez also served in the Marine Corps Reserves and returned to combat in the Korean War. He worked as a painter for 25 years at a V.A. hospital in Albuquerque.

Nez retired in the mid-1970s and moved back to Chichiltah to help care for his sister, Dora. In his later years he lived in Albuquerque with his son Mike, daughter-in-law Rita, and their children. In 2001, Nez was one of the four of the five living code talkers who received the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush.

He died at age 93 of kidney failure. Nez’s story was published in the 2011 memoir, “Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII,” which he wrote with author Judith Avila. “Writer Judith Schiess Avila met Nez in January 2007 “through the friend of a friend.”

Their friendship grew and he shared his story with her. Captivated by his story, she asked Nez to let her help him write his biography. “He kept saying to me, ‘What if it’s not interesting?

I just did my duty,’” she said. “After thinking about it for a couple of days, he agreed to tell his story.” In an earlier interview with ICTMN, Avila said, “I think it was hard for him to talk about himself.

[During our interviews] he often stopped and reflected: Was he building himself up? Was he being fair to others? Was he being accurate?” Here is the Navajo Code Talker monument in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation. The s

Here is an interview with a Navajo Coder Talker about why Joe Keyoomia, the Navajo captured in April 1942 in the Philippines could not understand the code.

Albert Smith Collection

Marine Corps, World War, 1939-1945 – Marshall Islands; Saipan, Tinian (Northern Mariana Islands); Iwo Jima; Pacific Theater.

Here is a good memoir of a well known Code Talker