Code Talker

by Joseph Bruchac

  “Hold on, Begay,” he would say as I started to turn around. “Drink this.”

  Then he’d hand me a glass of water, stand there in front of me, and watch while I drank the whole thing to make sure the pill actually went down.

  Soon, however, I figured out a new way to avoid those awful pills. You know the moccasin game, grandchildren, where we have two teams and one hides the stone, either in one of their hands or in the moccasin, while the other side tries to guess where it is? It is that same game that the ancient animals of the night played long ago against the ancient creatures of the day. If the night creatures won, then there would be darkness all the time on the earth. That was what such creatures of the night as Owl and Bat and Bear wanted. The day creatures wanted night to last only half of the time. Fortunately for us all, Coyote helped the day animals by hiding the stone in his paws so that they won that game. Just like Coyote, I started palming my malaria pill before putting it in my mouth.

  It was so much fun trying to trick our watch officer that before long all the other Navajos were doing what I did and not taking their Atabrine. Every code talker would probably have ended up with malaria if Watch Officer Williams had not found out somehow about what we were doing. One day he discovered the pile of pills behind the radio tent where we’d been tossing them. The next day he changed his routine.

  “Begay,” he barked, “hands at your side and open wide.”

  Then he put the Atabrine right into my mouth, sticking it as far down my throat as he could reach. I had to stand there until he saw me swallow. Then I had to open my mouth and stick out my tongue. Officer Williams nodded, a grim smile on his face as he moved on to his next Navajo victim.

  So our game with Watch Officer Williams and the Atabrine ended with him winning the final round. I suppose, despite how terrible those pills tasted, that I should have been thankful. All the time I was on Bougainville, even though those hungry mosquitoes took half my blood, I never got malaria.

  One very sad thing for all us code talkers happened on Cape Torokina. Because the Japanese knew the jungle and we did not, we’d all been ordered to keep close watch as soon as it got dark. That was the time when it was most dangerous. The Japanese liked to attack under the cover of night. Sometimes it would be in force in a banzai attack.

  Banzai is a word that the Japanese said when they were saluting their emperor, who was sort of like a god to them. It means “ten thousand years.” That was how long they thought their new Empire of the Sun would last. In a banzai attack, every Japanese soldier would leave his post and come running at you with a gun or a sword or even just his bare hands. They were also called suicide attacks because that was what it turned out to be for those Japanese soldiers. Thousands and thousands of them died that way during the war, but they also killed and wounded a lot of our men while they were doing it. A banzai attack might come at any time, even in the middle of the night. They would come screaming “Banzai!” at the top of their lungs. They would not stop until you were dead or they were dead.

  Other times our enemies would just crawl into a foxhole with a knife, cut someone’s throat, and crawl out again. You might wake up to find that the man next to you had been killed that way. The Japanese moved so quietly and stealthily that our code name for them was . That means “mouse.”

  Because of the chance of enemy infiltrators we were under orders to never, under any circumstances, leave our wet uncomfortable foxholes after dark. Even if we had to use the latrine.

  “That’s what your helmets are for,” one of our non-coms, Sergeant Wilky, said. And he wasn’t joking.

  The enemy could be anywhere at night. That was especially the case during those first few days when we had set up our base on Cape Torokina. Anyone seen out of a foxhole would be assumed to be an enemy and could be fired upon.

  Just after dawn on the morning of our fourth day on Cape Torokina I was at the command tent when one of our Marine medics rushed in. He was so excited he could barely talk.

  “I shot an enemy soldier last night,” the medic said. “Right over there.”

  We went to look and that was when we found Harry Tsosie’s body. Harry was one of the code talkers in our group on Bougainville, one of the original twenty-nine. No one knows why he did it, but he left his foxhole after dark and was mistaken by that medic for the enemy. It was a terrible thing. I don’t know if that man who shot him ever forgave himself. His job was to save lives but he’d ended up shooting one of his fellow Marines. Other code talkers died in battle before the end of the war, but Harry Tsosie was the only one killed by friendly fire.

  Gradually we extended our beachhead on Bougainville, pushing farther into that wet island. I remember how hard it was to walk. Mud. So much mud. Up to my ankles, up to my knees, even up to my hips. It seemed as if the island were trying to swallow me up. My shoes and socks rotted and fell apart from always being soaked with mud.

  Though I had yet to see a live enemy soldier, the Japanese were still there and a constant danger. The first time I saw the body of an enemy soldier was November 7. I was following a trail through the jungle with our squad. The dead man was sitting by the side of the trail, leaning against a coconut tree with his eyes closed as if he was sleeping. I was surprised at how young and peaceful he looked and how small he was. I realized, with a shock, that his face was a lot like that of one of my cousins back home. As I stared at him, there was suddenly a loud Bang! from right next to me and one of the buttons on the Japanese soldier’s uniform shattered. Sergeant Wilky had fired an M-1 round into the dead man’s chest.

  “Kill every enemy twice,” Wilky said. “Better than gettin’ shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.”

  We continued on down the trail. Ten minutes later, we heard another gunshot from behind us. Someone in our second squad was killing that enemy soldier a third time.

  On November 10 we had a big birthday celebration. It wasn’t for a person, but for the Marine Corps itself. Colonel Liversedge, who founded the Third Raider Battalion, spoke about the long tradition of our Marine Corps.

  “Men,” he said, “it is exactly one hundred and thirty-eight years since the Marines fought in Tripoli and first raised an American flag over foreign soil.”

  Then he cut the birthday cake with his Marine Corps sword. That cake was four feet tall.

  I was sorry that I didn’t get to taste the birthday cake. I was so far back in the crowd that it was all gone by the time I got close enough. Maybe I should have said that it was my birthday, too. After ten months of training and combat as a Marine, I was now seventeen years old—according to the records kept by the Indian agent. But I told no one about it. I didn’t tell Georgia Boy or any of my white Signal Corps friends, which now included Smitty, the Marine from Boston I’d met during training who’d just been attached to our unit. I sure didn’t mention it to other code talkers. Back then, celebrating your birthday was still not a common thing for us Navajos. And after all, November 10 was only the day listed as my birthday. Since my mother remembered my birth as being sometime early on in Nitch’itsoh, the month of Big Wind, at Rehoboth School they’d just chosen the date of November 10 at random and made it my birthday.

  In honor of the birthday of the Marines, the Second and Third Raider Battalions, who had been in the heaviest fighting, were moved off the front line and allowed to rest for two weeks. However, we code talkers were not given a break. As long as vital secret messages needed to be sent and received, teams of Navajos had to stay by their radios. More LSTs were coming down the Slot between the islands to Bougainville bringing troops, ammo, and fuel. There were always fears that the Japanese would mount more air raids, so all news of shipping in the Slot had to be sent in code. Also, as always, there were urgent messages to be sent in our code when we were out in the field with the enemy close by.

  On the very next day, November 11, one of those messages had to be sent. The Ninth Regiment was on the Numa Numa trail, half a mile inland, setting up a new command post. Bill Tole
do and I were with them. As we moved down the trail, we saw signs that the Japanese had just retreated. By the side of the trail were weapons, clothing, packs, and other personal items that appeared to have been abandoned in haste. Just about every Marine could be seen picking up equipment and personal items left behind by the enemy as they pulled back. One of the favorite things that we salvaged were the supply packages that were the Japanese equivalent of our cans of C-rations.

  C-rations, grandchildren, were the special food packets that we Marines were given to carry with us so that we would have food to eat when we were cut off. Each C-ration package was supposed to be a three-meal-a-day food source. Dry biscuits, canned meat, sugar, and powdered coffee, all in one big can. Sometimes, too, we’d get a D-ration. That was a sort of hard candy bar made out of sugar, chocolate, and oat flour. Every Marine complained about our C-rations. Even though the government kept trying to improve them, nobody loved C-rations. In the last year or so of the war they started giving us something new called K-rations that had a lot more in them, sometimes even fruit drinks, toilet paper, peanuts, and chewing gum. C-rations and K-rations had to be waterproof and able to stand the heat or the cold. So they were backed in tough, wax-coated cardboard. You had to use a knife to cut them open.

  Those Japanese food packets were much more interesting than our C-rations. They contained small boxes of Japanese candy, packets of biscuits, cans of stew, as well as lots of pamphlets written in Japanese. A few of us kept those pamphlets as souvenirs but most just threw them away.

  However, picking up Japanese things was not wise. Our enemies had learned that American soldiers love to take souvenirs. So the Japanese began to plant booby traps. When one of us tried to pick up a pack or a knife, a supply packet, or even a pen, he might set off an explosion. I had just finished stowing a Japanese food packet in my bag when I heard the sharp sound of an explosion from farther up on the trail. Two Marines had just been wounded in their arms and legs by shrapnel when they tried to retrieve a seemingly discarded .35 caliber Japanese machine pistol.

  After sorting out what happened, our lieutenant turned to us code talkers.

  “Set up and get ready to send,” he ordered as he began to write his message on a pad.

  We fastened our radio to a big palm tree and I cranked it up while Bill put on the headphones and picked up the microphone. Then I read off our lieutenant’s message to him as I had translated it into our code and written it on my own pad:

  Da-a a-kha ta-a-tah da-az-jah: Beh gah-tso dine-ba-whoa-blehi da-n-lei ya-ha-de-tahi tsa-na-dahl nas-nil do ehl-has-teh. Ba-ha-this.

  In English, that meant: To all units: Japanese are booby-trapping personnel equipment, installations, and bivouacs. Over.

  Dine-ba-whoa-blehi, “man trap,” was our word for a booby trap. , “mouse,” as I told you already, was the Japanese. If our message had not been sent and received all down the line, I am sure that many of our men would have been wounded or even killed. In fact, as soon as we finished sending and were heading down the trail, I carefully took out the Japanese food pack I’d picked up and tossed it into the jungle.

  There were four rules for sending messages in the field: SEND, RECEIVE, ROGER, and MOVE! The Japanese had equipment that could pinpoint where an American radio transmission was coming from. Although they could not decipher our messages, they knew they were important. When they located the source of a Navajo code message, they’d try to take it out. The day Bill Toledo and I relayed that message, the last of those four rules probably saved our lives. No sooner had we shut off the radio, untied it from the tree, and moved, than a Japanese mortar round landed behind us—right where we had been sending and receiving.

  Those two months on Bougainville were so hard and strange. It wasn’t just the Japanese attacks. The earth itself seemed displeased at the warfare being waged upon it. The deep mud that sucked at our feet, the swarms of insects, the eruptions of the volcano were like messages of the island’s unhappiness. On December 6, the whole place began to quiver underfoot like a giant animal trying to shake fleas from its back. I was on a little hill in the jungle with several other Marines looking down on the valley below, which was still in Japanese hands. Until the quake, we’d seen no signs of the enemy. That changed as the ground shook and rolled, and the tall palm trees in the valley began to whip back and forth.

  “Look at that!” Smitty said, pointing down into the valley.

  Japanese snipers who had been tied in, high up among the palm fronds, were falling out of the tops of those trees like coconuts.

  It probably seemed to them, as it did to me, like the end of the world. However, that earthquake ended after only a few moments. Some of the men who had lived in California were used to earthquakes and they laughed at us. But even the California boys did not climb back into their foxholes that night for fear the earth might move again and bury them alive.

  The construction battalions, the Seabees, were working hard. In no time at all they’d put up piers, a mess hall, warehouses, and a hospital where there’d been nothing but jungle a few days before. It was amazing what those Seabees could do in such a short time. I really appreciated them, for they made all of our lives a lot easier. Some of the men in the Second Raider Regiment of our Third Marine Division even made a tall wooden sign out of spare planks salvaged from packing crates. They put it where you could see it from the water. It read:

  So when we reach

  The Isle of Japan

  With our caps at a

  Jaunty Tilt

  We’ll enter the city of Tokyo

  On the roads the Seabees

  Built.

  The Seabees also built a base for PT boats on Puruata Island. PTs were fast little patrol boats that were heavily armed. The men who commanded them were the bravest and most reckless boatmen in the Navy. They had no armor at all but relied on their speed and maneuverability in battle. One morning, late in November, two PTs came in escorting a landing craft that had just rescued some Marines who had been trapped on a riverbank. Another of my white buddies attached to our Signal Corps unit was there with me. Smitty, that same blond Marine from Boston I’d first met at Camp Elliott.

  I was seeing a lot of Smitty on Bougainville. Ever since our third day on Cape Torokina, either he or Georgia Boy had been by my side most of the time. Years later I found out that Smitty had a double assignment. His job was not just to serve in our Signal Corps unit, but also to watch over me and protect me—not from the Japanese, but from other Marines who might mistake me for an enemy in disguise because of my brown skin and the sort of Asian look a lot of us Navajos have.

  “See that fella there,” Smitty said, cocking his thumb at a redheaded lieutenant behind the wheel of one of the PT boats. “His father is Joe Kennedy. His family runs our whole state of Massachusetts, but he’s out there risking his life in those motorized egg crates. You know the last boat he was in got sunk? He gets out of this war alive, he’ll probably be our next senator. Want to meet him? He likes Indians.”

  I shook my head. I was shy back then around people I didn’t know. So Smitty and I just stood and watched from a distance as that young brown-haired lieutenant climbed out of his boat and went on up the pier to the mess hall without noticing us.

  You know, grandchildren, Smitty was right. Just two years later that brown-haired young man was elected to Congress and eventually became president of the United States. So I suppose you could say that John F. Kennedy was the most famous man I almost met. I never visited the White House while JFK was president, for our story was still top secret in those years. I was not invited to Washington to meet the president until many years later.

  Things kept moving ahead. The Seabees finished the small airfield at Cape Torokina and were almost done with the bigger one at Piva that would handle bombers. On December 26, the orders were given for the Marines to pack up. We’d established the American presence on the island and pushed the Japanese back. From here on in, Army units would take over. The Doggies would
n’t have it easy, but the hardest part had been done. Air strikes from Bougainville would soon be hitting the main Japanese base at Rabaul so hard that it would be wiped out.

  We finally had time to relax. For the first time in weeks we could bathe, get fresh clothing, and sleep without fear of attack. Best of all, mail call brought me a letter from my parents.

  Their letter read:

  Dear Son,

  All is good with us. We are glad for the pay money you send us. We are all eating well and are in health. We are continually praying in church for your safety and for our other Navajo boys over there. We are praying for your quick return home.

  I smiled at the P.S. written at the bottom of the letter. Because my parents could not themselves write English, they had dictated it to my sister, who was now in her sixth year of school.

  P.S. Big brother, I am writing this for our mother and father just as they have said it to me. I wish I could be there with you. School is so boring. I have the same teachers you had and they are just as bad as you said. I can’t wait for you to get home and tell me all about your adventures. Then I will not be bored. Return soon.

  I would not be returning home soon. I’d already gotten my orders. I had to train for a landing on yet another island. But although I could not go home, I did the next best thing. I packed my unwashed combat fatigues and sent them to my family with a note:

  Dear Parents,