You know, grandchildren, for a long time even after the war, it was hard for me to have any good thoughts about the Japanese. What troubled me the most was the way they treated the native people of the islands they conquered. They believed only Japanese were real humans. Anyone else could be treated like a dog. Never forget, grandchildren, that we must always see all other people as human beings, worthy of respect. We must never forget, as the Japanese forgot, that all life is holy.
“Tumon Bay,” Major General Turnage said to his officers as he stood on the bridge. With a wave of his hand he indicated the wide two-and-a-half-mile sweep of beach that was now in view.
Although I was assigned to a landing party, I was up there on the bridge checking signals with the other members of our code team who’d be staying on board to send and receive messages. Because of our special role, we code talkers were often able to go places where ordinary Marines hardly ever set foot.
“Best landing place on the island,” Major General Turnage said, nodding his head. “No reef to cross. Nice level sand. Darn fine landing place. Just where the enemy expects us.” Then he smiled. “Sorry to disappoint them.”
Instead of Tumon Bay, we went farther south. There we would have to cross the reef to land on two western beaches that lay below sheer bluffs. July 21 was set for the invasion, W-day, as our leaders named it. As the first light outlined the island I stood by the rail, watching. I’d managed to find a wooden box to stand on, so I wasn’t just looking at the backs of other Marines as sometimes happened.
“Hey, little fella, want me to boost you up on my shoulders?” a familiar voice said from behind me.
It was Smitty, of course. He sometimes kidded me about being so short, but I always had an easy answer: “Bigger guys make bigger targets.”
The next thing I knew, I was on an alligator rumbling over the reef. I could hear the roar of the LVT’s engines, the whap-whap-whap of small waves hitting the metal side of the boat, and the coral being crushed by the treads, sort of like the sound sugar cubes make when they are crushed between teeth.
But I don’t even remember hearing the whistle and the order to land the landing party. Once again, I had that familiar, unsettling feeling of being in a movie where the film has been broken and then spliced together a whole scene later. All of a sudden sand was churning under my feet as I sprinted across the beach. It was easier for me to run now because all us code talkers had the new lighter portable radio units. But it was not just because the new unit on my back was lighter that I ran so much faster. I no longer had forty pounds of TBX radio to hide behind and I needed to get to cover as fast as I could.
Our first wave of alligators had crawled up onto Red Beach just below Asan Point. The beach was small, only 200 yards long, but the bluffs made up for it. They looked like they were ten miles high.
“You got any hills like that back home, Chief?” Smitty yelled.
We had taken shelter in a shell crater from the American bombardment. We’d been met with small arms and machine gun fire, but no enemy bombs or shells were falling among us.
I peered up toward the bluff where he was pointing with his chin. In the time we’d been together he’d learned the Navajo way of pointing with your lips or your chin rather than your hands. That hill rose up steeper than I would have liked. Not really ten miles, but at least 200 feet. We had to climb it, even though the Japanese were firing down at us from the heights.
I looked back toward the shore where a tank was being unloaded.
“As long as we don’t have to carry one of those, I think we can do it,” I said.
Then we went running across the beach, dodging back and forth so that we would not be a good target for the small arms fire coming from above. All the way up that cliff, bullets kept spraying the sand in our faces and bouncing off the rocks around us. Somehow, neither one of us got hit. But when we got to the top, the fire was so intense that all we could do was dig in along with the rest of the men in our first wave. I got out my radio and began sending. We were going to have to fight for every inch of ground.
It was not easy for us to break out from our beachhead. There were over 18,000 Japanese troops on Guam. They’d mostly been deployed at Tumon Bay, but when their commanders finally realized we weren’t going near there, they moved them to head us off and keep us boxed in.
We code talkers were kept busy, sending message after message from the shore to the command ship. Our headquarters had been set up now on shore and I was told not just to report to the command post but to set myself up a cot there, housed in the same tent as General Howling Mad Smith.
Before long, Admiral Nimitz and his generals were meeting in that tent to discuss battle plans while we Navajo code talkers waited in the corner, right there next to the top brass. I was only in that tent for a little while, but it made me feel extra safe being guarded right along with the general.
Eventually, though, I was assigned to a unit moving inland. We began to walk our way into the island. It was a slow walk, only a few miles at a time, as we took back the coastal towns of Agat, Asan, and Agana, and pushed through the rice paddies to secure the important road junctions. Every town that we took had been destroyed by the enemy as they retreated.
It made me sad to walk through those broken towns. No living people were to be seen, but there were many bodies of native people, who’d been slaughtered by the angry Japanese as they pulled back. Finally, on July 25, there was a lull in the action and our units were able to regroup.
“Finally,” Smitty said, “we can get some rest.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, hoping I was wrong.
But I wasn’t. The pause in the fighting did not last. Japanese soldiers had been taught that there was only one thing to do when things were hopeless, when they were surrounded, or when their leaders were killed. Attack. We Marines always began our battles at dawn. The Japanese, though, like the monster beings in our old stories, preferred to strike in the darkness.
The night when the first attack came, some of the men in our group were trying to sleep, but I was not. I just sat staring out into the dark waiting as the slow hours ticked away. Twenty-one hundred hours. Twenty-two hundred hours. Then, just after midnight, it seemed as if the air grew thick and trembled.
“They are coming,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice was.
A single scream, so loud and distorted that it didn’t seem to come from a human throat, tore the night. Shapes began hurtling at us out of the darkness amidst the flashing and crashing of weapons and the smell of gunpowder.
We were dug in. Many of those attackers were killed by our machine guns, but others fought their way through. At different places in our line there was hand-to-hand fighting. Each time a wave of attackers was wiped out, another human wave came screaming in. I cannot recall what I did during those hours of darkness, grandchildren. I am glad that my mind does not allow me to remember.
By the time the sun rose the next day, the attacks had ended. Our lines had not been broken. Thirty-five hundred enemy soldiers had died, including many of their high officers. We had not suffered many casualties, but one of them was Johnson Housewood, another of our Navajo code talkers. He’d been with the Twenty-first Marines, dug in on a small hill just a hundred yards past my own foxhole. As he raised his head a bullet had struck him. He was the third code talker to die.
On July 27 we broke out from our beachheads and began to take back the rest of Guam. On August 10 we reached the sea at the north end of the island. There would still be weeks of skirmishing ahead with small groups of enemies still in the hills and jungle, but the battle for Guam was won. As I walked along, the sun was shining and I could feel a little of that sunshine beginning to warm my heart. We trudged down into Agana, the capital city of Guam.
There we set up command posts and a hospital. Little groups of Chamorros who had managed to escape the Japanese began to come back in to Agana. They needed help, but were more eager to help us by telling where the remaini
ng Japanese were hiding.
Because Guam had been an American island for so long, the Chamorros spoke English as well as we did. It was heartbreaking for me to hear their stories and to see the little children whose families were dead. What happened to those Chamorros and the people on the other islands made me think yet again of what had been done to our Navajo people during the time of the Long Walk. I wanted to weep for them. It was just as bad for the Chamorros as it had been for us Indians.
In fact, grandchildren, I think it was worse for the Chamorros. At least we could run to the hills. The people of those little islands had nowhere to get away. Guam was only thirty miles long and seven miles wide. Have you ever had a dream where you see a monster but cannot move your feet to run away? That is how it was for the Chamorros when the Japanese soldiers came.
I tried to do as much as I could, helping them carry their few possessions and sharing my food. Before long, all of us Navajos were bringing the natives right into our chow lines and no one ever objected.
There was one little boy that I will never forget. He was only seven years old and his name was Johnny. His whole family had been killed when the Japanese invaded. Our Navajo way is that no child should ever be without a family. So Wilsie Bitsie brought him into our tent and we gave him a cot to sleep on. He stayed there while we were out on patrol, and he was always waiting for us when we came back, a big smile on his face. He made up a sad little song about what had happened to him.
On the eighth day of December
the Father above
took my father
and took my mother.
He took my sisters
and He took my brothers,
He took Baby Jer,
who was only a month old,
He took them all.
He left me by myself
and I have no one to turn to.
We took care of little Johnny all the time we were on Guam. When we finally got our orders to pull out, leaving him was like losing a member of our family. Wilsie picked little Johnny up and carried him to the Red Cross aid station. They promised they would make sure that he was placed with a good family. The last thing Wilsie did was give Johnny his address back home so that they could always stay in touch by writing to each other.
There is one more story to tell you about Guam, grandchildren. It started out very sad. In those last days of fighting after the Japanese pulled back from the Tiyan airfields on August 7, our patrols pushed their way through the jungle, pursuing them. Charlie Begay, another of our code talkers, was with a forward patrol that walked into an ambush and was cut to pieces. A few hours later, our unit, which included Wilsie and me, discovered what was left of the patrol.
Wilsie found Charlie’s body. As he knelt to look at him, I had a hopeless feeling in the pit of my stomach. Charlie’s lips were blue and there was no sign of breath. An awful wound, probably from a sword, went from his right shoulder across his neck and chest.
“Graves registration hasn’t been through yet,” Wilsie said. I could see how upset he was. Charlie had been one of Wilsie’s best friends back home. Wilsie took one of Charlie’s dog tags and put it into his own pocket. He straightened his friend’s body, placed the other dog tag in Charlie’s mouth, and tied his mouth shut with a strip of cloth. That was standard procedure to make sure a dead man’s identification would not get lost. Then we placed Charlie’s body near a log, covered him with leaves and bark, and said a prayer.
Later that day, we gave Charlie’s dog tag to the CO, who then packed his belongings, wrote a letter to his family, and sent it all home.
So when Wilsie left Guam he was not just leaving behind little Johnny, but also one of the best friends he’d ever had. We all kept thinking about Charlie’s death.
Weeks later, though, back on the Canal, several of us code talkers were sitting around when a jeep pulled up to our tent. I had just gotten back from a little vacation and was being filled in by the guys about what was new. Leslie Cody and I were by the door and Wilsie was on his cot by the tent flap. We all figured they were bringing another Navajo to be Charlie Begay’s replacement. I walked up to greet him. But when that person who got out of the jeep turned around, I became speechless. All I could do was stand and stare in shocked silence.
“Have you been to the land of devils?” Leslie Cody said in a hushed voice in Navajo as that person, who now had a little smile on his face, stepped past me into the tent. Like me, Leslie was so shocked he couldn’t move.
Wilsie, though, jumped up and ran over to that man. It was Charlie Begay, dressed in clean new khakis.
“Yáát’eeh,” Charlie said, his smile getting even broader.
“What happened?” Wilsie stammered. “Last time I saw you, you were dead.”
Charlie Begay shook his head and looked down at the ground. “I don’t remember much of anything after the Japanese ambushed us. Except I started to feel my feet twitch and then I heard my heart beat. It seems that somebody,” he said, looking up at Wilsie, “had put bark and leaves all over me, so I started moving to shake that stuff off. Then when I rolled over I realized some helpful person had stuck my dog tag into my mouth! I was not pleased about that. I was just trying to stand up when graves registration got to me.”
Charlie had been evacuated to the hospital ship. He had lost a lot of blood and had a big scar, but eventually was recovered enough to report back for duty. We were all overjoyed that day when Charlie came back to life, and Wilsie was the happiest of us all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Fatigue
“Look at that thang,” Georgia Boy said, pointing at the truck that was one of the “new” vehicles being unloaded for our motor pool. Its dented fenders and worn upholstery were only some of the signs of its age. “I think my grampa done drove it in World War One. Ain’t nothin’ that us Marines can’t patch up, is there?”
I nodded my head and rubbed my sore shoulder. I’d just gotten back from Hawaii. I hadn’t been on leave, but in the hospital and I knew just what he meant. He wasn’t just talking about trucks.
As always, we Marines in the Pacific got things after the Army was through with them. Most of our tanks and trucks were more than second-hand by the time they reached us. But our mechanics always just patched up the outsides, tuned up the insides, and then repainted them Marine Corps camouflage green.
Truth be told, we Marines were kind of fond of those old used vehicles. We had a lot in common with them. We, too, were always being patched up, dropped somewhere, and told to do the best we could with what we had. And we did it. When we weren’t sending or receiving messages, we Navajo code talkers also did what had to be done. If stretcher bearers were needed, we were stretcher bearers. If people were thirsty, we were water carriers.
But those battles took much out of us, grandchildren. We needed time to rest before we were ready to go into combat again. And about the only time we were given even a little vacation was when we’d been hurt in action as I had been.
During the last few days of fighting on Guam, I’d gotten my own chance for one of those little vacations. A few enemy soldiers who refused to give up were still left in the jungle. One of them was a sniper who caught me in his sights.
One moment I had been walking along. The next I heard a sound like the buzzing of an angry bee just as something slapped me on my shoulder. It felt like someone hit me with the palm of his hand, but when I looked at my shoulder I saw blood welling out and felt my knees getting weaker.
“Medic!” somebody was yelling. It took me a minute to realize the voice was Smitty’s and that Georgia Boy had picked me up off the ground and was carrying me at a dead run.
I tried to try to make a wisecrack about him mistaking me for a football, but blacked out before I could say it. When I woke up there was a bright light in my eyes and somebody was digging into my shoulder with a scalpel. I was in the operating room on a ship.
I only got a small wound from that bullet. It passed through pretty cleanly without
hitting much else before it came out the other side. It was easy for the medic to patch me up. My shoulder hardly even got stiff from it, although I do feel it now on winter nights. It is hardly worth mentioning. I speak of it only to explain why I was forced to head for Hawaii while other men who fought harder than I did carried on.
Not everyone, though, could carry on. Some of the men on the hospital ship with me didn’t have any visible wounds, but were badly hurt. They had kept going forward until not just their bodies were worn out but their spirits. They hadn’t been physically wounded, but now were unable to do anything. Some just stayed in bed and cried. Some sat up babbling words with no meaning while tearing at their own hair and clothing. Others just stared off into space.
The name the armed forces gave to that sickness of the mind and spirit was “battle fatigue.” It was hard for some people to understand, especially those who’d never been in combat. Some even accused those men of being fakers and cowards. But we Navajos understood it well. Our ancestors saw what war does to human beings. When we must fight other humans, injure and kill them, we also injure a part of ourselves. Our spirits become sick from contact with the enemy.
Long, long ago, even the Holy People suffered from this. It happened that way after the Sacred Twins were given the Thunder Bow and the Arrows of Lightning by their father, the Sun. Monster Slayer used those arrows to destroy the monsters that had been devouring the people. He killed the giant Ye’iitsoh. He killed the Monster Who Kicked People off the Cliff, the Horned Monster, the Monster Birds, the Eyes That Kill, the Rolling Rock, and many other awful beings. The only terrible beings that even Monster Slayer was unable to kill were those that still attack us all. Those ones are Poverty, Old Age, and Hunger.
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