ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- As a young boy in the 1920s, Chester Nez was punished for speaking in his native Navajo language, his mouth washed out with soap by the administrators of the government boarding school he attended. Thursday, President Bush presented Nez with the nation's highest civilian honor, the Congressional Gold Medal, because of his skillful use of the Navajo language as a World War II leatherneck to confound the Japanese in the Pacific. Nez and 28 fellow Navajos formed the original U.S. Marine platoon of the so-called Navajo code talkers, an elite band of radio operators who, speaking in their own complex tongue, passed critical messages between commanders and front-line troops that proved indecipherable to the enemy.

Using the Navajo word for bird to talk of aircraft, eggs for bombs, beavers for minesweepers and tortoises for tanks, Nez and the others created a code that was written nowhere and recognizable only in the American desert Southwest.

"It was all up here," he says, tapping his temple. Use of the Navajo code remained a military secret for more than 20 years, delaying any recognition the Navajo code talkers might have received for their critical role in the Pacific theater. On returning from battle, they told their families only that they were infantrymen. Stoically, they kept their secret until 1968, when the Pentagon finally declassified the tactic. At the behest of Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., Congress has now taken note of the role of the Navajo men. A ceremony Thursday in the Capitol Rotunda honored those first code talkers. In addition to Nez, three of the four other surviving members of the original platoon attended: Lloyd Oliver of Phoenix; Allen Dale June, 79, of West Valley City, Utah; and John Brown, 77, of Crystal, N.M. Another survivor, Joe Palmer of Yuma, Ariz., didn't attend for health reasons. Code talkers who have died were represented by relatives.

"Today America honors 29 Native Americans who, in a desperate hour, gave their country a service only they could give," Bush said. He said theirs was a story of young Navajo men who "brought honor to their nation and victory to their country. Regardless of circumstance, regardless of history, they came forth to serve America." The legislation authorizing the gold medals also authorized Congressional Silver Medals to be awarded to about 400 subsequent Navajo code talkers, many of whom also attended Thursday's ceremony.

'Don't speak Navajo'

Nez, 80, lives in Albuquerque, where he creates pencil and charcoal drawings of animals and Navajo figures. He can only ponder the irony of it all. "We often think of how, back in the '20s and '30s, we were told, "Don't speak Navajo.' They washed our mouths out with soap. It was a bitter, brown soap, and they used toothbrushes to scrub our tongues with it. Then Uncle Sam came along and told us to use our language in World War II. We were very proud. We spoke to each other of how we were the chosen ones, how we were asked to use our language to help win World War II." Nez and the others had no idea what was in store for them when Marine Corps recruiters scoured the Indian schools of Arizona and New Mexico in the spring of 1942.

The military had used various Indian languages as code in limited fashion during World War I. Resurrecting and refining the strategy was urgent because the Japanese had broken every other code employed by the Allies. The unwritten Navajo language was chosen for its complex syntax and tonal qualities -- sometimes nasal, sometimes a gurgling sound that makes it virtually unintelligible to those not steeped in the culture. The Army similarly was recruiting Comanche Indians to serve as code talkers for battlefields in Europe, and Hopi Indians in the Pacific. The Navajo recruits were told nothing of their mission. But to teenagers looking to escape the reservation, the notion of a uniform and a military adventure was all they needed to hear.

Nez, approaching his 18th birthday, had figured his own future was growing corn, pinto beans and squash like his father, or herding sheep. "The Navajo feeling is to go to the top of the hill and see what's on the other side," Nez said. The 29 young Navajos were sent to the Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego for basic training and then to nearby Camp Elliott, where they learned what was in store for them.

Cpl.Henry Bahe Jr.,Left, and PFC George H. Kirk
operate a portable radio in a clearing.
The two Marines are Navajo code talkers- in the dense jungle on the Pacific Island of Bougainville during World War II.

Creating New Words

"The brass came by and told us to use our language to come up with words representing the letters A to Z, and to come up with a code for military terms," Nez said. "They put us all in a room to work it out and, at first, everybody thought we'd never make it. It seemed impossible, because even among ourselves, we didn't agree on all the right Navajo words." In some instances, they created new Navajo words unknown even to their own parents.

To this day he can still recite the coded alphabet -- dibeh-yazzie (lamb) for L, ca-yeilth (quiver) for Q, gloe-ih (weasel) for W.

For 13 weeks, the young enlistees drilled themselves on the evolving code. They showed they could encode, transmit and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds -- at a time when code machines would take 30 minutes to perform the same task.

In October 1942, Nez and his colleagues shipped out to the South Pacific. Sometimes they performed their radio code work aboard ship, but he said he preferred wading ashore with fellow Marines "where you could act more independently."

He participated in the amphibious assaults at Bougainville, Guadalcanal and Peleliu, and recalls in horrific detail -- spawning nightmares to this day -- the horror of the combat he and the other Marines encountered.
"The bullets are flying behind you, in front of you, beside you," he said. "A buddy of yours gets killed. His body floats beside you in the water." Ashore, the job for him and his Navajo partner was to advance as far as possible, radioing back to their counterparts aboard ship what was known of the enemy force, gun placements, and American advances, casualties and other intelligence.

Three of the 29 original code talkers died in combat. Nez escaped injury. "Just lucky," he said. Four members of the original platoon had remained at Camp Elliott after the initial training to teach the code to other Navajo marines. By the end of the war, 400 had been deployed overseas. Nez said he ended his combat tour of duty and returned home before the assault on Iwo Jima. As he left Guam, he watched the formation of the invasion armada, which included replacement code talkers. In the first 48 hours of the battle, the Navajos processed 800 messages without error. Recalled one Marine officer, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima."

Recognition For Heroes

On Thursday, the surviving code talkers shared stories with the men surrounding them. They talked about growing up on the reservation. They remembered boot camp and code training, the specter of war they witnessed, their quiet homecoming.

They wore the red hats and mustard yellow shirts of Navajo code talkers, and most wore the beads, turquoise and silver jewelry and silver concha belts specific to their culture. Many had family members with them and circulated programs from the event for each other to sign.

Joe Morris, Sr., 75, of Daggett, Calif., said that when each code talker was discharged, his commander admonished him not to speak of the work he did. Most code talkers rode buses home and, once they got there, participated in ceremonies to purify their minds from what they saw of war.

Now, their story is being chronicled in the film WindTalkers. Starring Nicolas Cage, it is scheduled to hit theaters in November. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., said the recognition for the original group is overdue.

"It's unfortunate that it took our nation so long to recognize their contributions," said Campbell, a Northern Cheyenne. "They always have been heroes to us in Indian country."

Crafting the Code

The Navajo language had no alphabet, so the code talkers first developed a list of English words -- mostly names of animals -- to correspond with the alphabet. Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them.
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When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di-glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)."
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Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The code talkers assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Here are some examples:

besh-lo (iron fish) meant submarine
dah-he-tih-hi (hummingbird) meant fighter plane
atsah-besh-le-gai (silver eagle) meant colonel
tsidi-ney-ye-hi (bird carrier) meant aircraft carrier
be-al-doh-tso-lani (many big guns) meant artillery
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Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary
The Naval Historical Center

Compiled from Times Wires
St. Petersburg Times
St. Petersburg, Florida Published July 27, 2001

Information from the Los Angeles Times, Cox News Service and Scripps Howard News Service was included in this report.