The Navajo Code Talkers During The Vietnam War

“I thought about it a lot of times, to defend our land and the people. As a young man I thought that if I joined the marine corps my people would have the chance to enjoy the freedom” (Nez and Avila, 15). The Navajo Code Talkers, a branch of the Marines that created a coded communication spoken in their native tongue of Diné, were a major key in the American strategy during World War II in the Pacific. However, the Navajo men who served as the Code Talkers had to overcome their sheltered, racially stunted early life, survive the harsh conditions of the Pacific theater warfront, and then to keep all of their contributions to the war a secret until the government released classified documents decades later. In the time preceding World

Their drill sergeants called the Navajos "Chief" and "Geronimo," and expected them to be eagle-eyed with a bow and arrow. But while the Navajos had long ago put aside bow and arrow, they proved to be model marines (Watson and Kawano, 6). With few exceptions most of the Navajo felt that the marine corps treated their people with “100 percent respect” (Nez and Avilla, 51). The Navajo had proven they had what it takes to earn their place in the US military, the first group of Navajos became the 382d Platoon, USMC, and were ordered to create the code which would help the US win the

The officer left the room and we could hear the click behind him when he locked the door” (Teller). The code, devised by the original twenty-nine Codetalkers, entailed 413 words in addition to an alphabet based on existing Navajo words. Consequently, the military terminology did not have corresponding Navajo words, much of the code entailed denoting corresponding Navajo words symbolically (Riseman, 53). After completion of training, two of the original twenty-nine remained in San Diego to train additional Codetalkers. Through various trials of the code the Marines observed that in the time it took a machine thirty minutes to send a coded machine, but the Code Talkers only twenty seconds making them in high demand. By April 1943 there would already be 190 Codetalkers in action, and over 400 would serve by the end of the Second World War, all in the Pacific Theatre (Aaseng,