This article was published in The Raider Patch, Issue Q1 2020 (Part 1) and Q2 2020 (Part 2)
This was written in conjunction with the Marine Raiders and Code Talkers Monument project.
About four years ago a well-dressed older Two Star General came up to me at a party and asked if I had heard of the Code Talkers of World War two, I had, but knew little. He said grab a beer and come sit for a moment I have something I would like to ask of you.
Over the course of the next fifteen minutes or so he told me the story of the “Navajo Weapon.” He told me the story of the request from Franklin Roosevelt to Admiral Chester Nimitz to organize a special operation group now known as the Marine Raiders, to combat the Japanese as forward observers and point men in the long and arduous drive from New Guinea, Guadalcanal, Iwo and Okinawa to the Japanese homeland. These Raiders and Code talkers, my friend told me, were trained in judo, jungle survival, existing on a sock full of rice for a month, they carried a special dagger with a blade that was meant to penetrate from the clavicle to the heart, how to use piano wire for clandestine elimination of the enemy. As efficient as they were as fighting units their efficiency improved markedly with the addition of Code talkers. The Code Talkers carried a 38’ double action pistol and there were some with carbines and some with rising guns. The Raiders is where the iron was. They packed 45 caliber pistols, M1 Garand rifles, grenades and the dreaded BAR. In addition to the Raider iron there was the phenomenal power of the Navajo word. From English to Navajo to English baffled the Japanese, it was the killing sword of the Allies and used to deadly effect on the Empire of Japan.
He then told me this story.
The Code Talkers, he said, drifted OUT of the Great Pacific war going back home to their soaring mesas sky piercing red moun- tains and sheep, the same way they ENTERED the Great Pacific war, SILENTLY. So vital was their speech, the aptly named “Na- vajo Weapon”, that it wasn’t until 27 years after VJ Day that Code Talkers could tell their few remaining family and friends what their roll in that hideous, but essential war was. As one Marine Raider vet noted: “they gave us a job and we done it”, one can say the same for the code talkers. So valuable were the Code Talkers that where other Marines could serve a year get leave and be off the front, the Code Talkers were rotated on the front but not allowed to go home. When one island was conquered and liberated the code talkers were moved to the next island. When the assault on Iwo Jima was made the only code used was the Navajo weapon.
These men the Navajo Code talkers, came from their ancient homelands on the high mesas and cottonwood bottom lands of the Navajo reservation. They came from great grandfather’s Ho- gan in secluded box canyons and scab lands, they walked out into the early morning light from Hogan’s with turquoise crucifixes and sheep skins on the walls. They walked down from secluded moun- tain farms where they were surrounded by their goats and sheep. They came from the checkerboard in rural western New Mexico and Utah. They came from Tuba City and Kayenta and towns and villages across this vast south west land. You see these young herders had been told about the war, they were walking or hitching a ride to sign up. “What did it take to be accepted” they asked? Some said, “you had to run and climb and shoot”, all things they knew how to do. They did it most every day.
What they couldn’t guess was that what the marines would want from them some other government agency had just taken the last five or ten years trying to deny to them, that was their language. They talked among themselves of all the things it took to go into battle, but their language was really what the Marines wanted, could this be true? To be a code talker you needed to know the old Navajo language, your mother’s language, grandfather’s and great grandfathers’ language.
They hiked toward the cities, washed in drainage ditches and dried themselves with sun heated soft white sand. Some nights they threw out a sheep skin under the heavens.
The mountains are red in this world and never more red than sun- rise and sunset, the mesas and mountains stand, grand throats of ancient volcanoes, but surly they are castles?
Those mountains have stood out there against 250 million years of dust and sandstorms, freezing in dry cold winters and baking at 120 degrees in summer. These deserts and valleys, mesas and canyons have names, ancient names that binds one to the land. These named places represent clans containing ancient heritage, The “Start of the red streak” people, “Where two waters meet” people, The “Zuni” people, the “Many Goats” people the “Bitter Water” people The “Honey combed” people and many more.
On the mesa’s pastures, sheep and goats quietly graze, their bells chiming. Here colorfully dressed people sit in the shade of bushes watching their flocks. They hold spindle whorls, maybe a rattle, chilies. Some kneel at the stone mete grinding maize, they have been kneeling and sitting there for thousands of years. They are placid and rigid. There are limits and there are overarching Gods.
The Navajos are clannish, they come from ancient parts of their homeland, identified by where they came from. One cannot marry within their own clan.
“My personal clan”, my friend the Two Star, said, “is from the ancient Stewart land on the Isle of Skye,” in northern Scotland. I understand clans, clans have many Chiefs, however no one chief is in charge of all clans. The clansmen go into battle as true bands of brothers. The clans were close knit and interrelated, these were our Code Talkers.
They came with an old well-established community. Their lan- guage was not written, just say it or draw a symbol. Every now and again they place a bit of corn pollen on their tongue and forehead from a leather pouch around their neck and gesture to the east, south, west and north. They bury their dead with turquoise on their tongue.
The code talkers were so valuable that they had personal guards, some said, who were to shoot the code talker if captured. These men ran as deep as the twisted solid ancient stone rivers, there was a vibration, a drumhead, a moon rattle, they were the geology. Walking through places with names like Window Rock and Winslow the young men are walking along dusty paths, sage lined trails on roads and rails, all to the same or similar places, the Ma- rine Recruitment center at Ft. Defiance, Arizona. A place of pol- ished grey floors that smell pungently of wax. There are stainless steel lunch lines and short brown grassed parade fields. There are barracks of olive drab, double bunk beds, and tents. “We all were having fun early on,” one code talker said. But one must ask what was the attraction maybe it was the complete opposite of the sand etched cliffs, the gentle cry of the mourning dove with its distinc- tive tooo whooo to whoooo, the quaking of aspens, mesquite, pin- yon pines and cottonwood?
There were campfires back then before the war, amidst the boul- ders, where quiet men and women, watching the flocks savored the scent of the sweet roasting kid lamb on a spit over a desert campfire. They knew nothing in those days of total war, of napalm and the putrid smell of Japanese burning alive in caves, the smell of rotting human flesh.
All of the code talkers had a secret that the Marines wanted kept secret, their language. Who could have believed it was a secret? After all this is how their whole world talked, new and ancient. No one wrote words in the sand but instead wrote symbols.
They painted those symbols on pottery, wove them into blankets. Now they are going to war, what do they know that will be of use in battle? They can survive, they are nature learned, lean and wiry they can exist on minimal water, sleep on bare ground, be stead- fast, know their way at night by the great dome of stars. They have been taught by father and grandfather, uncle, by the medicine man and migrating ducks.
They are uniquely entering the war with lips, the Navajo weapon, against razor edged samurai swords.
They are going to war against a vicious adversary who has never lost a major war in centuries
The “Japanese weapon” is the unrelenting devotion to the God Emperor. Losing was not in the Japanese lexicon. They went to war armed with ancient chants, armed with family swords with personal crests, like Lotus blossom or chrysanthemum, and Fuji. Retreat was not an option, ever! The Japanese felt themselves in-vincible and superior. Wrapped around their chests were ribbons with these words: Banzai.
The Bushido code, suicide before capture, is “the way of the War- rior’. It is fight to the death each and every encounter and take out as many of the enemy as possible, even when dying, choke the enemy to death with your blood. There was the much feared and dreaded Banzai charges where screaming Japanese are yell- ing “Tenno haika banzai”. “May the emperor live one thousand years.”
We Code talkers and Raiders knew we either killed them or they killed us, sometimes life is really simple and overwhelmingly ter- rifying. We knew what to expect, after all we all, the whole US military, all of us young men, were there to kill.
The Japanese, deathly doggedly stumbling through rank wet jungle growth came hollering through the twisted streams and mountain ridges in a silent seething charge running and falling down and getting up and continually kept coming screaming “Tenno hai- ka BANZAI”. Out of dense black nights, without reflection, with swords, daggers, bells and gongs, pistols, machine guns, grenades, sometimes fireworks, sometimes deep in the dead of a leadened down pour, when you would least expect anybody to be out, here they would come, grunting, gasping, out of the thick green growth as nightmarish phantasms, dark, chanting, a thousand voices near and far hitting gongs, chanting BONZAI. BONZAI, BONZAI. We instantly are in defensive posture, and 100 percent alert, there is no retreat, only live or die, survive.
Our Marine Code Talkers also went into war with their own weap- ons, there were also chants and goat bone flutes, medicine bags, and of course, their language. The language told a story of love, of peace and balance. The story was about beauty and harmony, not conquest and subjugation.
The language said:
In beauty I walk.
With beauty before me I walk.
With beauty behind me I walk.
With beauty around me I walk.
With beauty above me I walk.
With beauty below me I walk.
Indeed, the Navajo word is mightier than the sword. For surly has no foe been more thoroughly vanquished by word than the sword wielding Japanese in the second World War.
The combined intel effort, with the code talkers in the lead, out maneuvered the Japanese. No surprise but non the less miraculous that this invisible way of speaking should devolve from quiet, peaceful desert herdsmen.
They live in a place of soft winds, ancient cliff dwellers, archa- ic history, a place of pottery makers, weavers, meadow larks and medicine pipes.
Their home now is a ship all painted grey, wiring and pipes up and down walls. A weird assortment of vents and generators, suction and blow-by valves. Voices on loudspeakers, sirens, and every one running somewhere. This is a place where cannons are booming, men are coughing up blood, red colored jungle birds, high winding Allison aircraft engines, the Divine Wind, the dreaded kamikaze, this is now their home.
Nothing is familiar to these young herdsmen except the things they know. They don’t know emergency klaxon horns, but they do know the braying of their burrows. They don’t know the great salt sea, never even seen the sea only for seven days from Pearl, but they know the vast sea of red sands on the high plateaus. Wires and electrical signals are all new, most of these men didn’t have electric lights in their homes.
Nothing is familiar, the smell of diesel, the smell of paint, the smell of your own body and those around you in a bunk or a foxhole.
You have a job to do, seems so simple, just say a few words into your microphone, life and death hanging on every adjective and vowel.
A place where you say Lo-tso but it means something else, in this case whale. The Japanese never could understand this, indeed who could except a Navajo?
Teachers in boarding schools went to great lengths to “civilize” these beautiful young people of the high deserts and in the process tried to destroy their centuries old traditions, bloodlines, customs and more importantly to our story, their language.
“Major Howard Connor, a 5th Marine Division signal officer, had half-a-dozen code talkers with him when he invaded Iwo Jima. He said that without them, the Americans wouldn’t have taken the island. Iwo Jima was the only battle in the Pacific war where Allied casualties outnumbered Japanese casualties.”
What a fascinating and intricately woven blanket it all is. All the oceans of sand, the south pacific oceans, the ocean blue and the sky blue, what a colorful place it all is. The grand tangled masses of red bougainvillea, the overwhelming fragrance of white jasmine, the giant green leaves, the grasses, white and black beaches and glassy lavas, what are its colors? Surly Calvary coat red, grey butte grey, campfire charcoal black, freshwater clamshell white, deep ocean blue, blue booby blue and wild onion yellow.
A young sheep herder stands by a small fire on a warm night that cast shadows on nearby canyon walls. Gathered around him his dogs his goats and sheep and the sky, his great mother. He has been taught well by grandmother and grandfather. When he awakes in the morning, he prays to the four corners of the universe. His life course has been set thousands of years before he was born. His people crossed the Bering land bridge.
He hears again of the great conflict that is going on in his nation. Men come and pow wow of the need to join the war effort, many do. People smoke the pipe.
The Navajos have a secret, a language that is not written and a linguistic dialogue that is virtually impenetrable to a non-native Navajo speaker. The military code developed by the first 29 code talkers and then by other code talkers later has never been broken, the only such military record.
All other codes have been broken at one time or another. It was, of course, the breaking of the Japanese code that allowed the allies to discover and crush Admiral Yamamoto and his fleet in the great battle of midway.
“In beauty will I rest my heart,
In beauty all will be in balance,
In beauty all will be restored.”
The code is everything.
The young Navajo warrior knows little of this, he joins knowing he wants to fight for his land and his country, the black-haired girl in the Bitter Water clan and maybe also a chance to see the city and the giant salt ocean.
The Navajos suffered an indignity as they were not able to vote for the country they were expected to defend in the Pacific. Defend they did, however with great honor and valor. The personal Navajo credo was called, “the Right Way,” the “bal- ance between all men and women and their world”
Despite the incredible oddity of their new world, the Navajos car- ried into battle successfully, their ancient home learned personal protections. Tattoos and small leather pouches with objects that had mysterious curative powers. The tooth of a lynx, the dried tongue of a songbird, corn pollen, a pebble, red and black paste, many things particular to that individual and his clan. There were songfests and dances that “clothed” them before they left home with protective energy for the battles to come.
Men are men and all bring unique experiences. The connection between the Marine Raiders and the Navajo Code Talkers is near- ly symbiotic. They could never have functioned the extremely suc- cessful way that they did without each other. Each was part of the matrix. It all seems so simple until it isn’t.
You only want to sleep and all you need is someone to hold your head above the water in your flooded fox hole so as to catch a few winks. Then wait one or two hours and then change places with your foxhole buddy, and listen, always for Banzai, even in your sleep.
It would be very illuminating to have visited these young men a year before Pearl, make no mistake, for most of these young war- riors they were chosen by the war. Few people would take the choice to run into machine gun fire, or choose to run off a landing barge in four feet of water with an eighty pound radio on your back while 40 mm rounds enfilading cross wise across the beach, body parts flying in the wind. Who would choose to crawl on hands and knees into caves to find wild eyed suicidal Japanese madmen? No, war chose these men in the Pacific, but no denying, there was also the allure of protecting their homes and loved ones.
Some were going to be farmers, and doctors, and lawyers, and log- gers and dairy men, sheep herders and teachers, they were going to marry the girl next door, they were going to ask the father for the daughter’s hand, They were going to buy the car, that tractor, that favorite bull, the productive sow, those sheep, that bride, any- thing and everything just not have to shoot some poor yellow sop between the eyes on a bleary rainy night in a war in a strange place, how does this happen?
Our Code talkers and Raiders had shot lots of things. Among them deer, pheasants, elk, rabbits, wolves, coyotes, prairie chickens, hogs, goats, cows, sows. Shooting was a way of life for them. When they went out the door, they grabbed their 22.
A few were like “Mud Hole” famed Marine Raider given his Nom de Plume, “Mud Hole” by none other than his commander, Ev- ans Carlson. “I have seen natives in New Guinea”, my twister told me”, reach down in a muddy water filled cavity of a cows footprint in the muck and scoop up a hand full of murky water and drink it, thus did Mud Hole, he was an original. These men code talkers and Marines were all forced to be unique, though few would admit it. Around mud hole’s wrist he wore a bracelet of captured Japa- nese teeth mounted in gold.
“Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.”
The Navajo Weapon, the great Navajo code is just that, great. By this very fact it was so rare in concept, that it peeled steel armor off the entire Japanese war machine. The code is in some ways a tro- jan horse amidst Japanese certitude that they were impenetrable.
The profound mistaken idea that one has no vulnerability is a very flawed strategy. The Japanese didn’t know their code was broken and they couldn’t break ours, hell is about to descend on their heads.
They didn’t understand anything except what they could see, and that was only just over the next horizon, their wireless communi- cations viabilities were totally compromised. What orders they sent out were intercepted, understood and decoded by the allies.
With this ability to remain invisible, this Navajo code, made the Japanese extremely vulnerable to allied forces. So vulnerable that their huge grinding, driving, gnashing, war behemoth eventually, flaming, smoking, disintegrated and shuddered to a death rattling stop. Zeros fell from the blue south pacific skies where their shin- ning ceased.
Its gargantuan Japanese death star was extinguished by the quietest of words, really, they simple colorful words like hummingbird, tur- tle, bear and duck. A few soft Navajo words spoken in a language never written across this vast expanse of rolling ocean, words never heard and as a result, many people die, how ironic.
The words are emblematic of the code talkers home strata. There were soft shades of pale pastures and blue wind ruffled ponds with golden eyes and canvas backs, pulsing windstorms and crystal heavens with an endless pave of diamonds. Stick built Hogan’s with grandmothers stirring cornmeal, the supple words talk about feasting, they talk about dancing, weaving and rufous hawks, about sacrifice and death.
The Japanese will surly die if the “turtle kisses the ant”. This is sent out in code. But then how can that make sense to the Japanese? Sheep, horse, rabbit, deer, lamb Ute, there was no pathway for the Japanese to understand what this string of words meant.
The Japanese didn’t want to lose, they thought they were alert but then events swung out of their favor, they had lost the advantage of surprise. The herdsman our code talker says quietly a-ye-shi, eggs in Navajo, bombs in the code, and more Japanese die.
The Navajo code was as important as the atom bomb someone once said. The numbers of people impacted by the code was monumental.
As I finished my second bottle of beer my friend asked me, you are probably wondering why I asked you over? It is this, I want to build a life-sized Marine Raider/Navajo Code Talker monument to these magnificent, selfless individuals, none has ever been built. These World War II code talkers and marine raiders are the fathers of our new MARSOC. The MARSOC are the sons of these Pa- cific warriors. In fact, the new MARSOC has adopted the name, “Marine Raiders.”
“Would you like another beer? On me of course.”