http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/us/chester-nez-dies-at-93-his-native-tongue-helped-to-win-a-war-of-words.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0
Chester Nez, 93, Dies; Navajo Words Washed From Mouth Helped Win War By MARGALIT FOXJUNE 5, 2014 Photo Chester Nez, who was the last surviving original Navajo code talker, in 2011. Credit Dean Hanson/Albuquerque, via Associated Press To the end of his life, Chester Nez recalled the first message he sent over the radio while serving at Guadalcanal: “Enemy machine gun nest on your right. Destroy.” Receiving the message, American forces eliminated the threat. Mr. Nez, a former United States Marine who died on Wednesday at 93, had sent the message not in English but rather in a code he had helped create. It originally went much like this: “Anaai (Enemy) naatsosi (Japanese) beeldooh alhaa dildoni (machine gun) nishnaajigo nahdikadgo (on your right flank). Diiltaah (Destroy).” The code was fashioned from Navajo, the language that Mr. Nez grew up speaking, was later barred from speaking and still later helped craft into a military code so impervious that it helped the United States secure victory in the Pacific in the summer of 1945. Mr. Nez was the last surviving member of the 29 original Navajo code talkers, who at the urgent behest of the federal government devised an encrypted version of their language for wartime use. They and the hundreds of Navajos who followed them into battle used that code, with unparalleled success, throughout the Pacific theater. Photo Mr. Nez holding a photo of himself from the early 1950s. Credit Mark Henle/The Arizona Republic, via Associated Press Not fully declassified until 1968, the Navajo code remains the only oral military code that has never been broken. Mr. Nez’s death, at his home in Albuquerque, was confirmed by Judith Schiess Avila, the co-author of his memoir, “Code Talker,” published in 2011. For Mr. Nez and his fellows, World War II was quite literally a war of words. Their work, and the safety of tens of thousands of American servicemen, depended crucially on the code that they had created during 13 fevered weeks in 1942, as the prospect of Allied victory in the Pacific seemed increasingly uncertain. Members of other Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Choctaw and Winnebago, using codes based on their languages, were also recruited for the war effort, serving in Europe and North Africa. But the Navajo, who served in the Pacific, furnished the war’s single largest contingent of code talkers. About 400 Navajos followed the original 29 to war; of that later group, about 35 are still living, The Navajo Times, a tribal newspaper, reported this week. Serving on the front lines in the Pacific’s key battles, Mr. Nez and other members of the Marine Corps’s 382nd Platoon — made up entirely of Navajos recruited for their fluency in the language — used the code to relay movements of American and enemy troops, casualty reports, coordinates of strategic targets and other vital intelligence to Marines in the field. “There were no machines or other devices that could scramble voice communications that could be used on the front lines,” David A. Hatch, the National Security Agency’s historian, said in an interview on Thursday. “What the code talkers did was to provide absolute security for the information we transmitted on the radios, denying to the enemy vital information that we were picking up from their communications.” In 2001, Mr. Nez and the 28 other creators of the code were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, most posthumously, by President George W. Bush. The men of the 382nd have been commemorated in a string of recent books; a Hollywood film, “Windtalkers” (2002), starring Nicolas Cage and Adam Beach; and even an action figure, Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe. What remains less well known is what took place before they went off to war, when the 29 present at the code’s creation built a covert communications system whose crystalline simplicity belied its linguistic impenetrability. Nor did every account of the code talkers’ work focus on what happened when they returned to the United States. There, for Mr. Nez and others, hardships included post-traumatic stress disorder and marginalization by the very country they had served. Chester Nez was born on Jan. 23, 1921, in Chichiltah, N.M., known in English as Two Wells, and reared on the Navajo reservation nearby. His mother died when he was very young. His Navajo given name has been lost to time; his surname, pronounced “nezz,” means “very tall” in the language. The Nez family had been fairly prosperous, and Chester grew up herding its large flock of sheep. But in the 1930s, responding to what it deemed overgrazing in the region, the federal government slaughtered tens of thousands of Navajo sheep, including the Nez family’s. They were reduced to subsistence farming. At 8, Chester entered the first of a series of Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that he would attend in New Mexico and Arizona. Assimilation into white society was the goal of such schools, and he was assigned the name Chester, after President Chester A. Arthur. Students were forbidden to speak Navajo. The penalty for doing so, Mr. Nez recalled, was a beating, or having one’s mouth washed out with “a bitter, brown soap.” In 1942, when Mr. Nez was a high school student, a Marine Corps recruiter visited his school. The Marines were looking for young men who were bilingual in English and Navajo. He enlisted in May. “When joining the Marine Corps, I thought about how my people were mistreated,” Mr. Nez said in a 2005 interview. “But then I thought this would be my chance to do something for my country.” After boot camp in California, he and the initial Navajo cohort were sent to Camp Elliott, in San Diego, and told to come up with a code based on Navajo. The plan was the brainchild of a World War I veteran named Philip Johnston. The son of missionaries, he had been reared among the Navajo and spoke the language fluently. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Johnston persuaded the Marine Corps that Navajo — whose syntax and tonal contours differ vastly from those of English — would be the perfect vehicle for encoding spoken communication. Charged with creating a code that was fast, accurate, memorizable and uncrackable, the 29 Navajos set to work in the spring of 1942. The code they conceived used two layers of encryption. The first layer was the Navajo language itself, known to be understood by only a handful of non-Navajos, none of them Japanese. But what the men developed that spring went far beyond ordinary Navajo, and that was where the second layer of encryption came in. First, they created a glossary of hundreds of words used in battlefield communication. While some were simply Navajo translations of their English counterparts, many others were poetic circumlocutions. For “America,” for instance, they substituted “ne-he-mah” (“our mother”). “Lieutenant colonel” became che-chil-be-tah-besh-legai (“silver oak leaf”). “Battleship” was “lo-tso” (“whale”), “submarine” was “besh-lo” (“iron fish”) and “destroyer” was “ca-lo” (“shark”). The men also developed an encrypted alphabet that could spell any English word. For each letter of the Roman alphabet, they substituted one or more Navajo words; the words’ English translations began with the encoded letter. To indicate “A,” a code talker would say “wol-la-chee” (“ant”), “be-la-sana” (“apple”) or “tse-nill” (“ax”); B was “na-hash-chid” (“badger”), “shush” (“bear”) or “toish-jeh” (“barrel”), and so on. The result was a system that sounded nothing like Navajo yet could be employed with great facility by those trained in its use. “The Japanese tried, but they couldn’t decipher it,” Mr. Nez told CNN in 2011. “Not even another Navajo could decipher it if he wasn’t a code talker.” Handed a written English message, a code talker took to his radio, relaying that message, encoded, to a compatriot at the front. The Navajo on the receiving end, having memorized the entire code, rendered the message back into English and passed it on. The written English copies were destroyed immediately. “We acted as coding machines, transmitting messages that would have taken a couple of hours in just a couple of minutes,” Mr. Nez said in a 2012 interview with the website ArmchairGeneral.com. “We could never make a mistake, because many communications involved bombing coordinates.” After Guadalcanal, Mr. Nez was sent to the battles of Bougainville, in Papua New Guinea; Guam; and the islands Peleliu and Angaur. It was no soft service. On Angaur, an American service member mistook Mr. Nez for Japanese and put a gun to his head before a superior intervened. The code talkers were considered so indispensable that they were given little respite, often working 35 hours straight without food or rest, hunkered down in foxholes or dodging bullets. “We would land on the beaches, which were littered with dead Japanese bodies,” Mr. Nez told The Arizona Republic in 2011. “My faith told me not to walk among the dead, to stay away from the dead. But which soldier could avoid such? This was war. War is death. I walked among them.” About a dozen code talkers were killed in action. Mr. Nez returned home from the war to less than ideal conditions. He was unable to vote: New Mexico did not grant suffrage to American Indians until 1948. When, in uniform, he went to the Federal Building in Gallup, N.M., to register for the identity card that Indians were then required to carry, a white civil servant told him, “You’re not a full citizen of the United States, you know.” Prohibited, like all the men of the 382nd, from discussing his service, Mr. Nez was plagued by nightmares and spent more than five months in a San Francisco military hospital. “My condition was so severe I went psycho,” he said in a 2005 lecture. “I lost my mind.” Yet of the returned code talkers, he considered himself among the lucky ones. “Some turned to drinking or just gave up,” Mr. Nez said in an interview last year. His father came to his rescue, explaining that his nightmares were caused by the spirits of dead Japanese. Mr. Nez underwent a traditional healing ceremony, and the dreams largely ceased. He studied art at the University of Kansas, but left before graduating when his money from the G.I. Bill ran out. (The university awarded him a degree in 2012.) After serving stateside in the Korean War, Mr. Nez worked for many years as a painter and muralist at what is now the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque. Mr. Nez’s marriage to Ethel Pearl Catron ended in divorce. His survivors include two sons, Michael and Tyah; nine grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren. Four other children died before he did. A few years ago, Mr. Nez lost both legs to diabetes, long epidemic among Native Americans. In his many interviews and public appearances, Mr. Nez expressed unmistakable pride in his wartime work. But the irony of what that work entailed was far from lost on him. “All those years, telling you not to speak Navajo, and then to turn around and ask us for help with that same language,” he told USA Today in 2002. “It still kind of bothers me.” >From the Navajo Code Book ARMOR besh-ye-ha-da-di-the iron protector BRITAIN toh-ta between waters CONVOY tkal-kah-o-nel moving on water DIVE BOMBER gini chicken hawk GERMANY besh-be-cha-he iron hat GRENADE ni-ma-si potatoes LIAISON da-a-he-gi-eneh know other’s action MINE SWEEPER cha beaver OBSERVATION PLANE ne-as-jah owl PYROTECHNIC coh-na-chanh fancy fire
