Code Talker (18 page)

We lay on our stomachs, on a relatively level stretch of land. Normally we tried to stay away from flat places, because they afforded poor protection. But we had a clump of bushes for cover, and the enemy had been lobbing constant fire, hitting the ground only a dozen yards away, so we didn't dare run to a more protected place.

I rested my Springfield bolt-action '03 rifle next to my torso. I knew the hardware well, the smooth metal and wooden parts fitting together like the work of a fine craftsman. I had taken that rifle apart and put it back together blindfolded, in complete darkness. But the well-made weapon—of World War I vintage—was less important than my communications gear. I knew I would have to use that rifle, especially at night when the Banzai came. Yet even though we code talkers had proven ourselves to be excellent marksmen in basic training, our responsibilities differed from those of other combat Marines. Our primary job was to talk, not to shoot.

The red light on the TBX radio blinked on. A small beep sounded, loud enough for Roy and me to hear, but not loud enough to alert the Japanese. A message. I pushed the receive button, and we both listened. It was Roy's turn to talk, mine to crank. An explosion flared, not three hundred feet away. It was a daisy cutter, the kind of bomb that threw shrapnel out sideways, exploding outward rather than up. A jagged piece of shrapnel dug a hole in the beach nearby, but Roy didn't seem to notice.

I whispered to myself, “Damn Japs.”

Roy pressed the earphones to his head, obviously straining to hear the Navajo message. He nodded, translating the message in his head to English and writing it down.

“Artillery lieutenant,” Roy said, turning to me.

I signaled a runner, who grabbed the message. “The lieutenant,” I said, raising my chin in the direction of a U.S. tank bearing ninety-millimeter guns. The runner took off.

A few minutes later, he was back with a response. Roy read the English note, and—as all of us did—simultaneously translated it in his head to the Navajo code. He transmitted it.

The Navajo code words were never written when we transmitted messages. That made us men living, walking code machines. And even if the enemy somehow managed to link our Navajo language to the new code, there was nothing written to help them learn the unfamiliar words.

If the Navajo oral tradition had not been as strong as it was, human error could have rendered this method of communication impractical. But we code talkers called upon powers of concentration that had been developed by the constant exchange of unwritten information. As far as I know, we generally transmitted our messages flawlessly. If someone did make an error, someone else in the Navajo network would catch it and send an alert. And we never relaxed, never let up.

I looked around and realized it was growing dark. Roy and I had been transmitting all day and would continue through the night and the next day with—if we were lucky—an hour or two to decompress before starting in again. I pulled a roll of tape from my cargo belt and bit a piece off with my teeth. I stuck the tape over the message light of the radio, masking the red light from Japanese eyes in the dark.

“You think we'd get more sleep on board ship?” Roy asked.

“What?” I chuckled. “And miss all this fun.”

We men worked in pairs. Officially, two pairs of men who partnered together were coupled into a group of four, and two groups of four worked together with two rotators, bringing the total number in each band to ten. Generally, we ten sailed together on the same ship. When we reached an island, four of the code talkers in our band remained on board ship and the other six disembarked. Our positions—land versus ship—changed with different campaigns. Once onshore, the land-based men stayed in touch with those on the ship and with each other so everyone knew what was happening.

I spent most of my time onshore, actively sending messages. And I, like the other code talkers, stayed in communication with all the talkers as much as possible, regardless of assigned groups. We'd report what was happening in battle around us. We'd let the rear echelon know when we needed reinforcements and give them the hot dope on whether a particular strategy was working. If someone screwed up and our men were targeted by friendly fire, we'd send a message through requesting a halt. That type of message was always heeded when sent by Navajo code, because the Navajo men receiving our messages knew the Japanese could not fake them.

Our staying in touch had another advantage: if a man heard an error being made in a transmitted message, he'd click the transmit and receive buttons on his TBX radio several times. That click acted as a signal, telling the transmitter to recheck and retransmit his message. When messages were flying, it was difficult to tell where the click came from and to determine which message might contain an error. But we were fierce about deciphering any problems and correcting any misunderstandings. People make too much of how difficult the code was. We knew it like we knew our own names, so it wasn't difficult for us. But every man worried about making some sort of error. The strain of having to be perfect ate at us. It weighed upon us every minute of every day and every hour of every night. Every bit of information had to be accurate: where the Japanese were, which way they were going to move, how many men they had. No one wanted any mistakes to get through and to endanger our own men.

In addition, we had a battle liaison, a communications man, to whom we reported the day's events, especially during periods of fighting. Each morning, he attended strategy sessions and tried to prepare us for what to expect of the day ahead. The Marines cared well for us men and attempted to fully utilize our skills in gaining an advantage over the enemy.

Despite my exhaustion and the danger on Guadalcanal, I was glad to work the land position rather than the sea. When there was a communications lull aboard ship, I knew the code talkers there were assigned other duties. They might be ordered to unload cargo or inventory the supplies. Their attention was diverted from the battle at hand. On the island, there was rarely a lull, and we concentrated on one crucial thing only: relaying the needs of troops in the midst of combat.

A spotter arrived. He ducked down next to me to hand me a message. I now manned the microphone.

“Fighter pilots,” he said.

American planes were scheduled to drop bombs ahead of the American line. The message I held gave the coordinates of forward U.S. troop locations on the island. Before we code talkers arrived, some of the pilots had dropped their bombs as soon as they reached the island, hitting U.S. troops with “friendly” fire, then reversing course and flying back to their aircraft carrier. I'd heard how the brass got all over the pilots' butts when they almost bombed my 1st Marine Division. Now we code talkers were utilized, relaying coordinates that would be forwarded to the pilots, making sure that the pilots knew the locations of their own troops.

The runner took off, crouching low to avoid enemy fire. Exhausted, I took a sip of water from my canteen and translated the information into code. I relayed it to an aircraft carrier sitting offshore. As I finished, another runner arrived with another message to be sent.

Roy reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a crushed packet of crackers. “Here. Eat something. You look like hell.”

As it grew darker, we moved in closer to a couple of Marines who wielded a machine gun. Around nine at night, we heard footsteps. We made out a Japanese soldier running towards our position, waving a sword. He began screaming,
“Banzai!”
He ran straight up, his full height, not even crouching to try to protect himself. When he was maybe a hundred feet away, one of our guys opened fire. Several bullets hit the Banzai warrior, but he didn't drop. He took his sword with both hands and plunged it into his stomach. Then he dropped. A sacred death. It made me feel sick, seeing that, seeing how a Japanese would gut himself rather than be captured by the Americans. I thought about American men I had seen butchered by the Japanese, trying to feel like it was okay that the guy had stabbed himself. But it never felt okay. Seeing death come, on either side, was something I never forgot.

Total madmen, the Banzai terrified U.S. troops all through the war. Each Banzai was a one-man suicide mission, intent on getting himself killed while taking out as many enemy combatants as possible. The Banzai adhered to the Japanese doctrine of blind obedience to authority, even when it meant their own death. The suicidal Japanese always attacked the foxholes after dark and before dawn. The random nature of the attacks kept us Marines awake in our foxholes. And if we managed to sleep, we knew we could wake with a Japanese sword slicing our throat.

After a few minutes, when the Banzai didn't move, one of the non-Navajo Marines dashed toward the body. He bent down and took the Japanese sword. “Souvenir,” he said, turning back toward us and scrambling back under cover in his foxhole. If the brass found him with that sword, they would confiscate it. It was against rules to take anything from an enemy's body.

That particular prohibition wasn't needed for most Navajos. Our religion taught us that you didn't touch property belonging to the dead. However, there were some Navajos willing to risk touching the dead in order to acquire pieces of clothing or hair to be used back home in ceremonies. I wasn't one of them. Those dead Japanese were in no danger from me. I would have avoided the dead altogether if I could have.

 

 

Things were quiet. I found it eerie how some days could feel almost normal, how men walked around almost as though we weren't engaged in war. It was morning, and I had managed a few hours of sleep the night before. Roy and I and a couple of the other code talkers sat among the endless thickets of palm trees and vines, eating military rations—Spam, and corned beef out of a can, and crackers.

“Just like Grandma makes,” joked one of the men.

“At least there's plenty of it,” I said, forking a large bite of Spam.

“Yeah,” Roy said, “When we have time to eat.” He stuffed a packet of crackers into his shirt pocket.

A man held his nose as he chewed.

“Tough to eat with the smell of rotting bodies, enit?” someone said.

I said, “What's tough is knowing what that smell is.”

Roy glanced back toward the beach, although we could only smell it, not see it, from where we ate. He had that faraway, combat-veteran look in his eyes. “All those men. Theirs and ours.”

The stifling smell of decaying bodies permeated the moist, hot air. Soldiers driving bulldozers tried to cover the bodies with sand when they could, but often they were thinly covered or totally exposed.

A Marine picked his way through the underbrush with his dog, a German shepherd, close by his side. Heads turned and we watched the pair pass by. Those dogs were impressive. They sneaked up on the Japanese, hunting them as a soldier would. When we came upon an enemy bunker, the dogs could tell by the smell whether it was empty or occupied. They also located snipers, high up in the trees. And even at night they could sniff out hostiles. Their handlers would turn them loose, and they'd range back and forth across the area. Their tails stood up when they had found an enemy combatant, and their ears stood up at attention, their nose pointing. The dogs never attacked the Japanese, though. They were too valuable to be put at risk, which is kind of ironic, when you think about all the men who were lost. The dogs were really smart, and it made me feel good knowing that one was on patrol while we ate.

My feet were covered with blisters, huge things that were always growing larger, so full of fluid that they felt like they could explode. I took out my knife—my Ka-bar—and popped the blisters to relieve the pressure, then spread a butterlike substance provided by the corpsmen over them. I stood and pulled my socks from the branch of a bush where I'd hung them to dry, then brushed sand from my bare feet. I tossed a second pair of socks to Roy.

“Here. Dry.”

He sat down to pull on his boots, raising each and shaking it first to make sure a scorpion hadn't crawled inside. We'd been warned to dry our feet and socks whenever we could in order to avoid foot problems, like toenail fungus. Any scratch could become an open sore, and sores festered in the tropical climate. Some of the men developed fungal infections and ringworm. Almost everyone got sores that ulcerated, festering like chicken pox. We called them “jungle rot.” They itched so much that you couldn't help scratching, and that made them worse. The corpsmen gave us a salve to heal the sores, but we seemed to keep getting them. Dysentery, with extreme dehydration, was also a common complaint. So was typhus, which was caused by jungle insects. Corpsmen handed out various pills to all of us. Used to these daily doses of medicine, Roy and I swallowed them dry. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes arrived like fleets of fighter planes, attacking in swarms, especially virulent at night. For that, we were given small, bitter yellow pills—atabrine—and were administered various shots at least once every week or two.

“Hear that?” I asked.

“What?” said Roy.

“The bells. Like the sheep.”

“No sheep here,” said one of the men.

Another said, “It's prayers. Someone back home is praying for us.”

I had noticed the bells before, usually around noon. Even thousands of miles from home, in conditions I could never have imagined, it was comforting, the sound of the sheep and goats coming in. Even though I had not been able to attend, my family had performed a protection ceremony for me, a Blessing Way, after basic training. I felt sure they continued to pray for me and burned sage or chips of cedar, fanning the smoke over their bodies. Their prayers were carried across the miles as the pure, bright chime of the bells. The clear tones told me that I was still in good faith.