Code Talker (23 page)

I pulled my thoughts back to the present. Everyone was growing more and more quiet, waiting for the Japanese Navy to attack. Three o'clock in the afternoon came and went. Four. No Japanese fleet. Every sound of men in nearby foxholes—shifting their weight or adjusting a weapon—made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. You could almost hear nerves pinging in the air.

My radio beeped and the red light blinked on.

“Message.” I pressed the headset to my ears. I felt a huge grin break across my face. “Our Navy beat the Japs. We're condition yellow.” Condition yellow meant “all clear.”

The United States Navy, the branch of service to which the Marines belonged, had intercepted the Japanese fleet as they approached Bougainville. A sea battle had ensued, with the Americans emerging victorious.

We Marines cheered our Naval brothers in arms. On shipboard, Navy men and Marines often harassed each other. Fistfights broke out on the battleships and destroyers when a sailor called a Marine a “jarhead” or a Marine referred to a sailor as a “swab jockey.” That day, though, all of the rivalries were forgotten. We thanked God for our sailors.

Francis, the other code talkers, and I sent the message out to the rest of the troops on Bougainville. Men cheered, and relief poured over us all, palpable as a bucket of cool water. Everyone's biggest fear had been that the enemy would wait for the cover of darkness, then attack the island the Americans had fought so diligently to secure.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Onward to Guam

The terrain of Guadalcanal was familiar, but the island seemed eerily quiet. Scattered foxholes, splintered trees, and the occasional broken-down tank testified to the battles we had fought there. It felt strange to be on an island that wasn't in the midst of combat. After taking Bougainville, my 3d Marine Division had returned to the site of the code talkers' first campaign. The island had become a jungle training base and a staging area for war equipment and supplies.

This wasn't R&R. Generals had gathered on the island, where, huddled over maps of the South Pacific, they discussed which islands should be invaded next and wrangled over the details of the United States' war strategy. How many men should be sent? How long should we bomb the island prior to invading? The generals may have planned the war, but we men on the ground lived it.

A special liaison kept the code talkers informed of plans, and we were asked to forward strategic information to military leaders who weren't at the meetings.

Guadalcanal had been a beautiful tropical island before the war hit. Now broken heavy equipment was buried in the sand or hauled out into the ocean and sunk. Vegetation was trampled and shattered. Dead and broken palm trees had gone from green to brown. The brush was cut and dying. Bomb craters disfigured the once-pristine sweep of beach. It was awful, seeing all the things that had been destroyed.

But it was safe, a good place for training. We learned additional words as they were added to our Navajo code. It was a flexible secret language, sensitive to the dictates of battle, and always growing. Our vocabulary expanded throughout the war to accommodate new equipment or practices, anything that was needed by our troops and officers.

One I remember was the bazooka, a terrible gun, rocket-propelled, recoilless, and very effective as an antitank weapon. It delivered HE (high explosive) warheads and wasn't used by American forces until 1943, after we had already developed the original code. The gun was operated by two-man teams, aimer and loader, and its accurate range was limited, maybe three hundred feet, but it could take out any tank and was also used with great success to attack fortified positions. Bazookas were so effective that the Germans, back in Europe, copied the design and used our own innovation against us. The code talkers had to come up with a word for the new weapon. Someone chose
ah-zhol,
which means “stovepipe” in Navajo
.
That made perfect sense, since, in the field, the bazooka was nicknamed the “stovepipe.” All the code talkers learned the new word, as well as other words required by similar innovations. Upgrade code training was always stressed, since the original and the newer code talkers had to be in sync, and everyone had to be familiar with new vocabulary. Drilling on the code never ended.

Occasionally we were assigned to work detail. When there was no real work to accomplish, we dug holes, six feet deep, only to turn around and fill them. It was a strange assignment. I guess the Marines figured digging was a good way to get exercise.

I relaxed. Even strenuous Marine training was less exhausting and stressful than the fierce fighting we had endured on Guadalcanal and Bougainville. The bulk of the South Pacific islands still remained in the hands of the Japanese. Our victories at Bougainville and at Guadalcanal provided United States troops with jump-off points for future conquests.

When night arrived on the Guadalcanal training base, everything was quiet, almost surreal. With no ear tuned for the sound of enemy troops, I slept soundly there for the first time in months. I woke early, to the sounds of men swimming and roughhousing, the smells of food cooking. What a life!

We prepared for our assault on Guam, an island much smaller than Bougainville and Guadalcanal. But at only 212 square miles, it was the largest and most southern island in the Mariana Islands chain. The Mariana Islands lay due east of the Philippines, and the United States' command saw them as stepping stones to an eventual attack on Japan.

Operation Forager pursued the objective of capturing several of the Mariana Islands, foremost among them Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.

Guam had been a territory of the United States from 1900 until the Japanese captured it in late 1941, immediately after their invasion of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese perpetrated many atrocities against the island natives, the Chamorro people. They were tortured, beheaded, and treated as slaves. The Chamorros, who had been well treated during the American occupation, naturally favored the Americans. And the United States military knew that for strategic reasons, they needed to wrest the island back from the Japanese.

Prior to our land invasion of Guam, American bombers and ships strafed the beach near Apra Harbor. The bombing lasted for thirteen days.

On July 21, 1944, Marines and infantry invaded Guam. We Marines in the 3d Division landed north of Apra Harbor, an important deep-water harbor on Guam's western coast. Our goal was to capture the Japanese Naval yard located there. A regiment from the Army's 77th Division, along with the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, landed south of Apra. Their assignment was to capture the Orote Peninsula and its airfield.

 

 

Bullets fell like deadly sleet. Francis and I waded ashore from our landing craft. Ahead, I could see much of the island. The vegetation was close to the ground, and the terrain was more hilly than mountainous. At least the Japanese wouldn't have a mountain stronghold that overlooked the entire island.

But the enemy did have several vantage points atop a series of ridges and cliffs that overlooked the beach. Bombs and bullets flew everywhere. A daisy cutter hit the beach near me. Shrapnel exploded outward. Something slammed into my foot. I looked down at my left boot. A piece of shrapnel had lodged there.

“Corpsman!” someone yelled.

I said nothing, just gritted my teeth. We Navajo men never screamed when we were hit, and we waited for someone else to call the medic. We'd been raised to suffer silently.

A medic fought his way through the assault. The shrapnel had sliced my left foot between my big toe and the toe adjacent. The corpsman wrapped the injured foot. “You can keep going, Chief,” he said.

“Okay, Doc. Thanks.”

Business as usual,
I told myself, diving behind a bush with Francis. The radio beeped and blinked. An American cargo plane flew overhead, dropping crates full of supplies onto an empty portion of the beach. We listened to the message, then ran behind a three-by-five-foot crate and hunkered down.

Francis and I survived days one through four on Guam. Our 3d Marine Division captured the beachhead north of Apra Harbor while the American troops five miles to the south fought to isolate the Orote Peninsula.

During the night of day five, stuck in our foxhole, I tried to ignore the throbbing of my foot. I concentrated on my bladder, which felt as though it would burst. I nudged Francis. “Gotta take a leak.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“Don't try to crawl out.” I shuddered, thinking about what had happened to Harry Tsosie on Bougainville.

We Marines had been warned numerous times about relieving ourselves at night. We should never stand up. Some men would leave their trenches on all fours, flying in the face of our superior officers' warnings. But we were always told to simply stay and do our business in the foxhole. Our helmets did double duty as chamber pots.

“Crawl out? Not me,” said Francis.

I crouched lower in the foxhole. No one could forget the Japanese Banzai who lurked out there or their war cry, “
Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!
Marines, you die!”

“Better not leave this hole,” I said.

I could hear the smile in my partner's voice. “Right!”

We had plenty of things to worry about, and being delicate about biological functions wasn't one of them. Besides, we'd learned that we stayed drier in the tropical climate if we didn't wear underwear, which served only to hold the wet against our bodies. So we went “commando,” which made things easier when we had to pee. We pissed in the foxhole, feeling better after responding to nature's call. Then, careful to keep our heads low, we tried to get comfortable in the cramped trench. I closed my eyes, hoping for sleep.

But before dawn our radio came to life. Shouted messages told of a Banzai attack. No time to even think about an injured foot. Thanks to Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina's leadership, the Japanese attackers were better organized than previous Banzai had been. They'd slipped between two regiments of our Marine 3d Division, actually attacking U.S. positions just before dawn.

When we Americans responded, the walking wounded from the division hospital joined the fray, and the nonwalking wounded shot at the enemy from their hospital cots. The Japanese drive broke up, with groups of the enemy losing both their leaders and contact with one another. The battle dissolved into a series of isolated skirmishes.

The Navajo radio net was busy all night. Everyone needed ammunition. Everyone needed grenades. Everyone needed night flares. Messages zipped back and forth as fast as we could send them. Exhausted, Francis and I, both with headsets, wrote the incoming messages down and quickly compared them to make sure we had made no mistakes.

In the full light of morning, dead Japanese lay everywhere, 3,500 of them. There were many fewer dead Marines. Thanks to our Navajo code, our U.S. troops had been warned. When the smoke of battle cleared, we Americans still owned the beachhead.

That same night, as the Japanese approached our beach north of Apra Harbor on foot, U.S. troops just south of the harbor completed their assignment to take the Orote Peninsula. We Americans owned both the airfield at Orote and Apra Harbor with its Naval yard.

A group of Seabees had built several large foxholes on the island, huge holes covered with palm logs and camouflaged with dirt and leaves. Sometimes they dug the holes into a hill, making something like a cave, and covered the door with branches. The “super” foxholes measured maybe twelve by fifteen feet, with one side open, and were so deep you could almost stand in them. Officers and enlisted men all dove for those shelters when we thought an attack was coming. The officers mixed with us men and often removed signs of rank so the Japanese wouldn't target them. We all huddled together, feeling safer than in a standard foxhole. Although the officers sometimes had a tent to sleep in at night—not like us enlisted men, who slept in foxholes—they were just regular guys, seeming every bit as scared as the rest of us.

When bombs dropped, generally we code talkers couldn't just curl up in a shelter. We were almost always needed to transmit information, to ask for supplies and ammunition, and to communicate strategies. And after each transmission, to avoid Japanese fire, we had to move.

One morning, my squad huddled in a bomb crater large enough to hold eight men. Francis and I stayed close, connected by our communications gear. Our leader, a tall, skinny second lieutenant from New York, was not popular with the men. He had a mean streak and a desire for personal glory that made him especially dangerous to the men under his command. He ran back and forth on the crater's lip, yelling at us to “move the fuck” out. A shot rang out. I saw the lieutenant fall. He was hit either in the ass or the nuts. Corpsmen arrived immediately and patched him up.

“He'll get evacuated.” I said to Francis. “Lucky guy.” I didn't say it, but I felt relieved that he would no longer be commanding us.

The lieutenant's injury would send him home. A “million-dollar wound” was the general term for a non-life-threatening injury that got you out of the war. Of course, if he had really been wounded in the nuts, as scuttlebutt suggested, it was a wound none of us men envied.

His retirement brought another man to duty. A sergeant major from Philadelphia took over for the New Yorker. We breathed a sigh of relief. The Philadelphia man was well liked, and he knew what he was doing. He was extremely careful about us men when giving orders. He tried to be sure we knew everything we needed to know to avoid being killed. And he was a take-charge guy, always able to get supplies, whatever we needed, with unusual speed. A man like that, with the ability to get what his troops needed, was invaluable in war.