"National Navajo Code Talkers Day" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
August 14
National Navajo Code Talkers Day
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A quick note before today's post: this blog usually digs for the esoteric thread running underneath a date on the calendar. Today, we're setting that habit aside entirely. Some history deserves to be told plainly, on its own terms, without a mystical frame draped over it, and the story of the Navajo Code Talkers is exactly that kind of history…
On
August 14th, 1982, President Ronald Reagan formally proclaimed “National Navajo
Code Talkers Day,” honoring the Navajo Marines, and the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chippewa,
Creek, and Sioux servicemen who came before them, whose native
languages became one of the most effective tools in American military history.
The
idea had precedent: during the First World War, Choctaw and Cherokee soldiers
had already demonstrated that Native American languages, unfamiliar to any
enemy cryptographer, could carry battlefield messages securely simply by being
spoken. Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran who had grown up on the Navajo
reservation as the son of missionaries and spoke the language fluently,
proposed reviving and formalizing the idea for the Pacific theater. In February
1942, he demonstrated the concept for Marine officers at Camp Elliott, and that
spring, 29 Navajo recruits arrived at Camp Pendleton to build something that
had never existed before: a two-layer code, using Navajo itself as an unbroken
outer layer and a specifically constructed vocabulary of 211 substitute terms,
later expanded to 411, as the inner one. A fighter plane became “hummingbird.”
A submarine became “iron fish.” America itself was rendered as a
sign-language-derived term for the country's own name. None of it existed in
ordinary Navajo before these men built it, word by deliberate word.
By the end of the war, more than 400 Navajo Marines had trained as Code Talkers, serving in every major Marine operation in the Pacific theater, transmitting battlefield orders, troop movements, and coordinates with a speed and accuracy no mechanical cipher of the era could match. The code was never broken. Not once, by an enemy that had proven skilled at breaking nearly everything else the United States tried to encrypt.
Their
service came at a genuine cost that the eventual honors can't fully repay.
These men served a government that had spent decades before the war actively
working to suppress the very language that would go on to help win it, forcing
Navajo children into boarding schools designed to strip their native tongue
from them. They fought and, in too many cases, died in the Pacific for a
country that would not let them vote in New Mexico or Arizona until years after
the war ended. And because the code's value depended entirely on secrecy, their
story couldn't be told at all. The program remained classified until 1968,
meaning most Code Talkers came home to silence rather than parades, unable to
tell even their own families what they had actually done overseas for more than
two decades.
National recognition, when it finally came, came in stages: the 1982 proclamation itself, then the Congressional Gold Medal for the original 29 in 2001, and the Congressional Silver Medal extended to the remaining several hundred men who followed them into the program. Many of the men who most deserved to see that recognition did not live long enough to receive it.
One
persistent piece of the story deserves an honest correction, not because it
diminishes the Code Talkers, but because it's become one of the most repeated
claims about them and doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The 2002 film Windtalkers
dramatized a claim that Marine bodyguards assigned to protect individual Code
Talkers were secretly under orders to kill them rather than let them risk
capture and interrogation, a chilling detail the film's own producers insisted
was based on interviews with surviving Code Talkers. However, the documented
record doesn't support it. Chester Nez, one of
the original 29 and the last surviving member of that founding group before his
death in 2014, addressed the claim directly in his own memoir, stating plainly
that if bodyguards existed at all, and even that much is genuinely disputed
among the men themselves, their job was protection, not execution, and that no
Code Talker was ever killed by the man assigned to guard him. The only Navajo
serviceman actually captured and tortured by Japanese forces during the war,
Joe Kieyoomia, wasn't a Code Talker at all; he survived the Bataan Death March
and brutal interrogation, and while he recognized isolated Navajo words when
Japanese interrogators tested him with intercepted transmissions, the code's
own double-layer construction meant the words made no coherent sense without
training he'd never received. The military itself has officially denied any
kill order ever existed.
It's a case where the true story, ordinary men doing extraordinarily dangerous work and surviving it through skill rather than a grim contingency plan, needed no embellishment to be worth telling. Today, we remember true heroes who brought their own heritage to a war, and extended what was already their extraordinary legacy.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
A note on today's recommendation: our usual Occult Reads pairing draws from our roster of esoteric and occult publishing partners; yet, this story deserves to be read in its own voice, so today we're stepping outside to point you toward the source that matters most…
Code Talker: The First and
Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII
By
Chester Nez, with Judith Schiess Avila | Berkley Caliber
There
is no better place to hear this history than directly from one of the men who
lived it. Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original 29 Code
Talkers, published this memoir in 2011, finally able to speak openly about a
mission he'd carried in silence for nearly seventy years. Co-written with
Judith Schiess Avila, the book moves from Nez's childhood on the Navajo
reservation, including his own experience in a government boarding school built
to erase the very language he would later be asked to weaponize for his
country, through his recruitment, training, and combat service across the
Pacific.
What
makes the memoir essential is exactly what a magazine like this one can't
provide secondhand: Nez's own voice, unfiltered by dramatization, describing
what it actually felt like to build a code out of his mother tongue under
combat pressure, to watch friends die beside him, and to come home unable to
tell anyone, including his own family, what he had done. It is a document of
extraordinary courage told without embellishment, which makes it more powerful,
not less, than any fictionalized version of the same events.
There
isn't a caveat to offer here, no audience it isn't right for. If you take one
thing away from today's post, let it be this: read Chester Nez's own words
before you read anyone else's version of his story.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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