Code Talker (17 page)

A white T-shirt hung on a branch, maybe twelve feet away from Roy's and my foxhole. Someone had tossed it there the night before. Other arriving Marines had dug in farther down the tree line—some ten or twenty, others thirty, forty, and fifty feet away from Roy and me. During the night, the men all seemed to notice the shirt at different times. Was it a Jap? Shots, aimed at that shirt, rang out all night long. They zipped just over our heads.

I tapped Roy's shoulder and gestured toward the shirt with a movement of my lips. “Look.”

“Ouu!”
Roy shook his head.

The shirt flapped, a torn rag in the breeze. As dawn broke, someone pulled it from the branch, counting the twenty-one “friendly fire” bullet holes. Roy and I had made it safely through a night riddled with bullets. We'd slept very little, if at all, but the blessing helped to refresh us. We needed to be sharp. Today was the day we were going to start using the new code in battle.

Some communications officers on Guadalcanal greeted us Navajos with skepticism. Yes, they'd been given notice about the arriving code talkers. And yes, the old Shackle coding system was slow. Yet the notion of changing to something new during the heat of conflict filled battle-weary minds with doubt.

My group of code talkers was assigned to just such a doubter, Lieutenant Hunt, signal officer under General Alexander Vandergrift. When we Navajos assigned to him had arrived, Hunt just shook his head. He knew of our mission, but he had never worked with a group of Indians, and he had faith in the old code. Also, he was one of the officers who hated the idea of switching tactics in the middle of a major military operation.

He had decided to test the new code immediately and had given us a message to send out on our first night. Directly after the transmission began, panicked calls came in. Hunt's other radio operators jammed our Navajo speech, thinking the Japanese had broken into their frequency. By then it was dark, and the annoyed Hunt postponed the test.

That next morning Lieutenant Hunt continued with the trial of the code. He ordered his radiomen not to jam the transmissions, then told us code talkers to do our best. The test would determine whether or not he could use us! Both the code talkers and the standard communications men were given the same message, one Hunt estimated would take four hours to transmit and receive using the old Shackle protocol.

With the Shackle method, a mechanical coding machine was used to encode a written message. The encoded message was then sent via voice. These encoded messages were a jumble of numbers and letters, and unlike the Navajo code, were meaningless to the person transmitting them. At the receiving end, a cipher was used to decode the message. The entire process was cumbersome and prone to error.

While the men utilizing the Shackle code waited for the encoding machine to accomplish its work, one of our men, I think it was William McCabe, transmitted the message to another code talker. I can't remember who. The message that Hunt had estimated would take four hours by Shackle took only two and a half minutes by Navajo code—an impossible feat by current standards. And the message was transmitted accurately, word for word. Lieutenant Hunt was impressed.

But we Navajo code talkers already knew our code was good. None of us wanted it to go unused. With a code that could keep military plans and movements secret, our country would outmaneuver the Japanese. We were sure of it.

Even after Hunt's test, American fighting men who overheard the Navajo messages continued to be alarmed, thinking the Japanese had broken into the U.S. frequency. Communications men tried to jam the strange sounds. To identify ourselves as U.S. troops, and to keep our transmissions from being jammed, we code talkers needed a clear tag. We initiated our messages with the words “New Mexico” or “Arizona.” That was followed by the time and date, spoken in Navajo. We finished off with the time and date again, then with either
gah, ne-ahs-jah,
the letters
R
and
O,
standing for “roger and out” or with simply
ne-ahs-jah
for “out.”

None of us liked to think about it, but we had also planned a strategy in case we got captured. If the Japanese ever forced a code talker to send a message, he would alert the person on the receiving end by embedding the words “do or die,” in Navajo of course, somewhere inside the message.

When I looked around me at the other men, I could easily pick out the members of the 1st Marine Division who'd been fighting on the island for three months. They moved like zombies, their eyes focused straight ahead. None smiled or changed expression. They seemed not to notice us new guys—or anything else.

That first full day on Guadalcanal, after we passed Lieutenant Hunt's test, runners began arriving with messages. The runners, also called spotters, performed the dangerous assignment of scouting ahead of U.S. lines into enemy territory and reporting back on the locations of Japanese troops and armaments. They delivered messages involving combat details to communication personnel, to the front lines, and to the rear echelon. It was a dangerous job, especially at night, when they could be mistaken for Banzai
.
It was a job originally assigned to us code talkers, one we had trained for, and occasionally we went out on a run. But generally we were too busy sending messages.

Roy and I grabbed the radio. We both wore headsets. We moved to a position close to a Japanese nest of eighty-millimeter machine guns. A continuous barrage of shells from those Japanese guns wrought heavy damage on our U.S. fighting men.

A runner approached, handing me a message written in English. It was my first battlefield transmission in Navajo code. I'll never forget it. Roy pressed the transmit button on the radio, and I positioned my microphone to repeat the information in our code. I talked while Roy cranked. Later, we would change positions.

“Beh-na-ali-tsosie a-knah-as-donih ah-toh nish-na-jih-goh dah-di-kad ah-deel-tahi.”
Enemy machine-gun nest on your right flank
.
Destroy
.

Suddenly, just after my message was received, the Japanese guns exploded, destroyed by U.S. artillery.

I shouted, “You see that?”

“Sure did.” Roy grinned, but didn't stop cranking the TBX radio he held. The radio, the size of a shoe box, weighed thirty pounds. It stored up electricity generated when the crank was turned. Both of us wore headphones so we could hear each other. Thin red and yellow cords attached the microphone and headsets to the radio. There was a button for transmitting and one for receiving.

“U.S. artillery nailed them,” I said.

As I viewed this small victory—a direct result of my transmission—the wet, the fear, the danger . . . all receded for a few seconds.

Roy and I ran and crawled to a new position, knowing the Japanese were experts at targeting the locations from which messages had been sent. The enemy picked up U.S. radio signals and delivered mortar shells to those locations. We never stayed on the radio a second longer than we had to. And the frequencies we used changed every day. Each day we were careful to dial in the new frequency on the TBX box.

Immediately we focused on sending the next message, moving, then sending the next. Bullets zipping around us kept the level of noise high but that didn't keep us from hearing incoming messages. Luckily both the headsets and our ears were good, and we heard the Navajo words in spite of the war exploding around us.

Occasionally, I looked over at Roy, who tirelessly carried and cranked the radio. He nodded, still cranking.

After a couple of hours, we switched positions. I cranked and Roy spoke. My head reeled with Navajo and English words, with coordinates, with messages sent. It was good just to crank for a while, good not to worry about slipping, making a mistake that could cost lives.

Artillery shells whistled past us. I dived, the radio under me. Roy lay flat out on the ground. We never stopped transmitting.

More than twenty-four hours passed before we were able to grab a few hours of sleep.

We woke, still exhausted, in the hole we'd dug two days before.

“I'm starving,” said Roy.

Snaking our way to the mess tent on all fours, we ducked bullets and artillery shells. At the mess we grabbed some cold food for fuel, waved the omnipresent flies away as best we could, and ate ravenously.

“Not like the hot food in boot camp,” I said.

“Heck, no. That food was
good,
” said Roy around a mouthful of cold Spam.

“Yeah, well, I'm eating everything I can hold,” I told him. “You better do the same. No extra meat on those bones.” I pointed at Roy's lanky frame with my thumb.

Roy grinned. “I weigh more than you do, I bet.”

I shoveled a forkful of cold eggs into my mouth and swallowed. “Not too bad.”

We returned to relaying messages. My throat grew raw with talk. Never before had I spoken so many words without a break. I gestured to Roy. He handed me a half-full metal canteen that looked like an overblown whiskey flask. I drank, grabbed the TBX radio, and started cranking. We tried to ignore cramped muscles, gnawing stomachs, and the ordnance exploding around us.

Warships crammed the once-tranquil ocean along Guadalcanal's north shore. Bodies covered the beach. Then darkness moved in, thick with smoke, masking the grisly products of war.

Our messages relayed calls for ammunition, food, and medical equipment back to the supply ships waiting offshore. Messages transmitted the locations of enemy troops to U.S. artillerymen. Messages told of something unexpected that had happened in battle. Messages reported on our own troop movements. Messages forwarded casualty numbers, the Navajo code keeping the Japanese from learning of American losses in each foray. Throughout the days of battle to come, we sent those numbers back to our commanders on the ships each night.

After being in operation for just forty-eight hours, our secret language was becoming indispensable.

 

 

The hilly terrain on Guadalcanal posed real problems for the men operating mortars and artillery. Muzzle-loaded mortars were low-velocity, short-range weapons with a high trajectory, particularly well suited to uneven terrain. A mortar could drop into an enemy trench that artillery fire flew right over. Shells fired by field artillery reached a higher velocity and followed a flatter trajectory. Howitzers were similar to mortars in function, but larger.

The men firing all of these weapons dealt with a serious issue. Artillery, howitzers, and mortars targeted an enemy who was frequently nose to nose with the American soldiers at the front. Marksmen had to clear the hills and the heads of our own troops, causing them no injury, while drawing an accurate bead on the enemy. This became especially ticklish when we were “walking fire in.” That meant that our weapons were shooting behind the enemy and drawing them closer to the American troops at the front line. As they drew closer, we continued to fire behind them, moving both our fire and the Japanese troops closer and closer to our own troops. There was no room for error in a maneuver like that. The old Shackle communications system took so long to encode and decode, and it was so frequently inaccurate, that using it for the transmission of on-the-fly target coordinates was a perilous proposition. Frequently, in the midst of battle, instead of using the Shackle code, the Marines had transmitted in English. They knew the transmissions were probably being monitored by the Japanese, so they salted the messages liberally with profanity, hoping to confuse the enemy.

We code talkers changed all that.

 

 

Roy and I traveled close to the mortars. And the mortars, due to their short range, placed us well within the enemy's line of fire. Not as close as the riflemen, who were always out front leading the attack, but still close.

Sweat streamed down my back. I transmitted coordinates detailing the locations of Japanese and American troops. I knew men's lives depended upon the accuracy of each word. I wiped my brow with a sleeve, but never stopped talking. Out of the corner of one eye, I saw a flash of fire. Sand and shrapnel kicked up into the heavy gray sky. I kept talking.

Just then, a spotter, sent out to locate a pocket of Japanese soldiers and artillery, returned. Someone handed a slip of paper to me, bearing the exact Japanese location. The same paper also reported the location of forward U.S. troops.

I squinted, rubbed my eyes, read the paper again. Any error could cause the death of my fellow fighting men. I'd sent hundreds of messages. Messages swam in my brain, jamming and tumbling over one another. I shook my head to clear it.

I translated the data into Navajo code and spoke into the microphone that fit neatly into my fist like a baseball. I glanced in the direction my transmission would travel. Roy and I crouched so close to the American artillery and mortars that I could almost have shouted the information.

I spoke clearly, carefully. I pictured the code talker who received my message translating it back into English for the gunnery men. I imagined those men planning a trajectory, one that would fire over the heads of the Americans and hit the Japanese.

If a soldier was shot right beside us, we had been warned not to stop and help. Our transmissions could not be interrupted.

That day, as the afternoon waned, communications slowed. Roy and I whispered in Navajo, joking with each other, trying to stay awake. Messages generally started coming in around 5 A.M., so we woke up and plunged right into work. When things were busy, nothing else entered our minds, just the delivery of information. Lulls were more difficult than a steady stream of messages. Periods of quiet allowed exhaustion to creep into our brains like a work-worn dog, turn around three times, and settle down, demanding sleep.