From the Monterey County Herald
Serving Monterey County and the Salinas Valley

Thursday, January 17, 2002

Speaking in Native tongue

By KEVIN HOWE

They weren't even citizens when they answered the call to the colors in World War II by enlisting in the Marine Corps.

But 540 Navajos signed up, and more than 300 of them served as "code talkers," an elite and long-unrecognized group whose mother tongue became a secret weapon of war against the Japanese in the Pacific.

Keith Morrison Little was one of them, and described his experience to a rapt audience of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines at the Presidio of Monterey Wednesday evening.

Little, 77, joined the Marines in 1943, one of hundreds recruited through the efforts of Philip Johnston, then one of 30 non-Navajos who could speak the language.

Johnston, a veteran of World War I, understood the value of a code that could be used in the field, immediately decoded, and which an enemy couldn't crack, said Marine Corps Maj. Thomas Sparks, commander of the Marine Detachment at the Defense Language Institute.

The Japanese, he added, never did.

Little served with the 4th Marine Division in the Pacific on Kwajelein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima, transmitting messages by radio and telephone in Navajo.

Like his comrades in the Corps, he said, he was required to memorize a book of military terms and phrases developed by the original 29 "code talkers."

Navajo was an unwritten language and had no vocabulary for modern war, so a fighter plane became a "hummingbird," a tank a "turtle," bombs were "eggs" and grenades were "potatoes," and a message in code-talk would seem nonsensical, even to another Navajo who didn't know it, Little said.

As the war progressed, he and the other talkers refined the code, added words that had been overlooked, and were able to send their coded messages within seconds, compared to the minutes it took to decode standard signal encryptions.

Little reminded his audience that in 1943, no Navajos were citizens and they were prohibited from bearing arms by the Treaty of 1868, which allowed them to return to their sacred lands, the vast Navajo Reservation in the "four corners" area of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.

The Navajo nation's farms, livestock and crops had been destroyed by the U.S. Army, and its people marched into captivity, a death march that lives on in tribal memory as the "Long Walk," he said. Only the pleas of their leaders prevented them from being resettled in Oklahoma with other Indian tribes.

The hardest thing about Marine boot camp, Little recalled, "was they way they talked to us, very rough. Physically, it was easy" to young men inured to the hardships of reservation life.

"I was an outdoor person all the time; wherever I went, I rode horses or ran. But the DIs (drill instructors) were not very kind."

The code talkers were expected to do all the work and perform all the duties other Marines did, he said, and in the field "some of us had bodyguards. The code had to be protected, and we were to be shot by the bodyguard in case of capture."

The Navajo religion makes touching the dead or being in a place where a person has died a taboo because "there are evil spirits roaming around," he said.

But "you had to survive in combat. If you had to crawl behind a dead person for cover, that was it."

There were no promotions or special decorations for him and his comrades, Little said, and once home, they were told not to talk about their secret mission.

"I came out and just came home," he said. "My sister killed a sheep, and we had a feast, and I went back to work tending livestock. There was a religious ceremony for us, a Navajo Way, to chase away the evil spirits."

After the war, Little became a schoolteacher and later manager of the Navajos' logging business.

Other code talkers went on to serve in the state Legislature or on tribal councils, became engineers, lawyers, and in one case a medical doctor, and "some even became medicine men," he said.

Citizenship eventually came to the Navajo in the early 1950s.

Last July, Congress presented the original 29 code talkers with congressional gold medals for their role in developing the Navajo language code, and Little and other code talkers who came after them received a congressional silver medal.

The MGM film "Windtalkers," starring Nicholas Cage and Adam Beach, directed by John Wu, which portrays the code talkers of World War II, is scheduled for release June 14. Cage plays a Marine assigned to be Beach's bodyguard. Beach plays William Yazzie, one of the original 29 code talkers.