Code Talkers - Book Report #1

Internet image of Code Talkers

 An excerpt from Code Talkers by Joseph Bruchac, Chapter 26 The Black Beach:

 During the taking of Iwo Jima, I lost some of my white buddies, too. I have not said enough about how many of the white men who fought in the Pacific became my pals.  I had many friends - too many friends. I say "too many" because having a lot of friends during war can be a painful thing.

 It is different in war. Another friend is another person you might lose at any instant. Each new day, each minute, may be the last one when you will see your friend. That guy who shared a canteen of water with you, who teased you about your fear of snakes, or showed you pictures of his mother and father, can vanish in one moment as brief and shocking as a flash of lightning."

 The story of Navajo Marines in World War II is told in the first-person, based on the author's research into the damning yet heroic story of Navajo Americans who were invisible and invaluable at the same time.  

Ned Begay doesn't exist but the experiences in this page-turner are true and terrifying.  In the book, Begay speaks as a grandfather who was finally allowed in 1969 by the United States government to speak about his experience as a code talker, he starts with the day his parents sent him to a mission school operated by whites modeled on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania where Lieutenant Richard Pratt's motto was to "Kill the Indian and save the man."

 

That meant trying to erase Native American culture and language, which is ironic because it was Native American languages, going back to World War I that were an unbreakable code for the United States.

 

Begay is in the second cohort of young Navajo men recruited as Marines who were tasked with translating all communications into Navajo and back to American English.  You are with him on the landing ships, in foxholes, celebrated, and berated.

The story puts you in the middle of the action through the eyes of a young man who can identify with the natives on Pacific islands conquered by Japan and treated like his people were by Europeans who took his homeland.

It's worth your attention, whether you check it out of the library electronically or the old fashioned way, or buy it.

After helping the United States defeat the Japanese, Begay was discharged and returned home.  This excerpt is from Chapter 29:  

 

While I'd been in San Francisco and I wore my uniform in the street, people of all kinds would come up to me and say hello. Some would shake my hand and thank me for fighting for our country.  Now that I was almost home it was different.

 

The bartender, a big bilagaana (white man) with a red, sweaty face, glared at me.

 

"Can't you read, you stupid Navajo?" he said, pointing at a sign hung over the bar.  It said No Indians served here. Two other white customers along the bar glared at me as I read the sign aloud.

 

"I don't want an Indian," I said. "I'm just a thirsty Marine who wants a Coke."

 

They didn't laugh at my joke.  The bartender and the two other white men just grabbed me and threw me out into the street."

 

The novel put me in mind of my experience in South Dakota when reporting took me to the Rosebud, Lower Brule, Cheyenne, and Pine Ridge reservations.  The poverty was deeper than any I've seen, yet the men and women I met were smart, kind, and helpful.  

 

While the United States is country based on freedom and high ideals, our fears and prejudice have blown up in our faces when it comes to working with people who don't look like us.  In spite of treatment designed to tear down and destroy the targets of it, we can be thankful that so many have risen above, embracing the promise and teaching the majority their own ideals.

 

Check it out.