His entire life, they had tried to make him forget who he was. Where he came from. Why his history mattered. They punished him. Attempted to indoctrinate him.
And now they needed his help. To win the war. To save lives. He could have been angry. Might have been bitter. But when that time came for a young Chester Nez to answer the call, he did so with bravery and pride.
—
Chester Nez was born in Chi Chil Tah (Among the Oak Trees), New Mexico, on January 23rd, 1921. A member of the Navajo Dibéłizhiní (Black Sheep Clan) of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock People) at a time when relations between the U.S. government and Navajo Nation were at a low. Much of the support the government promised to the reservation had not been provided, and children were often taken from the families and placed into boarding school, in an attempt to dislocate them from their origins.
Still, Nez enjoyed life on the hard land. He lived with his extended family – except his mother, who died when he was three – doing what he could to assist in the keeping of the over 1000 sheep herded on their land.
That all came to an end in the 1930s, when the government imposed a livestock reduction on the Navajo, claiming they were ruining the reservation. Government agents shot the horses and cows, and burnt the sheep alive in a ditch while Nez and his family watched on.
Shortly after, Nez was sent to boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Here, he was given the name by which he is now known: Chester, after President Chester A. Arthur, and Nez, meaning ‘very tall’. His Navajo name is lost to time. So too would his language, if the supervisors had their way; anyone caught speaking a native language was punished severely.
In 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Early the following year, a group of Marine recruiters arrived at Nez’s school. Alongside them was Philip Johnston, a former Army engineer who had previously lived on the Navajo reservation and proposed using Native American languages to create a code indecipherable to enemy forces. With its unusual structure and subtle oration, it would be unlike anything they had tried before.
When the recruiters asked for volunteers, Nez was one of the first to raise his hand. “I was always raised to be a warrior,” he would later say, believing it to be his duty to protect both the people and land he loved so greatly.
Lying to his family about his intentions, Nez joined the rest of the volunteers and were shipped out for basic training in San Diego in May of 1942. It was “pretty tough,” says Nez, even for those who had spent their lives on the reserves. At its conclusion, 29 individuals would remain to become the very first code talkers.
From here, they were assigned to Camp Elliot in California, where they began creating the code. After experimenting with several different means of encoding, the code talkers began pairing letters from the modern English alphabet with words from their language. For instance, A = Wol-la-chee, the word for Ant. B = Shush; bear. Simple, but entirely effective.
The code talkers would be deployed in the Pacific theatre only; Hitler was known to have studied Native American languages before the war, and even though his research time was unsuccessful in their attempts, it simply wasn’t worth the risk. The Japanese, however, had no way of understanding the foundation on which the code had been built.
Nez would first see fighting in Guadalcanal. “We would land on the beaches, which were littered with dead Japanese bodies,” he told The Arizona Republic in 2011. “My faith told me not to walk among the dead, to stay away from the dead. But which soldier could avoid such? This was war. War is death. I walked among them.”
He remembers the very first message he sent clearly: Anaai naatsosi beeldooh alhaa dildoni nishnaajigo nahdikadgo, or “Enemy Japanese machine gun on your right flank. Destroy”. From there, Nez saw service in Bougainville, Guam, and Peleliu. The code talkers would always fight on the front line, working in pairs so that one could crank the battery and operate the radio while the other sent and received messages.
He spent four years overseas, before being honourably discharged as a Private First Class. “It was the happiest day of my life,” exclaimed Nez. Returning home, the code talkers – who now numbered close to 500 – were told not to talk about their responsibilities during the war, nor share the code.
Plagued by nightmares, Nez spent five months in a military hospital. It wasn’t until his father arrived, took him home, and performed a traditional healing ceremony that the nightmares departed.
Nez then turned his attention to the arts, studying at the University of Kansas from 1946 to 1952. He left without receiving a degree, but received an honorary bachelor’s on Veteran’s Day, 2012.
For the next 25, he worked as a painter for what is now the Veterans Affairs hospital in Albuquerque.
Chester Nez died on June 4th, 2014, at the age of 93.
The code talker program was officially declassified in 1968, but the service of those involved went largely ignored until 2001, when President George W. Bush awarded the five remaining code talkers the Congressional Gold Medal. Nez proudly accepted, though he remained troubled by the lack of respect he and his companions had faced throughout their lives. “All those years, telling you not to speak Navajo, and then to turn around and ask us for help with that same language,” he said in an interview with USA Today in 2002. “It still kind of bothers me.”