The Code Talkers: And now there are none....
Keith Little, one of the last living Navajo Code Talkers, passed away on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2011. His friend, Chester Nez, died last Wednesday, June 4, 2014, and was the last of the Code Talkers. I bumped into Keith and eleven of his fellow Code Talkers on New York's Fifth Avenue located toward the end of the City's 2011 Veteran's Day parade (all I was trying to do was to get across Fifth Avenue to meet friends). I first read about them in the book, "With the Old Breed," by Eugene Sledge. Keith recalls being a young Navajo boy at a reservation school and being reprimanded for speaking his native language. And yet it was this skill -- and his dignity in the face of such prejudice -- that made him and his fellow Code Talkers so exceptional. I feel as if we have lost a special link. He was recruited as a very young man in 1943 to join 420 Navajos in a special encryption unit of the US Marines. The Code Talkers transmitted and received messages in their native Navajo language. They were assigned to all Marine Units and were in the front lines of all of the Pacific battlefields of World War II (Keith was a member of the 4th Marine Division). The code proved unbreakable given its uniqueness and the fact that it was an unwritten language that depended on the tone of a word for its meaning -- so complex that it really needed to be learned in childhood. The specific code eventually grew to include 411 Navajo words.
The Code Talkers: And now there are none....
Keith Little, one of the last living Navajo Code Talkers, passed away on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2011. His friend, Chester Nez, died last Wednesday, June 4, 2014, and was the last of the Code Talkers. I bumped into Keith and eleven of his fellow Code Talkers on New York's Fifth Avenue located toward the end of the City's 2011 Veteran's Day parade (all I was trying to do was to get across Fifth Avenue to meet friends). I first read about them in the book, "With the Old Breed," by Eugene Sledge. Keith recalls being a young Navajo boy at a reservation school and being reprimanded for speaking his native language. And yet it was this skill -- and his dignity in the face of such prejudice -- that made him and his fellow Code Talkers so exceptional. I feel as if we have lost a special link. He was recruited as a very young man in 1943 to join 420 Navajos in a special encryption unit of the US Marines. The Code Talkers transmitted and received messages in their native Navajo language. They were assigned to all Marine Units and were in the front lines of all of the Pacific battlefields of World War II (Keith was a member of the 4th Marine Division). The code proved unbreakable given its uniqueness and the fact that it was an unwritten language that depended on the tone of a word for its meaning -- so complex that it really needed to be learned in childhood. The specific code eventually grew to include 411 Navajo words.