Chester Nez

January 23, 1921 – June 4, 2014

One of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers who built an unbreakable code from their own language for the U.S. Marines in WWII.

world war 2military leadernative americancode talker

Chester Nez was born on January 23, 1921, in Chichiltah, New Mexico, a member of the Navajo Nation, the Diné people. Like many Native children of his generation, he was sent as a boy to a government-run boarding school whose purpose was to strip away Native identity. There, teachers punished him for speaking Navajo, the only language he had known at home, sometimes washing his mouth out with harsh soap. The message was blunt and cruel: his language was something to be beaten out of him. It is one of the great ironies of American history that the very tongue the government tried to erase would soon help save American lives by the thousands. When World War II came, the United States Marine Corps faced a serious problem in the Pacific: the Japanese kept breaking American radio codes almost as fast as they were created. An engineer who had grown up among the Navajo suggested a daring solution, and in 1942 the Marines recruited 29 young Navajo men, Nez among them, to build a secret code out of their own unwritten language. Navajo was almost unknown outside the Southwest, had no alphabet familiar to outsiders, and used sounds and grammar so complex that no enemy could crack it by ear. In a locked room, these original 29 Navajo Code Talkers invented the code from scratch. They assigned Navajo words to military terms, so that a fighter plane became a hummingbird and a battleship a whale, and built an alphabet in which each English letter was represented by a Navajo word. Nez helped create it, then had to memorize the whole system, because nothing could be written down in combat. Once trained, Nez carried the code into some of the fiercest fighting of the Pacific war. As a Marine he served at Guadalcanal, Guam, Peleliu, and Bougainville, crouching over a radio under fire to send and receive messages in the code he had helped invent. The code talkers could transmit a report in seconds that would have taken a coding machine far longer, and they did it flawlessly under the worst conditions. The code was never broken. Japanese cryptographers, so skilled at cracking other American ciphers, were utterly baffled by it, and Marine commanders credited the code talkers with helping win crucial battles, including the taking of Iwo Jima, where code talkers sent hundreds of messages without a single error. What these men had done stayed secret for decades after the war, because the military wanted to keep the code available in case it was needed again; the code talkers came home unable to tell even their families what they had accomplished. Not until 1968 was the program declassified, and only in 2001 did the United States finally honor the original 29 with the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian award. Chester Nez lived to see that recognition, and in 2011 he co-wrote a memoir, 'Code Talker,' so the story would not be lost. When he died on June 4, 2014, he was the last of the original 29 code talkers still living. His life holds together two truths that students should never forget: that his country once tried to punish the language out of him, and that the same language, in his mouth and the mouths of his fellow Diné Marines, became one of the most valuable weapons the United States possessed.

Chester Nez

Further reading