Marines salute Wordl War II 'code talker'

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

The law said the land their people lived on was not their own. Teachers told them their native tongue had no place in proper society. But when the United States needed Teddy Draper and his Navajo tribesmen to help win the war in the Pacific, they didn't hesitate.

Teddy Draper, who served as a "code talker" during World War II, was the guest of honor at Camp Smith yesterday. Draper is one of more than 400 Navajo whose used their native language as an unbreakable code for U.S. forces in the Pacific. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

"They told us we've got to go into the armed service and if we didn't go, we would go to jail," Draper told the assembled Marine audience, a smile forming at the edges of his mouth. "So I 'decided' to go into the service."

Assigned to six Marine divisions, the Navajo code talkers played a vital role in every Marine assault in the Pacific in 1942-45, using an encrypted form of their native language to transmit secrets. Draper and fellow code talkers relayed more than 800 error-free messages in the first 48 hours of the battle of Iwo Jima.

"Long ago, we fought the U.S. and they took our land," Draper says. "Our reservations were called trust lands. We weren't even considered citizens. In school, we were punished if we spoke Navajo.

"But it was the urgency of war that got us all to go out and help. We had to do a good job. And we did. We helped save thousands of lives."

The code talkers kept their mission a secret for a generation before information about their existence was declassified in 1968.

Since then, several books have been written about the code talkers' contributions to the the U.S. victory in the Pacific.

Michael Villanueva of Marine Corps Base Hawai'i leads a dance in honor of Ted Draper at yesterday's luncheon commemorating Native American Heritage Month. Villanueva, who is of Chiricahua, Apache and Seneca ancestry, was joined by Navajo dancers Ruchelle Bedonie, left, and Misty Cly Romero. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

And more recognition is on the way.

MGM's "Windtalkers" — directed by John Woo and starring Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater and Adam Beach, and filmed in part on O'ahu's Kualoa Ranch — is due in movie theaters in June. (After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the release was moved back from this month.)

Another film, "Whisper the Wind," is in the works from Pacific Western Productions and Red-Horse Native Productions.

All of this is heady stuff for Draper, 78, who grew up on a Navajo reservation in northern Arizona and vividly remembers seeing a white man for the first time at a trading post when he was 7 years old.

Draper said that while he was growing up, he never considered life outside the reservation. But he was hungry for an education. So, at age 13, he entered the first grade at a government school on the reservation.

He was 20 when the U.S. government lowered the draft age from 21 to 18 in 1943. At the time, military recruiters were visiting the reservations to look for Navajo men to join the war effort.

After completing basic training at Camp Pendleton in California, Draper was assigned to "code school," where he learned a newly developed method of relaying messages using Navajo-based code.

The Navajo Code Talkers Program had been established a year earlier on a recommendation by Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajo tribe. Johnston believed that the unwritten, highly textured language could form the basis of an unbreakable code.

Draper and his fellow code talkers learned to relay messages containing seemingly unrelated Navajo words that could be translated into English. The first letter of each corresponding English word would then spell out a word of the message. For example, the word "Navy" could be relayed using the Navajo words "tsah" (needle), "wol-la chee" (ant), "ah-keh-di-glini" (victor) and "tsah-ah-dzoh" (yucca).

Early code talkers also invented some 450 words for military terms with no Navajo equivalent. "Besh-lo" (literally, iron and fish) thus became the word for submarine.

The new code was rapidly translatable and, as Johnston predicted, totally confounding to the Japanese.

Though lauded internally by Marine officials, the code talkers occupied a tenuous position within the military. In certain situations, "bodyguards" were assigned to the Navajo troops. The guards were assigned to protect the code talkers, but they also had orders to kill them in the event of capture.

"They were there sometimes, but we never knew who they were," Draper says. "They knew who we were."

Draper returned to school after the war, raised 12 children and taught the Navajo language to students on the reservation.

Draper's visit to Camp Smith was made possible through his grandson, Lance Cpl. Richado Tsosie, who is stationed at the base as a motor transfer driver. Tsosie said he was told of his grandfather's service by his mother, but "he never said much about it."

Tsosie's other grandfather, Roy Notah, was also a code talker. There are fewer than 150 living code talkers, according to the Navajo Code Talker Association.