Code Talkers and the Trump Fan

I got to the senior hall early on Thursday because I wasn’t born yesterday and if you want a prime parking space that’s what you have to do. Heck, if you want a parking space---period---in the winter when snow piles are everywhere you need to get there a half hour early or you’ll be hiking in from the street. I guessed from the lecture topic we’d be hearing about that all 160 seats would be filled and I wasn’t wrong. A lot of people wanted to hear about the Code Talkers, the Navajo Indians who were mostly 15/16 year old kids living on Reservations or at Mission Schools when they were recruited to join the Marines during WWII. Yup, the same Mission schools where Indian kids would get their mouths washed out with soap for speaking Navajo were recruited to use that same language in the Pacific Theater.

The Code Talkers started out with just twenty-nine guys. At the time, there was no written Navajo language and it had no alphabet and only a scant handful of people world-wide spoke the language who weren’t Navajo. The teens were tested against coding machines passing communications back and forth and the Native Americans could do in minutes what it took the military equipment two hours to cipher. Over the next 30 days they developed 450 new words for military equipment and terms which they had to memorize plus they had learn to use Morse code and how to use wire and radio transmission equipment. The program proved its value quickly and more Navajos were enticed to enlist.

Encyclopedia.com says, “Over 540 Navajo served in the Marines during World War II, nearly 300 served in the field as code and communications experts. Navajo code talkers operated in all six Marine divisions, and served in every major Pacific battle between 1942 and 1945. At the battle of Iwo Jima, a small unit of six Navajo code talkers, under the command of 5th Marine Division signal officer, Major Howard Connor, transmitted and received nearly 1,000 messages in 48 hours.”

I already knew that each Code Talker had two Marines assigned to them to protect them from harm and who were supposed to kill them if the Code Talker had been captured. That was to protect the code from being tortured out of one of them. But I didn’t know they also had to protect them from being shot by other Americans who occasionally mistook the Navajos for Japanese individuals who they assumed were wearing a stolen uniform.

Our speaker became interested in the Code Talkers because her daughter lives on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and she had a patient who was one of the original twenty-nine. The last of the Code Talkers died this year and our speaker did a slide show of many of these guys, telling us what became of them after the war. Many of them suffered from what we call PTSD today, made all the worse because they were forbidden to talk about what they did in the war. The Code Talker program wasn’t declassified for 23 years because the military thought they might use it again. Most of the Code Talkers also didn’t get any military veteran’s benefits because they weren’t considered American citizens of the U.S.A. since they lived on Reservation land.

Reagan, Clinton and G.W. Bush all found ways to honor the Code Talkers and Obama left his legacy, too, by signing bills into law that help Native Americans. Then came Trump who, at a ceremony in the White House where three Code Talkers were being honored he joked about “Pocahontas.” That was bad enough but worse was he held the entire ceremony in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who signed the Indian Removal Act, leading to tens of thousands of Native Americans being forced to relocate, many dying along the Trail of Tears. Was Trump sending a veiled, racist message or is he just that tone-deaf or uneducated that he nor anyone on his staff understood the poor optics he was sending out into the world? Was there was nowhere else in the White House or even in the same room where all the news coverage didn’t have to include Jackson in the photo-opts?

According to our speaker the people on the reservation where her daughter lives were upset about the Jackson portrait and they had no doubt it was a purposeful act of disrespect. (Note how the podium was placed.) When the speaker shared that opinion a person sitting behind me said, “You just had to go there, didn’t you!” I turned around to see who said that and it wasn’t hard to figure out since I always sit in the next to the last row. The woman had a sour look on her face that made me want to laugh at her discomfort. I turned back around quickly so she couldn’t see the smile I was sure was growing on my face. And I don’t want to examine that smile too deeply because I’m pretty sure it’s a character flaw to enjoy another person’s anger. ©