LIFE in the Marine Corps came easily to Chester Nez. He was used to loping long miles, sleeping in the open air, and to the hard work of herding sheep and goats under the cloud-studded turquoise skies of the New Mexico Checkerboard. He took danger in his stride too: as a Navajo warrior and protector, he wanted to defend his country and make his family proud. He liked the plentiful food, after a childhood when he often was “hurt by hunger” as his language, verb-rich and adjective-poor, put it. And, in his uniform, he could visit bars that banned native Americans.

Some things bothered him: looking people in the eye (disrespectful), shouting (even more so) and the careless treatment of cut hair (a dangerous weapon to enemies). Navajo religion forbids contact with the dead, and the battlefield stench of corpses spooked him. To keep the spirits of the dead at bay, he would fill his mind with thoughts of beauty, mutter a Navajo prayer, and touch the buckskin medicine bag which hung at his neck, with its blessed corn pollen and tiny, secret souvenirs.

His first name was not Chester, nor was his surname Nez. The real ones had somehow got lost at boarding school, where the white world tried to civilise the rangy eight-year-old, born to a mother from the Black Sheep Clan and a father of the Sleeping Rock People. They made him speak English, a language he had never heard. To get rid of the dirty gobbledegook he insisted on using, the matron brushed his teeth with bitter Fels-Naptha soap.

In vain. Nothing could take away his Navajo–part (though he did not know it) of a language family so complicated that linguistics needs special terms to describe it. Verbs do most of the work, agglutinated with suffixes and prefixes, in seven modes (including the usitative, iterative and optative), 12 aspects, such as the semelfactive (a half-completed action), and ten sub-aspects, including the completive and the semeliterative (a single repetition). It has four combinations of tones, plus glottal and aspirated stops. A shift in any of them can change a word’s meaning completely.

War of words

As America struggled to stem the Japanese advance across the Pacific following the disaster of Pearl Harbour, military codes—cumbersome and weak—were proving a fatal weakness. But Philip Johnston, a missionary’s son raised on a Navajo reservation, hit on the idea of using a language that the Japanese could not crack. Native American tongues had been used for battlefield messages in the first world war, (Hitler had even dispatched spies to America in the 1930s to study them in case they would be used again). But Navajo had not been written down, and almost no outsiders spoke it fluently.

Moreover, to be safe, the code that Mr Nez and his fellow-Navajo volunteers in the secret 382nd Platoon helped devise was a complex one. The letter A was represented by any of three Navajo words: “ant”, “apple” or “axe”. Common military terms had words of their own: a fighter plane was a hummingbird, (da-he-tih-hi), a battleship was a whale (lo-tso), a destroyer a shark, (ca-lo). A hand grenade was a potato, and America was Ne-he-mah (“our mother”). The Japanese did eventually capture (and torture) a Navajo—but he was not a code-talker. He could not make head or tail of the messages.

Marine commanders were initially sceptical. But a message that took an hour to encrypt, transmit and decrypt on the existing mechanical Shackle system could be transmitted orally by code-talkers in just 40 seconds. Even America’s own code-crackers failed to break it.

On November 4th 1942 (the most frightening day of his life, he later recalled) he went into action on Guadalcanal, toting a hand-cranked radio, the size of a shoebox and weighing 30 pounds (nearly 14 kilos). His first message was: “Enemy machine gun nest on your right. Destroy.” The shells rained down as ordered. He was to serve in key battles of the Pacific war: Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu and Angaur. Everywhere the marines fought, Navajo code-talkers, under fire, hoarse, tired and thirsty, were vital in victory, directing fire, calling up reinforcements, evacuating the wounded, and warning of enemy movements.

Gratitude came slowly. Many code-talkers (unable to talk about their secret wartime work) ended up penniless drunks. When Private First Class Chester Nez applied for a civilian identity card in 1945, an official took pleasure in reminding him that he was not a full citizen and could not vote (that did not come until 1948). He suffered from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, fighting it, successfully, with traditional Navajo healing ceremonies. He started an art course, but ran out of cash (the University of Kansas awarded him his degree in 2012), and worked for 25 years painting walls and murals at a veterans’ hospital in Albuquerque. Only after 1968, when the code-talkers’ story was declassified, did the fame and honours begin—a bit embarrassingly, he said—to flow.

He mourned the suffering and injustice of his people’s past, but insisted that the Navajo story was ultimately of triumph, not sorrow. And his own life had been “100%”. But it did bother him that his country had tried to stop him speaking Navajo, when it had proved so useful.