Last Surviving Original Code Talker, Chester Nez, Speaks During Northland College's Indigenous...

After they've been persecuted. After we've used them. After they've served. We need to spare their lands and protect their water, Our water.

, I'm glad to know they're still alive. I saw on PBS a decade ago the last half a dozen or so code talkers were still walking in formation they still had the drill and ceremony in them as seniors walking proudly.

In 1942, the US Marine Corps recruited 29 young Navajo men to create what became known as the Navajo Code. The Japanese had managed to crack every previously used US radio code during the War in the Pacific. Chester Nez was one of those ORIGINAL 29 and the only one to have his memoir published in 2011. (Really good book!)

The reason the Navajo Code was unbreakable is that it was a double code using an unwritten language. For many things, there were no words in Navajo, so they substituted other words. For example, the word used for "bomber" was the Navajo word for "buzzard" and the word used for "submarine" meant "iron fish." To a native Navajo speaker who didn't know the code, it sounded like the Code Talkers were just speaking jibberish. Messages had to be translated from message to Navajo code to English and back. The Code Talkers could do this in several seconds to just a few minutes.

Once the code was created, 27 of the Code Talkers were deployed to the South Pacific while two stayed in the US to teach new Navajo recruits. By the end of the war, there were 400-500 Navajo Code Talkers. Chester Nez was last of the original 29; he passed away on June 4, 2014. So, it is very likely that you did meet a Code Talker, CPT Jack Durish, just not one of the ORIGINAL 29.