From An Unbreakable Code
Protect the code. Protect the secrets. For decades, John Brown, Jr., lived with those words in his head. He carried them through four Pacific Theater campaigns in World War II, and during most of his adulthood, living on Navajo lands in the Southwest.As a member of an elite group of Marines, Brown and 28 other Native Americans devised a code using Dine, the Navajo language, a code locked so tight the Japanese never came close to deciphering it. From 1942 to V-J Day in 1945, the "code talkers" delivered critical orders and battle plans in a simple, inscrutable shorthand language they invented. When the war was won and they were sent home, the order remained: Protect the code. Protect the secrets.
So Brown felt extraordinary pride one day last summer as he stood before a statue of Ulysses Grant in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington. After decades during which the code-talker project remained classified, Congress had acknowledged the five surviving original code talkers and the families of the deceased, and President George W. Bush presented them with chalice-size gold medals. Now came Brown's moment to reflect on the war -- and the role in it that he and his Navajo comrades played. "I fought in Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Tinian," he says. "The Navajo code talkers are going to be something in history."
And with help from Hollywood, their story will be told around the world. Timed for Veterans Day weekend this month, MGM is releasing Windtalkers, a film starring Nicolas Cage as a Marine assigned to protect a Navajo code talker during the battle for Saipan. Says Windtalkers director John Woo (who last directed Mission: Impossible 2), "I was touched by how dedicated, brave and smart the Navajo were. They are my heroes."
Sitting under a pinon tree outside his Crystal, N.M., home, Brown, now 79, tends a small fire and wanders back to his childhood. In spring 1941, he graduated from the Albuquerque Indian School, then returned to work on his father's ranch near Chinle, Ariz. John Brown, Sr., had raised his son in the traditional Native American ways, but wanted him to be more than just a ranch hand. "If you hang around here," Brown remembers his father saying, "there's a lot of bad boys with bad habits." So a few months later the kid with jet-black hair took a job some 40 miles away as a janitor at the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital.
The following spring, a group of soldiers came to Fort Defiance. "They said they were looking for Navajo boys, particularly the ones who had graduated from high school," says Brown. At the time, Brown had little knowledge of the world outside his sparsely populated high-desert reservation -- or of the conflict underway in Europe and the Pacific. "What is war?" Brown asked the soldiers. "We'd just read in the paper about Hitler. I thought going to war was some kind of adventure."
So he enlisted, departing without even the chance to tell his parents. It was 1942, and after losses in the Philippines the Allies were struggling to gain a new Pacific foothold.
When brown arrived at Camp Elliot in San Diego, he and 28 fellow Navajos were gathered behind closed doors and told of their assignment: to create a code based on their native language, virtually unknown outside Navajo lands. They developed a simple phonetic matrix, with a Dine word for each letter of the English alphabet. "We put it on the blackboard," says Brown, "A, B, C all the way to Z. For D we used dog, lha-cha-eh. For E, we used eagle, atsah. We always giggle about J. We used our word for jackass." The code talkers also chose more than 200 Navajo words and phrases to represent military terms. For the word America, they substituted the Navajo word for Our Mother; for destroyer, the word for shark. "We had names for officers, airplanes, submarines," says Brown. They memorized everything.
A Lethal Order
The Navajos were assigned to Marine divisions and shipped out. Brown first saw combat in Guadalcanal with the 2nd Marine Division; Japanese forces had taken a huge toll on the 1st Marine Division. During battles, code talkers traveled with regimental or battalion commanders. Says Capt. Matt Morgan, Marine Corps motion-picture liaison director, "A code talker with the regimental commander would, in Navajo code, say over the radio to three battalion code talkers something like, 'We're going to attack at dawn on the right.' Those three code talkers would then write the message in English and give it to their commanders." Because the Japanese couldn't crack the code, the Navajos became particular targets for capture.In the film, Nicolas Cage's character is assigned to guard a code talker, played by Adam Beach. "My character's job required that not only do we protect the code talkers, but we protect the code," says Cage. "If code talkers were captured, the bodyguard would be responsible for terminating them. My character grapples with the notion of having to kill an American."
The idea of a standing order for one Marine to kill another is, to say the least, controversial. Capt. Morgan says, "There is no documented evidence that there was such an order. It's fiction." But Alison Rosenzweig, co-producer of the film, insists the order did exist, and Brown, too, says he knew of the kill order. "The Marine order was to let them shoot you if you were captured," he says. "That was war. We were obligated."
For Brown, it never came to that. By the time he got to Saipan he was sick with malaria. After two years in the Pacific, he was shipped to a hospital on Hawaii, having lost more than 30 pounds. He spent three months in Pearl Harbor's naval hospital being treated for malaria and receiving counseling. "I guess I was getting bad in the mind," he says. The shock and violence of war had taken its toll. "He later told us how he'd disembark onto island battlefields," says his son, Virgil, now 47, "and see on the beach the bodies of guys he'd known only hours before."
Brown received an honorable discharge in September 1945 and returned to the reservation. He joined the Marine Reserve and went back to work as a medical technician. As commanded, he told no one about his secret Marine Corps mission. He married his longtime girlfriend, Loncie Polacca Brown, and they eventually settled into the one-story home where they live today, on a parcel dotted with sage and juniper.
About 40 miles northwest, Brown's mother, Na-ne-bah, who is in her late 90s, still lives on the Canyon de Chelly rim. Na-ne-bah told her son after his return that he should heal his spirit by undertaking one of the tribe's ceremonies to rid himself of an evil spirit. "My mind was still kind of messed up," Brown says. "I'd get nightmares, think about the war. My mother said, 'Son, you ought to have a squaw dance, kill that spirit that's still around you.' So I had a squaw dance," he says, "and I changed a lot."
Brown and Loncie, now 74, have seven adult children (one now deceased) and more than a dozen grandchildren. Three of their sons served in the military. From 1963 to 1983, Brown was a Navajo tribal councilman, an elected official similar to state senator. Until retiring this summer, he worked as a counselor for a tribal child-sexual-abuse unit.
Neither a medal nor a movie will change Brown's day-to-day life. But he's a man with a legacy -- one he's now free to celebrate. "They might be teaching about the code talkers in school one of these days," he says. "After I'm gone, my grandkids will see their grandpa was somebody."