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TwitThisA 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."
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