As marines fought cave to cave on lwojima, a foreign language crackled over field radios.  Bombers were called jaysho (buzzards) and bombs were ayeshi (eggs).  The commanding officer was bihkehhe (war chief) and each platoon was a hasclishni  (mud clan).  On the morning of February 23, 1945, when six soldiers on a mountaintop hoisted the Stars and Stripes for all the world to see, the word went out in code: "Naastsosi Thanzie Dibeh Shida Dahnestsa Tkin Shush Wollachee Moasi Lin Achi." Marine cryptographers translated the Navajo words for "Mouse Turkey Sheep Uncle Ram Ice Bear Ant Cat Horse Intestines," then told their fellow marines in English: the American flag flew over Mount Suribachi.

In most movies, the Navajos speak in a primitive pidgin and they still fight on horseback.  But long after the West was won and lost, a group of Navajo patriots sharpened speech into a precise weapon and went to war for the nation that surrounded their own.  They hit every Pacific beach from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, but their story is at best a footnote in war chronicles.  They are the Navajo Code Talkers, and theirs is one of the few unbroken codes in military history.

More than 3,600 Navajos served in World War II but only 420 were Code Talkers.  Members of all six Marine Corps divisions in the Asian-Pacific theater, they coded and decoded messages faster than any black box, baffling the Japanese with a hodgepodge of everyday Navajo and some 400 code words of their own devising.  In early Pacific invasions their code was barely used by skeptical officers, but Marine commanders came to see it as "indispensable for the rapid transmission of classified dispatches." For three critical years, these Navajo poly@ glots proved that when it came to heroism, The People, too often known for their silence, spoke volumes.

Like all Americans of his generation, Keith Little remembers exactly where he was when he heard the news of Pearl.  Now a robust, rugged man in his 60s, Little recalls the boarding school on the reservation of Ganado, Arizona.  He and his fellow students had some choice words for the cafeteria gruel, Little remembers.  So on Sunday afternoon, December, 7, "Me and a bunch of guys were out hunting rabbits with a .22. We had a rabbit cooking down in the wash, and somebody went to the dorm, came back and said, 'Hey, Pearl Harbor was bombed!' One of us asked, 'Where's Pearl Harbor?'

"'In Hawaii.'
"'Who did it?'
"'Japan."
"Why'd they do it?"
"'They hate Americans.  They want to kill all Americans.'
"'Us, too?'
"'Yeah, us too.'

"Then and there, we all made a promise.  We were, most of us, 15 or 16, guess.  We promised each other we'd go after the Japanese instead of hunting rabbits."

The next morning, the superintendent of the Navajo reservation looked out his office window.  There stood dozens of pony-tailed men in red bandanas, carrying hunting rifles, ready to fight.  A year earlier the Navajo Tribal Council, taking cognizance of a world at war, had unanimously resolved to defend the United States against invasion.  "There exists no purer concentration of Americanism than among the First Americans," the council declared.  But the Navajo volunteers were sent home.  No official call to arms had been issued, and besides, most of the men spoke only Navajo.

When the war broke out, Philip Johnston was a civil engineer with wire-rimmed glasses, a buttoned-down mind and a fluency in Navajo.  The son of missionaries, Johnston grew up on the reservation.  Reading about an Army test of Native American languages in combat maneuvers, Johnston had a mousetrap of an idea.  During World War 1, Indians in the American and Canadian armies had sent messages in their native languages.  But lacking words like "machine gun" and "grenade," their use was limited.  Early in 1942, when Johnston visited the Marine Corps' Camp Elliott, north of San Diego, he proposed an up-to-date code, guaranteed unbreakable.  The Marines were skeptical at first, but Johnston returned with a few Navajo friends.  For 15 minutes, while the iron jaws of Marine brass went slack, messages metamorphosed from English to Navajo and back.  In April 1942, as the Japanese sent American prisoners on the Bataan Death March, Marine recruiters came to the land of 'Changing Woman," the Navajo fertility goddess.

Though the Marines had been from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, they had never seen a place like the Navajo Nation.  Scattered across the milehigh Southwest desert, fewer than 40,000 Navajos lived in a territory the size of West Virginia.  The reservation had few paved roads, no electricity or plumbing, only a handful of schools.  Nearly all Navajos herded sheep, lived in houses called hogans and bought what little they could not grow or make at the nearest trading post.  Recruiters set up tables in the sagebrush and sandstone, called them enlistment offices and began looking for a few good men fluent in Navajo and English.

Fewer than 80 years had passed since the Navajo Nation had fought against the U.S. military.  In 1864, following Kit Carson's scorched-earth campaign against them, a band of starving, ragged Navajos was marched 350 miles across New Mexico.  Navajos call the relocation 'The Long Walk." Though they returned four years later, the sad story was still being told when white men in uniform came seeking soldiers.  President Franklin Roosevelt's Administration was then destroying Navajo sheep to,reduce soil erosion and overgrazing.  Why would men volunteer to fight for a nation that had humbled their ancestors, killed their herds and wouldn't even let them vote? (Voting rights for Navajos were restricted until 1948 in Arizona, 1953 in New Mexico and 1957 in Utah.) "Why do you have to go?" asked one mother.  'It's not your war.  It's the white man's war."

From nation to nation, soldiers enlist for reasons that lose nothing in translation, including jobs, adventure, family tradition and patriotism.  "What happened to the Navajos in the past were social conflicts," explained Albert Smith, a soft-spoken, highly spiritual man who now serves as president of the Navajo Code Talkers' Association in Gallup, New Mexico.  "But this conflict involved Mother Earth being dominated bv foreign countries.  It was our responsibility to defend her."

The Navajo creation story tells how The People emerged through a series of imperfect worlds.  From a First World "black as wool" to a second, third and fourth realm, First Man and First Woman led Navajos to this world where beauty surrounds them.  Not all the boys boarding the train for boot camp in San Diego believed the old story.  Nevertheless, the Code Talkers, switching from hogans to Quonset huts, stood at the rim of one world looking into another.

Few had ever been off the reservation.  They had met "Anglos" only on trading posts.  Soon they would fight across an ocean they'd never seen, against an enemy they'd never met.  So much mystery demanded ceremony, and recruits hired medicine men to perform a ritual called "The Blessing Way." The devout carried sacred corn pollen for protection.  Unarmed but guarded by the ritual, 29 Navajos got their first glimpse of the Pacific and entered the world of drill instructors and Semper Fi.

Marines called the Navajos 'Chief" and "Geronimo," and expected them to be eagle-eyed with a bow and arrow.  But while the Navajos had long ago put aside bow and arrow, they proved to be model marines.  Accustomed to walking miles each day in the high desert, they rnarched on with full packs after others balked and buckled.  Only once did they falter.  A drill instructor ordered his Chiefs to march in cadence to their language.  But Navajo numbers lack the rhythm of "Hup, two, three, four," and the marchers added colloquial remarks about the D.I. The unit dissolved in disorder and hysterics.  Toughened with the usual grit and gristle, the first group of Navajos became the 382d Platoon, USMC, and was ordered to make a code.

In 1942, it was mostly anthropologists and linguists who wrote Navajo.  On the reservation the language was primarily oral, and the Code Talkers were told to keep it that way.  There would be no code books, no cryptic algorithms.  Navajo itself was puzzling enough.  Germans deciphering English codes could tap common linguistic roots.japanese eavesdropping on G.l.'s were often graduates of American universities.  But Navajo, rooted in Athabaskan tongues probably brought across the land bridge from Asia, is a tonal language.  Its vowels rise and fall, changing meaning with pitch.  A single Navajo verb, containing its own subjects, objects and adverbs, can translate into an entire English sentence.  In Navajo, one speaker noted, words "paint a picture in your  mind."

To paint pictures at an exhibition of war, the Code Talkers turned not to math and machines but to nature.  They named planes after birds: gini --chicken hawk (dive bomber); neasjah-owl (observation plane); taschizzie-- swallow (torpedo plane).  They named ships after fish: lotso --whale (battleship); calo --shark (destroyer); beshlo --iron fish (submarine).

To spell out proper names, the Code Talkers made a Navajo bestiary, turning the Marines' Able Baker Charlie into Wollachee Shush Moasi ... Ant Bear Cat.  Finished with flora and fauna, they played word games.  "District" became the Navajo words for "deer ice strict," and "belong" became "long bee."The enemy was christened by characteristic:japanese-Behnaalitsosie (slant eyes); Hitler _Daghailchiih (Mustache Smeller); and Mussolini-Adee'yaats'iin Tsoh (Big Gourd Chin).  Soon a message like 'jap sniper by fortification at Bloody Ridge" became: "Slant eye kill 'em all by cliff dwelling at Badger Lamb Owl Onion Deer Yucca Rabbit Ice Dog Goat Elk." Once the message was translated, some brave "One Silver Bar" (lieutenant) could 16b a few "potatoes" (grenades) into the 'cliff dwelling," sending the "kill'em all" to the place "among devils" (a cemetery).

When the code was finished, Navy intelligence officers spent three weeks trying, and failing, to decipher a single message . New Navajo recruits untrained in the code could not break it.  Yet it still seemed too simple to be trusted.  Since 1940, U.S. intelligence had routinely intercepted and translated every message from the Japanese "Purple" code.  The process, code-named 'Magic,' took hours.  But these Indians were encoding and decoding sensitive military information almost instantly.  What kind of magic was this?

"Well, in Navajo everything is in memory," says William McCabe, one of the code's designers.  'From the songs, prayers, everything, it's all in memory.  So  didn't have no trouble.  That's the way we was raised up."

Two Code Talkers stayed behind to teach the new group.  The rest were shipped overseas.  The Navajo cosmology does not include a hell, but the Navajo recruits were about to enter one called Guadalcanal.

Assigned to four separate regiments on "the Canal Code Talkers met skepticism in the flesh.  One colonel agreed to use them only if they won a man-versus machine test against a cylindrical gizmo that disguised words and broadcast in coded clicks.  The Code Talkers won handily.  When another officer gave them a trial on a common frequency, frantic Marine radio operators elsewhere on the island thought the Japanese were jamming the airwaves.  After the lieutenant answered that the jabber came from fellow marines, the word came back: "What's going on over there at Division?  You guys drunk?" Despite the Code Talkers' undeniable speed and mystifying language, officers were reluctant to trust lives to a code still untested in combat.  Instead, the Code Talkers were used as everyday soldiers, fighting both the Japanese and the jungle.

For sons of the high desert, Guadalcanal, infested with leeches and crocodiles, drenched by torrential rains, recalled horrors from the Navajos' dark "First World." But, while ordinary marines survived on C-rations, the Code Talkers lived off the land, making stew from chickens picked off with a slingshot, hunting, skinning and dining on goats and horses.  Other marines stumbled in the dark and recoiled from the wild terrain, but the Navajos proved adept night scouts and natural guerrilla fighters.

Back on the reservation, while medicine men performed rituals to protect sons overseas, Navajo instructors led by Sgt.  Philip Johnston kept searching for the best and brightest volunteers.  In boot camp, Keith Little was just another Chief, and few knew or cared from which tribe.  Then a D.I. took him aside and asked, "By any chance, are you a Navajo?" Sent to Code Talkers' school, Little memorized 25 words a day.  Tests weeded out about 5 percent of the recruits, who returned to regular duty.  The rest were shipped to island infernos where the code had begun to convince the doubters.

On Rabaul, Code Talkers loaned to the Navy kept Japanese from learning of impending air attacks.  On Saipan, an advancing American battalion was shelled from behind by "friendly fire." Desperate messages called "Hold your fire!" but the Japanese had imitated Marine broadcasts all day, and the mortar crews weren't sure what to believe.  The shelling continued.  Finally headquarters asked, "Do you have a Navajo?" A single Navajo sent the same message back to his buddy, and the shelling stopped.

"When you started sending messages and everything was correct, they started treating you like a king," Harold Foster recalled.  "They'd say "Chief, let me carry your radio for you.  Let me carry your rifle for you."' Code Talkers were given their own bodyguards, often to protect them from marines who couldn't tell a Navajo from a Japanese.

On Saipan, Samuel Holidayjoined his buddies skinnydipping in a shell hole filled with rainwater.  He made the mistake of being the last man out of the pool.  An MP saw the short, black-haired man wearing his birthday suit instead of a private's stripe.  "I turned around and they had the bayonet right between my eyes," Holiday recalled.  Marched back to camp, he became one of many Navajos glad to hear a familiar face call him 'Chief."

Ethnicity fools soldiers but not bullets.  Wading ashore in a hail of fire, two Code Talkers were killed on New Britain, three on Bougainville, one on Guam, another on Peleliu.  The bodies came home but not the top secret.  To conceal the code's origin, Code Talkers' letters home were not delivered.  A year after their sons left the reservation, families still had no word from them.  When an anxious Navajo superintendent asked Johnston about the recruits, the by-the-book sergeant couldn't contain his pride.  They were involved in a secret code project, he wrote.  Soon an article, "Navajo Indians at War," appeared in an Arizona magazine.  After the Marines traced the source, Johnston was booted out of the Corps.  Before he left, fearing the story would be forgotten, he took some Code Talker documents and later gave them to the Code Talkers'Association.

As U.S. forces closed in on Japan, the word was that this new code could not be broken, not even when the Japanese captured an ordinary Navajo soldier.  "They ordered him to translate," Code Talker James Nahkai recalled.  "The poor guy couldn't do it.  'It's their own code,' he told the Japs.  'I don't understand.' This was in a POW camp back in Japan, in winter, and they stripped his clothes off and his feet froze to the ground."

Between invasions, Code Talkers convened to update the code.  Then it was back to the beachheads.  There may be no atheists in foxholes, but for a devout Navajo in battle, faith brought as much terror as comfort.  Believing that the living can be harmed by the presence of the dead, unless protected by ceremony, some Code Talkers were especially horrified at seeing a corpse-strewn beach.

"We went right directly to the Marshall Islands first," remembered Dan Akee.  "I saw some dead Japanese.  And the Navajos usually fear that, you know.  I tried not to glance at it, but I just couldn't help it.  I just had to be among all those deads.  That was one of the hardest things to get over."

The carnage of battle continues to haunt Code Talkers who can scarcely find words for what they saw.  Asked "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" most World War II vets summon tales from the jungle of memory.  But even 50 years later many Code Talkers respond with a deadly pause.  Ask Sidney Bedoni, veteran of Guadalcanal, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  'No.  No. Uh, well, it really... I could tell a lot of stories about that, but I just don't... don't have the time to talk about it." Ask Lewis

Ayze, veteran of Saipan and Guam: "These stories I don't care to relate." George Kirk, survivor of ten Pacific bloodbaths, rummages through photographs in his Arizona home.  One shows him a baby-faced rookie at the radio on Bougainville.  Another taken only months later shows a war-weary veteran seated beside a helmet with a hole through the top.  "Shrapnel," Kirk says.  He doesn't say much more.

The Code Talkers have reason to be proud of their work on Iwo Jima, but their words paint mere impressions: "It just seemed like the island was burning early in the morning," one recalled.  "This shelling was just coming down just like rain." Approaching "Iwo," a teardrop with a volcano on one end, most marines bowed their heads with the chaplain.  Code Talkers sprinkled corn pollen and recalled their "Blessing Way" ritual.

George Kirk remembered, "Some of the guys didn't believe in a church, either Anglo or Navajo religion, but on Iwo Jima I heard them pray.  I heard them cry."

Teddy Draper grew up at the site of a Navajo "day of infamy," a canyon where Spanish invaders slaughtered 125 Navajos in 1804.  But not even the legends of Canyon del Muerto (Canyon of Death) prepared him for Iwo Jima.  As Draper hit the beach, the tide washed back the dead.  "There were a lot of machine guns going along all the way around Suribachi about 50 feet apart from the bottom to the top," he said.  'Just flying shells, all over.  You couldn't see." A shell tore through Draper's pants, just missing his leg.  "And I thought, 'I don't know if I'm going to live or not."'

Working around the clock during the first two days on Iwo, six networks of Code Talkers transmitted more than 800 messages without an error.  In the monthlong battle, three Code Talkers were killed.  But by the time their code spelled out "Mt.  Suribachi," they had at last convinced all skeptics.  Signal officer Maj.  Howard Conner recalled, "Without the Navajos the Marines would never have taken lwo-Jima."

With human code machines churning out messages, the Marines went on to take Okinawa.  Many Code Talkers were practicing street fighting, preparing for the invasion of Japan, when the war ended.  "I kind of wanted to see Japan," George Kirk said.  But the Navajos were headed home to their high country.

Decades after he exchanged his .22 for an M-1, Keith Little, a successful logger representing the National Intertribal Timber Council, visited Washington, D.C. and dropped by the Pentagon.  The burly Iwo Jima veteran wandered the halls, looking at war photographs, searching for some mention of Navajos or Native Americans.  'It finally hit home," Little remembered.  "I realized we had lost our own country to foreigners and they were still getting all the recognition.  Native Americans were getting nothing."

After the war some Code Talkers accompanied their divisions to China and stood on the Great Wall.  In Japan, some saw the ashes of the atomic age at Nagasaki.  But once back on the reservation, they were Indians again.  Utah, Arizona and New Mexico still limited their voting rights.  The government's livestock reduction plan had killed a third of all Navajo sheep, leaving the grass to grow, fertilized by resentment.  Boys who had upped their ages to see the world and defend Mother Earth went back to high school.  Others worked where they could, returned to their hogans and had nightmares.

When George Kirk began dreaming of enemy soldiers leaping into his foxhole, his wife sent him to a medicine man.  "The Enemy Way," a three-day ceremonial slaying of the "enemy presence," cured Kirk and many other Navajo veterans.  Samuel Smith told his medicine man the whole story.  "Now my son," the healer answered, "don't tell it no more to nobody, anywhere.  That way, you won't be bothered in the future."

The code remained top secret.  Asked about the war, Code Talkers simply said, "I was a radioman." War movies and histories poured forth without mentioning them.  But bv linking The People to the world beyond the reservation, the Navajo vets had changed the Nation forever.  A few remained in the Marines and fought in Korea and Vietnam, but the code was never used again.  It was finally declassified in 1968.  Only then did the secret come out.

The first Code Talker reunion in 1969 brought nationwide attention.  In 1982, President Ronald Reagan named August 14 "National Navaho Code Talkers Day." Ten years later, Keith Little was invited to the Pentagon.  There he translated a prayer for peace phoned in by a Code Talker in Arizona.  Simple but efficient, the code still worked.  Then Little and other Navajo vets helped dedicate a permanent exhibit on the Code Talkers.

Todav a small, proud corps of silver-haired Code Talkers, as royal to Sempe rFi as they are to Navajo tradition, march in symbolic uniforms, wearing both turquoise beads and military medals.  But mindful of Navajo caveats against glorifying war, most of the remaining few hundred avoid all ceremonies and parades.  Only a handful will even discuss the war.  "Talking about war contaminates the mnds of those who should not hear about the bloodshed,' explained Albert Smith.  "There is always the danger of enticement for the young." So, like the stern photographs of young men in Marine uniforms framed in homes scattered across the sparse Navajo Nation, the Code Talkers are silent again.

Still their phones keep ringing, "a constant barrage," Smith said.  History students seek details for dissertations.  Hollywood wants a Native American Rambo.  Already, a dime-store novel, The Code Talkers, tells of one Johnny Redhawk who leaves the reservation to become "America's secret weapon in the South Pacific." Keith Little shook his head.  "Most of us are common men," he said.  "We don't get in the front line and wave our arms.  We know what we did and can tell it as it was without having to wave it on a TV screen."

But at the Window Rock Elementary School on the Arizona-New Mexico border, students are in search of a few good heroes.  Children in the Navajo capital live in houses or trailers, often with a hogan out back beside the TV satellite dish.  In school, young Navajos well versed in American pop culture learn Native Studies from teacher Isidore Begay.  They read about the Navajo ascent through the four worlds.  They study Changing Woman.  And they read about the Code Talkers.

"Are they heroes?" Begay asks a fourth-grade class.

Students nod.  "We could have lost the war," one says.  "Then we'd be slaves to Japan."

Students send messages in Navajo code and find Iwo Jima on a map, trying to imagine how far the Code Talkers traveled.  The chasm between countries and cultures has been closed by men who crossed the border between different traditions.  In code, they spoke of snipers and fortifications, but their real message needed no interpreter.  They spoke about surmounting stereotypes and vendettas for a higher cause.  They spoke about blending tradition into the modern world.  They spoke Navajo.

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