WWII Navajo Code Talker speaks at Mesalands

link Eugene Ross of Tucumcari talks to his friend Thomas H. Begay, one of the Code Talkers from World War II.

QCS Staff

Eugene Ross of Tucumcari talked a friend of his to make a visit to Tucumcari, and on Tuesday that friend, Thomas H. Begay, told about 100 students, and others about his experiences as one of the now-famed Navajo Code Talkers in World War II.

Begay’s talk was part of Native American Heritage Day at Mesalands Community College.

Begay, now 87, expected he would be placed in gunnery school when he joined the U.S. Marines in 1942 after he was recruited at a Navajo boarding school. He was 15 at the time but was accepted anyway.

When he got to California’s Camp Pendleton for training, however, he found himself surrounded by fellow Navajos, he said.

They told him he was going to be a Code Talker, he said, and he protested.

“Too bad,” they told him.

The Navajo recruits trained together and learned everything they could about radios, semaphore signals and Morse code, he said, before they started gathering to develop a code that used the “difficult” Navajo language as a basis.

They developed a code that the Japanese could not break, he said, after they had broken nearly every other code the Allies could devise.

There was a story, he said, of one Japanese cryptographer who was tortured for his inability to break the Navajo code.

The Code Talkers even developed their own form of the English alphabet, using Navajo words for things that in English started with each letter. “J” became the Navajo word for “jackass.” I became the Navajo word for “intestine.” M was the Navajo word for “mouse,” and A became the Navajo word for “apple.” The Japanese never figured out that the code ending in the Navajo equivalent of “jackass intestine mouse apple,” stood for JIMA, the second word in Iwo Jima, the Pacific island site of one of the war’s longest and hardest battles.

Begay was one of the code talkers who worked the entire 38 days of that battle, he said.

He quoted a Marine major who said, “We could not have won Iwo Jima without the Code Talkers.”

Three code talkers were killed in the battle’s first three days, but the survivors sent and received more than 800 messages during the campaign, he said.

Begay continued his service on Iwo Jima after the battle, when it served as a base for bombers, including the ones that bombed Tokyo later in the war.

After the war, Begay said, he could not find work at home, and joined the Army in 1946. He became a paratrooper and radio operator, and found himself in the war zones of the Korean Conflct in 1950, including the long winter battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November and December. He was one of the last soldiers to be evacuated as the Allies left the region.

Throughout his military experience, he said, the one mission he was always aware of was to “stay alive and keep your buddies alive.”

Begay said until he was 13, he spoke only Navajo before he was sent to boarding school to learn English.

After his military service, Begay enjoyed a 40-year career with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, where he retired in 1984.

The Code Talkers, he said, did not receive recognition for their service until the 1980s. In recent years, he said, he has circled the globe to talk about the work of the Code Talkers.

Begay closed his talk by singing the Marine hymn in Navajo.