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C&J 475: Multimedia Journalism, Spring 2007
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The few, the proud ... the forgotten?

By Jim Snyder
David Tsosie was denied a Congressional Navajo Code Talker Medal similar to this one.

Nursing home resident denied Congressional Navajo Code Talker Silver Medal

By JAMES SNYDER
 
Navajo Code Talker David Tsosie, 78, bent his brown-leathered face down into his wheelchair and said, “I don’t care anymore.”

Weeks had gone by since his fellow Code Talkers were awarded Congressional Navajo Code Talker Silver Medals in a Nov. 24, 2001, ceremony at the Navajo Nation capital in Window Rock, Ariz.

Tsosie was not there. The Navajo veterans’ administration office said the Marine Corps had no proof he had been a Code Talker. The Bloomfield, N.M., nursing home resident was uninvited from the ceremony in a phone call just five days before the event. Protests by his nursing home staff to get him recognized had failed. It was Thanksgiving week and nobody was working in Washington.

“We will fight this”

Nursing home supervisor Dawn Collen said Tsosie’s eyes had lit up when he was informed he was going to receive the medal in an Oct. 26 letter. Collen called the rescinding of the invitation an act of “abuse” citing Tsosie’s service and his advanced age. Nobody knew who Tsosie was.

“We will take this all the way to Washington, D.C.,” Priscilla Tucker, a caretaker for Tsosie said. “We are his family. We will fight this.”

Tsosie sat in his wheelchair in the nursing home courtyard and told his story.

A mortar shell had blown shrapnel into his leg and hip. Tsosie, nicknamed by his fellow Marines as “David the Jap killer,” lay crumpled in the Mt. Tappichau dirt on the South Pacific island of Saipan. His equipment and rifle were scattered around him.

The Navajo Code Talker thought he was going to die. Then the teenager, from Shiprock, N.M., passed out.

“Can’t hear nothing. They don’t make a sound, they just strike,” Tsosie said about the mortars.

Tsosie was carried down to the beach and worked on. “Boy was I sick then,” he said. When he woke up, he was on a ship going to the Naval hospital in Pearl Harbor. He later received the Purple Heart.

The Marines nicknamed Saipan “Death Valley” because of the high number of Americans and Japanese wounded and killed there during the World War II battle. Tsosie, a Marine Corps radio operator with Headquarters Company, 8th Marine, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, was responsible for transmitting messages to Code Talkers in other units as well as to the ships.
 
The messages were in a Navajo Code based on using animals. Tanks and trucks were turtles of the land, aircraft were birds of the air, ships were fish in the sea. The Japanese could not break the Code. Hundreds of symbols were used.

The Code was so complex that untrained Navajos could not break it.
   
Top secret radio men

Being a Code Talker was a top-secret operation until 1968. In fact, the term was not yet coined.

 “They were called radio men. The name Code Talker didn’t come about until 1971, when the Code Talkers Association was formed in Window Rock,” said Code Talker Wilfred Billey, a boyhood friend of Tsosie’s, in a 2001 interview.
  
It would nearly 60 years before anyone got around to deciding these men, now in their late 70s and early 80s, needed to be recognized. Farmington realtor Claudine Riddle contacted U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., about getting the Code Talkers recognized with congressional medals. He agreed. His legislation was passed by Congress in 2000.

Four surviving Code Talkers from the original platoon of 29 received gold medals July 26, 2001, in Washington following a ceremony with President Bush. Approximately 250 other surviving Code Talkers received their silver medals in the Window Rock ceremony in front of more than 3,000 people.

Tsosie’s plight soon became well known, as the Farmington Daily Times broke the news one day before the Window Rock ceremony that he had been denied a medal. It caught the Navajo people by surprise. The newspaper followed it up with a series of investigative stories.

It may have been the fact that the Times went to the Navajo veteran affairs office in Shiprock and got a copy of Tsosie’s military record listing him as a radio operator, which it then turned over to U.S. Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., or it may have been the relentless series of articles on Tsosie, which began the public outcry.

School children write to Tsosie

The Associated Press picked up the stories about Tsosie, who then began receiving cards from children at Weitzer Elementary School in Flagstaff, Ariz.

“I think you should get your silver medal because you risked your life for people’s freedom,” one child wrote. Another card read, “I am so very sorry you did not get your award … I still have hope for you to get it.”

He also received cards and notes from across the country and from Canada wishing he would get his medal. The Times further received e-mails from Native Americans in California, Oregon and Washington.
“Other tribes – I didn’t know they cared about me,” Tsosie said.

Tsosie also began receiving numerous invitations from Navajo veterans groups to be honored.

“I’m a V.I.P.” Tsosie said about all the dinner banquets he attended in his honor.

Bingaman and Udall were still waiting to hear back from the Marine Corps about Tsosie’s status.

Governor recognizes Tsosie

But New Mexico would not wait any longer. On Feb. 5, 2002, Tsosie was officially recognized as a Navajo Code Talker by then Gov. Gary Johnson, Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron and the Senate in a ceremony on the Senate floor. Tsosie was there to receive his recognition.

“The Code Talkers are very significant,” said New Mexico state Rep. Ray Begaye, D-Shiprock, in a February 2007 interview. Begaye added that Tsosie should not have to wait to be recognized simply because of Navajo bureaucracy.

The Marine Corps quickly followed suit in officially recognizing Tsosie as a Code Talker. Bingaman broke the news to Tsosie during a Feb. 8, 2002, phone call from his Washington office to Tsosie’s Bloomfield nursing home. It was on the speakerphone. Billey clapped for joy and Tsosie smiled as Bingaman formally apologized to Tsosie and announced he would be getting the Congressional Code Talker Medal.

“I apologize in their behalf for the confusion and mistake caused by record keeping,” Bingaman said.

The phone call caught Tsosie by surprise.

“I wasn’t expecting it. It surprised me who it was.”

Despite this Navajo President Kelsey Begaye’s spokesperson, Merle Pete, said Tsosie’s medal would be kept for safekeeping inside a safe deposit box in Gallup, until the tribe could identify more unconfirmed Code Talkers. Eventually, Pete said, the tribe would hold a second ceremony to award those medals – including for Tsosie.

Tsosie gets his medal

Bingaman’s office quickly responded that these were “Congressional medals” and scheduled a ceremony for Tsosie on March 9, 2002 at his Bloomfield nursing home.

The senator awarded Tsosie his Congressional medal on a stage inside a festival tent set up in the nursing home’s parking lot. Approximately 300 people, including a dozen Code Talkers, attended. Although it had rained all week, the weather was perfect that morning.

“Of all the honors Congress can bestow, the awarding of the Congressional medal is … the most distinguished,” Bingaman told Tsosie, adding other warriors who received it included George Washington and Gen. Colin Powell. “And here, finally, we add the name of David Tsosie, a Navajo Code Talker, to these prestigious ranks.”

The Navajo president then placed the Navajo flag over Tsosie’s shoulders.

Tsosie thanked everyone for their efforts and said he was proud to be recognized.

“It makes me proud that I’ve been recognized for what I did for the Navajo people and people of the United States,” he said.

Bloomfield Mayor Keith Johnson proclaimed March 9 as David Tsosie Day.

“We are excited to have this citizen of notoriety (in our community) and appreciate all that veterans have done,” Johnson said.

Also in the audience were Billey and Code Talker Samuel Sandoval, also a boyhood friend of Tsosie’s.

“I feel very happy for him after all this turmoil,” Sandoval said. “This is a better ceremony then we had in Window Rock.”

Billey had written the inscription when the Navajo Code Talker Medal was designed. It read: Diné Bizaad Yee Atah Naagéé Yik’ ah Deesdlii. It translates to “the Navajo coded language assisted the military forces to defeat the enemy.”

Tsosie passed away in January 2007. He is buried in the Shiprock Veterans Cemetery overlooking the San Juan River where he played as a child.

“They were totally loyal and dedicated to their country,” said retired Marine Corps 1st Sgt. David Bratcher, who served in Vietnam, in a February 2007 interview. “He seemed to be proud of it. I was proud that he finally got it before he passed away. (But) it was tragic he didn’t get it earlier. He was up in age and wasn’t fully aware what was going on. … I think they should have been recognized 25, 30 years ago.”

The Pentagon phoned Sandoval following Tsosie’s death and asked for a picture of Tsosie, which Sandoval and Billey had taken while the three were high school students at the mission school in Farmington shortly before they became Code Talkers.

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Speaking Navajo was forbidden


By JAMES SNYDER

Navajo Code Talker David Tsosie grew up living without electricity or running water in Shiprock, a Navajo reservation community in the extreme northwest tip of New Mexico.

The community was founded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1902 as a centralized location for Navajos to receive government services including health care. The Navajo were used to living miles from each other. 

Everyone lived in hogans, except for BIA workers who lived in wooden houses. Navajos traveled by foot, although some had wagons and horses. They bathed, drank from and played in the San Juan River. Thanks to a new bridge in 1939, which is still there, they could cross the river during its flood stage.

They held a fair every autumn to celebrate the harvest. They held powwows and gourd dances – sometimes around bonfires in the middle of the night to pray. Their grandparents and parents told them stories of who they were. Navajo is an oral culture.

Then the Second World War started. In an ironic twist, the U.S. government saw for the first time that the Navajo language and culture had value on a large scale. They would take Navajos, who had no right to vote, and were not U.S. citizens unless they renounced their tribe and moved off the reservation, and make them into Marines. The military had used Native Americans as scouts against other tribes in the 1800s. But, this was different. It was a world war.

A mortal enemy

For Tsosie and his boyhood friends Wilfred Billey and Samuel Sandoval, and hundreds of other young men, it was an opportunity for the Navajos to become warriors for the first time since their devastating defeat by U.S. Army Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson, who instituted a scorched-earth policy to starve the Navajos into submission in 1863 and then forced them off their land in the Long Walk. The Navajos consider Carson to be their mortal enemy, even in 2007.

The U.S. military put a rifle in Tsosie’s hands and said “we need you to speak Navajo.” It was an opportunity – on a world stage – to show they could be Americans and Navajos. But World War II was also a time when the military was still segregated. African American sailors, for example, were used only as stewards and cooks on ships.

The BIA, which operated schools in military forts such as Ft. Defiance and Ft. Wingate to the south near Gallup, N.M., relied on white missionary schoolmasters, such as the Mormons and the Methodists to provide a white man’s education to Navajo children. BIA truant officers rounded up children and sent them to boarding schools.

Boyhood friends become Code Talkers

Tsosie, Billey and Sandoval were sent to a Methodist mission boarding school in nearby Farmington, a Mormon community built on land taken from the Jicarilla Apaches. All of the schools had one dominant rule: speaking the Navajo language was forbidden.

“We got away with a smile, we were lucky,” Sandoval said in a February 2007 interview about being caught because they went to a church school instead of a BIA school. “The only punishment they gave the students there – they had a merit system and demerit system. You’d lose some privilege if you got caught speaking Navajo.”

Tsosie, Billey and Sandoval would later enlist into the Marines and go to Navajo Code Talker School at Ft. Pendleton, Calif.

So what was it like for Navajos to show up in Marine combat units?

“I think that life was initially kind of rough,” retired Marine 1st Sgt. David Bratcher said in a February 2007 interview. “But then anytime you’re in a combat situation, just like when I was in Vietnam … it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re Native Americans or not ’cause it doesn’t take very long to find out they’re your brother. You take care of each other no matter what color they are,” he added.

“So I think they were accepted after an initial week or two days, whatever it took, for them to say these guys are going to save our lives and we’re going to save theirs,” he also said. “’Cause your buddies, you’re in combat. I think initially it was kind of a shock but I think they settled in pretty quick.”