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Chester Nez, 90, the last surviving original Navajo code talker,spoke Tuesday night in the SUB. Nez recently released his memoir Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII.

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Chester Nez, 90, is the last survivor of the original 29 Navajo code talkers from World War II. He served in World War II and the Korean War. Nez, along with author Judith Schiess Avila wrote Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII. He was at UNM Tuesday night to share his story with students.

Daily Lobo: Tell me what being a code talker was like?

Chester Nez: (laughs) It was very, very interesting to talk in military words and stuff like that. It was very, very important to us to develop a code in our own language from A-Z. They tried everything to decipher the code and they never did.

DL: How long did you serve?

CN: I served four straight years. The first was Guadalcanal, and then Bougainville, and then Guam and then Peleliu.

DL: What kind of training did you receive?

CN: It was regular marine corps training … at Camp Henderson (now Camp Pendleton). It’s the biggest training center where they developed the code. We practiced sending messages back and forth — that’s where we had everything we needed to do before we went overseas.

DL: It was the only unbroken code in modern military history. Is that correct?

CN: That’s right. I don’t know how many years they kept that a secret after the war was over, and they finally released the code. A lot of guys that I went to the service, they’d talk about it and try to translate the message from one radio station to another. It was very important. I’m very happy to succeed in something like that, and I’m very glad they never broke the code.

DL: How did you become a code talker?

CN: I was going through high school when I heard about it. The recruiters were coming to school to select the Navajos (to recruit them to be) code talkers. I just picked up a pencil and signed my name, and I became a code talker.

DL: What kind of danger were you in?

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CN: It was very, very difficult when we hit the beach. You could see some of the guys you came with lying on the beach and all shot up. It’s something that some of our older people in Navajo told us not to come forward and try to walk around the dead. They were very superstitious. But when I hit the beach on Guadalcanal, everybody was floating, dead. It’s just something that you have to go through and I’m very happy that I came out alive.

DL: Would you consider the experience worth it?

CN: I think out of everything I went through, one of the most important things to me is that I came out alive. This is one thing I always thought about, to come back home and see my family.

DL: Would you encourage young people to enlist in the military today?

CN: You know, that’s one thing that’s very, very unnecessary. We cannot go and talk to these young guys who are coming out of high school and tell them to join the marine corps. It’s up to them to join the marine corps if they want to, or go into the army. I never did tell anybody to join the marine corps.

DL: You believe it’s a person’s own decision, but you’re not an advocate for it?

CN: That’s right. I just don’t like to see these young people go in and go through training. Some of the training is very difficult. What I went through is something that I had to go through, one of those things to graduate in the military.

DL: How did the process work once you got a code to protect?

CN: The first thing I would do when I’d get a code to send out is to read it, understand it, where it’s coming from, what time, everything like that. I would sent it and see what happens next.
The codes were just coming in and coming in, you’d have to transfer it right then and there.

DL: It was literally a split-second process? As soon as the code would come in, you’d translate it so it would be undecipherable to the enemy?

CN: That’s right. As soon as the code comes in, we sent it on to the artillery group or tank groups or to the soldiers ahead of us, and they’d do the job. The Japanese never had a chance to break the code.

DL: What was it like to come home?

CN: Everything seemed like it all disappeared. What we used to do, some of our neighbors and relatives … it was just awful. Even when I went to bed, I used to see Japanese walking around my bed. I actually did see the Japanese in nightmares.

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