Joseph Bruchac · 2005 · coming-of-age

Joseph Bruchac's 2005 novel, told by an old man to his grandchildren. Ned Begay is taken from the Navajo Nation at six to a mission school that beats the Navajo out of him - and at sixteen the same government comes looking for that exact language, to build a code the Japanese never broke. He carries it from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, and is forbidden to speak of it for twenty-four years.

1. 1
   The Navajo Nation

   Ned Begay is six when he is taken more than a hundred miles from home to boarding school, and the Navajo language he grew up in becomes the thing he is punished for - which is where the book's whole irony begins.

2. 2
   Rehoboth Mission

   At the mission school in New Mexico his hair is cut, his name is written down and his mouth is washed out for speaking Navajo - and he holds onto the language anyway, quietly, through every year they try to take it off him.

3. 3
   San Diego

   At sixteen he lies about his age to enlist, and the Marines who send him to boot camp then send him to a locked room at Camp Elliott - where twenty-nine Navajos are building a code out of the language the schools tried to erase.

4. 4
   Oahu

   Shipped to Hawaii for field manoeuvres, the code talkers train with units who have no idea what they are for - and some officers refuse to believe two Navajos on a radio can outrun a coding machine until they are made to watch.

5. 5
   Guadalcanal

   Guadalcanal is the staging ground, and Ned's first sight of what the Pacific war has already cost - men coming back from the fighting, and the code talkers finally issued to the units that will carry them into it.

6. 6
   Bougainville

   His first landing, and the first time the code is used under fire. It works so well that the commanders ask for as many more Navajos as can be found - which is the moment Ned's language stops being a liability and becomes an asset.

7. 7
   Guam

   On Guam the fighting is hand to hand, and Ned takes a bullet in the shoulder - and is more shaken by what the occupation has done to the Chamorro people than by the wound, which he treats as barely worth mentioning.

8. 8
   Pavuvu

   Between campaigns the units rest in the Russells, and Ned watches men come apart with battle fatigue - something he understands through Navajo teaching about what war does to a person long before the Marines have a word for it.

9. 9
   Iwo Jima

   The black sand and the guns in the rock, where the code talkers work six networks without a single error - and where the flag goes up on Suribachi with Ira Hayes underneath it, whom Ned knows.

10. 10
    Okinawa

    The last and worst of it, and the message Ned has to pass down the line that President Roosevelt is dead - after which the bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war he has fought since he was sixteen simply stops.

11. 11
    San Francisco

    The code talkers are debriefed and told the code is still secret and they may not speak of it - not to their families, not to anyone - which is an order they keep, all of them, for twenty-four years.

12. 12
    The Navajo Nation

    He comes home to a country that will still refuse him service in a bar, carrying a decorated war record he is not permitted to describe - and only in 1969, declassified at last, can he tell his grandchildren what he did.