Code Talker: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

While Ned’s group has been training, the war in the South Pacific has dragged on, with the Japanese proving tougher than expected. Some of the original group of Navajo code talkers are now in Hawaii, recuperating from combat in the Gilbert Islands. Ned is headed to Hawaii, too. He is assigned to the signal corps in Admiral Halsey’s South Pacific forces, and it’s rumored that his unit’s job will be to take Bougainville, a Japanese air base in the Solomon Islands.

Ned is excited to finally see some of the far-off places he’d loved studying as a schoolboy. But at the moment, he is much more nervous about crossing the ocean than he is about eventually encountering Japanese soldiers. As a child, he’d always been warned to avoid deep water. Navajo stories associate water with danger, even monsters. The morning he ships out, he prays with his corn pollen before dawn, asking for the protection of the Holy People.

The journey to Hawaii turns out to be calm and peaceful. The signalmen are kept busy practicing their code. The Navajo signalmen are sent into the field as teams of two. In each team, one is on the radio set, with headphones and microphone. He identifies himself in Navajo over the airwaves, waits for an acknowledgment of “Roger,” and then begins sending his message. This is usually Ned’s job. The Navajo on the other end speaks aloud the message he receives while his partner writes it down and translates it; then that team sends back a coded message of their own.

When they reach Hawaii, the code talkers gather with those from the original all-Navajo platoon in order to be briefed on changes in their code—something that recurs over the course of the war. At one point Ned chats with a veteran code talker team, Sam Begay and Bill McCabe, asking them what combat on Guadalcanal was like. They laugh about their first battle, when they were so “green” that they wandered innocently off their landing craft, “like two sheepherders looking for a lost lamb,” and into the path of a Japanese Zero (a bomber).

Sam and Bill explain that when they sent their first message, other American radio operators, having never heard Navajo before, thought that the Japanese had gotten onto their radio frequency. From then on, they had to start all their messages by announcing “Arizona” or “New Mexico” in a loud voice. But after their lieutenant saw that the code talkers could send a message in two minutes and 30 seconds, the code talkers proved themselves.