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``Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II'' by Joseph Bruchac; Dial ($16.99)
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The language a person speaks can tell you a lot about who he is. The tidy, logical construction of German puts us in mind of clockworks and precision engineering. The poetic idioms of the Gallic tongue make us think the French have an inside track on romance. In the case of Navajo speakers, their language - said to be the most difficult of all American Indian languages - is a reminder of the crucial role its speakers played in American history. Told in an unadorned, lulling first-person, Joseph Bruchac's novel about World War II is addressed to the main character's grandchildren, and this reference to a tradition of oral storytelling fits perfectly with the story being told - the story of a language.
At 6 years old, Kii Yazhii left his Navajo reservation to live at a mission school, where his long hair was cut off and he was given the Anglicized name Ned Begay. Studious and solemn, Begay (nicknamed Wollachee, or "ant," by his family for his tiny size and strength) took seriously his parents' charge to learn English, thereby proving that the Indians were not enemies of the United States. He and his fellow students learned the new language under fire; any child overheard speaking his "useless" Navajo was beaten and shamed.
But when America went to war with Japan, that attitude underwent a dizzying shift. During World War I, the United States used other Indian languages to make codes, but they had been mastered by the Japanese in the intervening years. Navajo was the last frontier, a language so difficult that white men who encountered it at trading posts never mastered more than a few words. To 16-year-old Begay, the sharp uniform was lure enough to join the Marines. Once he began memorizing alphabets of code, the fact that "wollachee was code for the letter "A'' seemed a sign that he was meant for important work.
The bulk of the book is about the war itself. Battle after terrifying battle takes place on the beaches and jungles of the South Pacific, mortar shells whistling over young kids crouched in foxholes. The all-Navajo 297th platoon had special difficulties: to them, just looking at a corpse risked association with bad spirits, and their belief in the danger of the ocean meant that they weren't comfortable eating fish, let alone traveling by ship or submarine.
But other things particular to the Navajos came in quite handy. As sheepherders they were well able to walk for days, and as desert dwellers they knew to save precious canteen water. "It surprised me to see how hard these things were for the white recruits. ... We Navajos would just stand and wait for the next thing we had to do."
"Code Talker'' is an enlightening bit of American history from the perspective of someone who had been on the receiving end of its aggression. But it also speaks subtly to a certain kind of defiance that, oddly, feels like the very stereotype of American individualism. At school, Begay was "stubborn in ways the teachers could not see. ... If anything, rather than taking my language away from me, boarding school made me more determined never to forget it." In his desire to defend his "sacred land" - and despite the fact that few Navajo soldiers were recognized for their work in the war - the character of Begay is as patriotic as they come.
Though the book is fact-heavy and not especially interested in poetic devices, there are a few powerful moments of culture shock and survival.
During basic training the Marines had to learn how to swim, something none of the Indians had done before. Again, they learned the hard way - they were blindfolded and thrown into the water. While other Navajo recruits sputtered to the pool's surface, Begay shocked his drill instructor by sinking to the bottom and taking slow, heavy steps through the resistant water. "Step by step I walked across the bottom of the pool until I reached the shallow water and could climb out."
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(c) 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
