Iwo Jima

They called me Chief, and I resented that for a long time. I don’t know what they mean by that at the time, but later on I decided, oh, they give me a promotion from PFC, and from then on I don’t bother with it.

Samuel Tso in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 2006. The Navajo code talkers were honored by President George W. Bush in 2001 with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow.

Private First Class Samuel Tso, displaying one battle star for service on Iwo Jima, is photographed in Camp Pendleton, California, in 1946.

There were twenty-nine original code talkers, four of whom were still living in the spring of 2007. Sam Tso was recruited for a later group. He and I were at Iwo Jima in March 2006, but I didn’t really get acquainted with him until we met again in Albuquerque in October of that year. He was there with several other code talkers to sign copies of three different books to help raise funds for their association. I bought all the books. They signed them. You couldn’t help liking these guys.

“I’m from Arizona, above Window Rock. It’s way up by a place called Black Mountain, about eighty miles from Gallup, New Mexico. We didn’t live on top but down below, on the east side of the mountain. The nearest town or store was twenty-five miles away. My father and mother raised sheep. They’d sell wool and sometimes sell the lambs. I had brothers and sisters; there were ten of us.

“I don’t know what year I was born. The only thing my mother remembered was it was sometime close to the midsummer, probably around 1926. When I finish eighth grade, I’m ready for high school, so they send me to Fort Wingate, New Mexico. In that four years I never came back home. I learned to read and write. It was a boarding school paid for by the federal government. We lived in dormitories. We were mostly Navajo, but other Indians were sent there too. During the summer everybody goes home except me. I had to go look for a job. I found out the government was running an experimental sheep station close by there. So I went and herded sheep for them. They were experimenting with wool. Old Navajo sheep wool had a hole through every strand, and to get rid of that, they brought in Rambouillet rams to crossbreed and change the wool so it was solid.

“After high school I didn’t get a chance to go home at all. The federal government just told me, ‘There’s a road down that way. Somewhere you’ll find a job.’ So I picked up my suitcase and started walking.

“You know what? I sure hate to tell anybody, but I really resented it. I really resented it. I just kept it inside me all those years. In fact, when I started school, they told me not to speak my language, Navajo, at Indian school. We used to get punished for it.

“It took me approximately nine years before I got back home. I did not get home until after the war. When I got home, I found out my father, my mother, and one of my sisters, that I used to herd sheep with all the time, they were all dead. There were no phones, and no one ever wrote; they couldn’t write. They were uneducated.

“When I come out of high school, the only job available was with the railroad company in Gallup, so I went there and asked for a job. They asked how old I was. I said nineteen. Then I found out they didn’t employ nineteen-year-olds, so in the morning I was nineteen, but by the afternoon, when I got hired, I became twenty-one years old and signed a contract saying I was born June 22, 1922. This was 1943. It was an easy birthday to remember. But that’s how I came to be drafted.

“When I got the job from Gallup, they transported me all the way to Barstow, California. We were replacing old ties underneath the tracks. While we were out there, the draft board came around and told me to report to the San Bernardino board. I went over there and signed in. About a month later they called me. I was drafted and sent back to Arizona. Instead of going home, I hitchhiked from Gallup over to the draft board at St. Johns, Arizona, to report. I didn’t know a bus had been set aside for the draftees, so I hitchhiked all day, a long ways. It was in 1943, March.

“The guys I worked with on the railroad had bought me a charcoal-colored civilian suit, and they told me to wear that coming back. I was hitchhiking with that suit on when I got to St. John. I found the guys there resented it. Right after lunch they ganged up on me and tore some of my suit, took my hat away from me and stomped on it. They were all Navajos. Jealous. The guy in charge, I guess he was the sergeant, came out and broke it up. Next morning they put us on the bus to Phoenix, for our physical exams. Only three of us were selected out of those two busloads of guys. We found out the rest of them don’t know how to speak English very good. I found out that to go in the service, you had to speak good English, read and write. Those others did not know how to read or write.

“After we were drafted, they found out we were Navajos, so they put us into the Marines because the Marines had the [code talker] program. Two of us went through boot camp in San Diego together. The third one came later, in the next platoon. It was 1943, March 13, when we started. We finished in April, then went to Camp Elliott, east of San Diego. We trained as infantrymen. We were ready to be shipped out when all of a sudden they pulled my seabag to the side. The rest of the guys I trained with, all white guys, were hauled off and sent to the Pacific.

“They took me to Camp Pendleton and put me in the code talker school. I said, ‘Hey, you didn’t want me to speak my language. How come? Now you want it.’ At least this time they said please. Before that they never said please.

“The way I heard it there were thirty original code talkers. Something happened to one, so there were only twenty-nine. A guy by the name of Johnston ran the school. Later on I found out he was the son of a missionary that was on our Navajo reservation. The first day I reported to Pendleton I met Mr. Johnston, and all of a sudden he talked to me in Navajo. I was really surprised that he could speak Navajo. His terms and tenses were all mixed up, but I could understand him.

“I believe I was there about a month, maybe more. We were at least one class, close to twenty. As soon as they got trained there, they got sent out. We were all from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. I did not know any one of them. I learned all the code signals, and they gave me a partner and took us out in the field to set up the radio and practice sending messages back and forth. We noticed that some of the Anglo kids that taught us how to set up the radios were listening to us and memorizing all the coded words. Right there me and my partner said, ‘Hey, if these kids can memorize that in such a short time, the Japanese will do the same thing.’

[The original code, invented in 1942, contained 236 terms. By 1945 it had grown to more than 400, all memorized. The expanded code uses alternate words for common letters of the alphabet. The letter A could be “ant,” “apple,” or “ax.” The word for America was Ne-he-mah, meaning “our mother.” The word for battleship was lo-tso, meaning “whale.”]

“We started making another set of twenty-six symbols for the letters in the alphabet, and then we started on a third set, and somewhere along the third set we were ready to be sent out for further training. So that’s where we started the other sets. And when we started it, we started jumping around between those sets, and the kids that memorized the first set got confused. We mixed it all up, so the Japanese could not memorize it.

“We were sent out as soon as we were trained. Six of us went to a recon company. We trained up in mountains, down on the beach, out on an island, even in submarines. The sub would come in offshore; we would paddle over there and go into the sub. It dives, takes us out somewhere, comes in, and surfaces, and then we get out and use rubber boats to go along the shore. They told us to look for military installations, ammo dumps, or fuel dumps. When we got back to the submarine, we would dive again, then get together and report what we saw. After about half a year they sent us to Hilo, Hawaii, in early 1944.

“We left Hilo on Christmas night of ’44 and went to Honolulu. They told us to go to town and do what we liked. I didn’t know anybody, at the time, to go into bars and drink beers and stuff. As I remember, we Navajos were told not to do that because the federal government put restrictions on us. So I didn’t bother to go to any bars. I went to one show and then another one. It was real close to sundown, so I went by myself to the ship, I got aboard, and in about two hours there was all this commotion. All those guys were coming in, some so drunk they couldn’t walk up the gangplank. So they let the cargo nets down, put ’em in there and hoisted them up and dumped them on the deck. This was the Fifth Marine Division. There were six of us code talkers in that company. All the rest got drunk, and I was the only one sober. Some got so sick they just puked all over the place.

“The boat left for Guam that same night, sneaked out, zigzagging all the way. Some guys said later the reason was to avoid Japanese submarines. From Guam we went to Saipan and practiced landing there. A recon company was practicing landing there, and I found out that some of these guys who could really swim good belonged to an underwater demolition team, UDT. I got to be real good friends with a guy named Al Mertz, one of the UDT experts. We sort of stayed together. He was from the Ozarks in Arkansas, Pine Bluff. I remember because he used to get letters. Me, I never got no letters. My father, my mother, my brothers and sisters were uneducated. They couldn’t write anything. I never got a letter from anyone all that time. I didn’t even have a girlfriend. Mostly I kept by myself.

“We didn’t know we were going to Iwo until we were out there at Saipan. I can’t remember what wave I went in with, but when we landed, there was no fire from the Japanese. But after we went on top and started spreading out, they opened fire. Some of the guys jumped in an artillery crater. We jumped in on the south side of it, and the guys who jumped in on the north side got shot because they were exposed. My personal sergeant was a guy named Barnes; when we started moving forward, he got blown up. He told me to go around to the other side and stay behind. He went straight ahead and stepped on a mine. If I’d followed him, I’d have been killed.

“Let me tell you, I was scared stiff. The only thing that helped me go on was the fact that I was committed to the fellows that I trained with. We were told that you go in as a team, that you must watch out for each other. That’s what kept me going, even though I was scared.

“When we went ashore, our mission was to cut the island in half, but they held some of us behind. They put us by the airfield and said, ‘You hold this for a certain day and then follow.’ My job was to receive and send messages from the ships or the command post or whatever it is. You receive it and send it on. All in Navajo. All the radio guys were Navajos doing code. I don’t know how many there were altogether. I know my recon company had six. Sam Billison was supposed to be with us, but they selected him to be with headquarters command. All messages went in code. Major Howard Connor said he had six Navajo networks going twenty-four hours, and they sent and received eight hundred messages without an error.

“On February 23, 1945, just somewhere close to noontime, all of sudden the radio signaled, ‘Message for Arizona.’ So I just grabbed my papers and my pencil and just sent it. They sent this message: DIBE BINAR NAAZII: ‘Sheep’s eyes is cured: Mount Suribachi is secure.’ Sheep Uncle Ram Ice Bear Ant Cat Horse Itch spelled Suribachi. And it was encoded too. It was sent out, and I caught it there by the airfield. And the marines that were there saw me writing it down, and they all said, “What’s up, Chief?” All I did was just point up to the flag, and they saw it. Oh, gosh, those guys just jumped up and started celebrating there. They forgot the Japanese were still shooting. As I remember Sergeant Thomas screamed at us, said, ‘Damn you knotheads! Get back in your foxholes there!’ And then the guys stopped celebrating, and they jumped back into their foxholes.

“They called me Chief, and I resented that for a long time. I don’t know what they mean by that at the time, but later on I decided, oh, they give me a promotion from PFC, and from then on I don’t bother with it.

“One night, sometime early in the morning, my buddy Paul Blatchfield kicked me, and he said, ‘Hey, Sam! Are you having a nightmare?’

“And I woke up, stood up, then sat down. I was dreaming about a young Indian maiden who came to me, and gave me something. She says, ‘Here, you wear this, and you’ll come back to us.’ It was so real that I got up and just set there thinking about it. And all of sudden they called the rest of the marines to go eat. Everybody went to go eat, but I just set there and thought about it.

“They came back and said, ‘Hey, Chief, are you still here?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m just thinking.’ Then, mail call. They all went over there. I know I don’t get no mail, so I don’t go. All of sudden, here this Mertz came running back, and he said, ‘Hey, Chief, you got a letter! You got a letter!’ He brought it over, and he said, ‘There’s something in it.’ We opened it and here is the necklace that Indian maiden tried to give me in my dream, it’s in that letter. That letter, I was so stunned I didn’t know what to do about it . . . oh, yeah . . . I was supposed to wear it. I put it on; as soon as I put it on, all that fear disappeared.

“The necklace was made out of what we call cedar tree berries. The berry has seeds in it, and it’s formed into something like one of those Catholic Church rosaries, and at the end it has a cross made out of cedarwood. I wore it and wore it and wore it. I don’t know when that thing broke. It just fell apart.

“Who sent it? I never knew. My name is on the envelope, but there’s no return address or nothing. No note. Just plain the necklace. And the dream. After that I wasn’t afraid anymore. That’s the reason why. We were sent to run across a place called Death Valley. This Death Valley is on the north side; there’s a valley there the marines tried to cross and on the other side a Japanese machine gun. When the marines tried to cross, they’d just mow them down. We were sent to cross that valley and locate the Japanese machine gun . . . the recon guys. I was selected to take the farthest point. Me and another guy were both assigned over there.

“They told us, ‘At noontime we will give you the signal to cross the valley and get to the machine-gun nest.’ So we strung out all the way. I believe a platoon, don’t know which one it was. Sergeant Thomas told us, ‘If you get hit, we’re going to come and get you; we won’t leave you out there.’ Gave us that pep talk. At noontime they gave us the signal, and we took off. Just beyond the boulders, oh, man, there were bodies laying on top of each other, some still alive, some reaching out for help. We tried to stop and help, but the sergeant screamed at us to keep going. You complete your mission first. I took off again. We ran smack into a Japanese submachine gun. They told us those Japanese soldiers would get their food ration at noontime. When they go out there, that’s when they sent us out, and we ran into that submachine gun. I think my buddy just threw a hand grenade over there, and we beat it back to report.

“The sergeant called me over and just chewed me up and down: ‘Don’t you know how to take orders?’ and all that stuff. He was mad because we had tried to help the wounded. That was not our mission; our mission was to locate the machine gun. The other two code talkers sent the coordinates and ordered mortar fire, rocket fire, and artillery fire, all three at the same time, at one machine-gun nest. Within five minutes you could hear all the explosions coming in, you could see rockets coming over, mortars coughing and going over. That place was just completely . . . Rocks were flying all over the place. Within maybe twenty or thirty minutes they stopped. Before the dust and all that settled they ordered the marines to cross. The marines they just walked right across without any Japanese fire. We found out stretcher bearers were all kneeling down waiting to go get our wounded out.

“Anyway, that’s where that dream helped. It kept all my fear away, and I said, ‘I’m going home, I’m going home.’ And sure enough, I came back.

“I was on Iwo for the whole battle. We carried M1s. Guys don’t believe me, but one time we were out on a ledge at the front and they told us to hold that point at all costs. Sometime late in the afternoon the sun was almost down, and the guys become real spooky, and one said, ‘You hear that?’ ‘Hear what?’ ‘That popping sound?’ As soon as we heard that popping sound, we could see that Japanese hand grenade coming. And we just grabbed the M1, used it like a bat and whammed the grenade back instead of trying to pick it up. Then we found out the M1 was a good bat too.

“I was never wounded. [Gestures left.] A guy got shot here [gestures right], another guy got shot there. Why I wasn’t hit is beyond me. The maiden in the dream? I believe that’s what it is. I believe I know for sure of three code talkers that got killed on Iwo Jima.

“They found out that carrying the radio on Iwo Jima was all right for a wide-open area but too risky in real close fighting. They used the telephone, a regular telephone receiver, mostly. Most of the code talkers had to string the wire. If it broke, you had go back and repair it or string another one. Some guys set up radios for relays in certain areas; that’s where I intercepted that message coming in about Suribachi.

“The radiomen, they always said, ‘Message for Arizona!’ And that meant a code talker needed to receive it, even on the radio. Message for Arizona. Can you hear it? A lot of people don’t understand that this Navajo code language was not written. It’s only a spoken language. You can’t read it, and you can’t write it. You have to decode it in your head and change it to English. It’s only in the head here. A rich language.

“Now they’re trying to pass a law that all Indian languages should be taught in public schools. It is being taught on the reservation and on the university level, at New Mexico State, University of Arizona, Northern Arizona, and at Arizona State. But back then they wouldn’t let us speak it; they wanted everybody to be Anglo. I went to speak in Washington, D.C., last April 12 [2006]. I talked to some congressmen, Senators Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka and some others. We talked about the Native American language. I told them it was very valuable. This was about legislation saying that Native American languages will be taught in states where they have reservations. The other was to recognize code talkers from other tribes, like the Sioux, the Choctaw, Comanches, Sac and Fox, and some others. They were used as translators in their own languages, but ours was coded.

“During the war there were guards assigned to protect us. Some code talkers had bodyguards. I wasn’t told I had one, but there was a guy who stayed with me all the time: ‘Hey, Chief, where you going?’ ‘Oh, I got go to the restroom.’ And he comes along. He followed me all over that place. The guard was supposed to protect you.

“That Windtalker movie? One of the guys who saw it, one of the original twenty-nine, said that’s eighty percent correct and twenty percent Hollywood. But another guy says it’s fifty percent OK and fifty percent bull hit the snake. That’s Navajo code for bullshit. When Tokyo Rose used to come on the radio, this guy by the name of Chester Soul always used to say, ‘Oh, that’s bull hit the snake.’ That means ‘bullshit.’

“Chester trained with us. Groups came in later. Some joined and learned the code, but they never saw action. Altogether there’s about four hundred twenty code talkers, all marines, in the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Divisions. They were at Okinawa too. Every theater. Last March, when we were back over there, we stopped at Okinawa, and man, oh, man, there were people out there who really appreciated the Navajo code talkers.

“I didn’t go to Okinawa during the war. Iwo was my last action. When we got back to Hawaii, they were getting ready to invade the mainland. Japan. I came back to the States sometime in February of 1946. If my family had said, ‘Write to me,’ I would have seen my mother again. But nobody could write, no telephone. That’s the one that really hurts.

“I got out March 29, 1946. They tried to keep me in the Marines. They said, ‘We’ll give you a corporal rating if you stay in.’ I said, ‘No, thank you. You don’t give me no promotion or nothing all this time, and I’m supposed to be a specialist. I’ll take my chances on the outside.’

“I was released in San Diego, and from there they took us to Camp Pendleton, and we waited a whole month to get discharged. The bus depot, the train station, everything was all jammed. I had to stand in line almost two nights just to get on a bus. Some would get so disgusted they’d take their seabag and try to hitchhike. I got on a bus as far as Winslow, Arizona. It turned south there, so I took my seabag and hitchhiked to Gallup. A guy from New York picked me up. He wanted to stop at Petrified National Forest before we got to Gallup, so I went along with him. We saw it, came back, and he decided to eat. We went and sat at a restaurant, and to my surprise he ordered beer for us. Then the guy that owned the place said, ‘No beer for this Indian!’

“And the guy from New York got into an argument with the owner. He was mad at that guy. He said this man just risked his hind end for you guys, and you won’t even give him a beer. So they argued. I was beginning to think they might get into a fight, and I said, ‘Forget it, forget it, let it go. I’m used to it now.’ But he finally talked the owner into it. He says, ‘OK, then you be responsible for him.’ ‘Responsible for what? It’s just one beer.’ So we had a beer, and then we went on to Gallup.

“From Gallup there was no transportation to the reservation, and it was more than ninety miles to Black Mountain. I had to wait for the mail truck to Chinle early next morning. There was no transportation from Chinle to Black Mountain. Nobody knew anything about where I was.

“So I had to walk again, had to walk all day. Just before sundown I got to a place where they have rocks piled up on the south side. There was a mirror hidden underneath, so I took that mirror out and started flashing out toward the Black Mountain, where my home was. All of sudden I saw a horse coming. I put the mirror back in there and walked a little ways. The horse came bearing my brother. I hadn’t seen him in nine years. I left my seabag there till they could come for it with a wagon. We rode back home, and I found my father had died.

“Then just before dawn I got up and walked out of there because there was nothing for me to stay for. A big cedar tree is still standing just a little ways from where we lived. Underneath that tree is where I was born. When you stay with the sheep, you have to move here and there every month so they don’t overgraze. You don’t move the hogan, which is your home. At that time we didn’t have any tent. All we had was sheepskins spread over a lean-to. I was born in a lean-to under that tree.

“I looked over there at that tree and saw there’s a family living there. I asked, ‘Who’s that?’ They said, ‘They own that place now.’ And here that was supposed to be mine. And I talked with the guy who lived there, and he told me, ‘This is mine because you been away all these years. To own this land, you’re supposed to live on it, and tend to it but you’ve been gone all these years.’

“I said, ‘Hey. I been fighting for that land. The government took me away.’ But that’s tribal law. He still lives on it.

“I just walked out of there. My brother found out I just left. He brought a horse over to me and asked where I’m going. I said, ‘I don’t know where I’m going. I’m just going. The first thing I need to do, I need to get to Chinle and that mail truck.’ So he gave me the horse and gave me instruction. ‘You ride this over there and leave the saddle and the bridle at the church and put my name on it and turn the horse loose. He’ll come back,’ he said.

“I rode the horse to Chinle, got on the mail truck, and went back to Gallup. From Gallup I bought a bus ticket all the way to San Francisco. I had found out one of my sisters got married and she and her husband lived there. She didn’t know our mother, our father, and my other sister had died. She couldn’t communicate with them either.”

Sam worked in San Francisco and then back on the railroad, and then he went to Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent two years at the Haskell Institute vocational school, a trade school for Indians. He learned electrical work and refrigeration. Here he met his wife, Anne, also a student. He went on to Oregon while Anne found a job at a new school for Navajo children in Brigham City, Utah. Eventually Sam joined her there and obtained a degree in elementary education. They were married in June 1952 and had a son and a daughter. For thirty years he taught Navajo children at the Intermountain Schools and up in Lukachukai, “a little bitty settlement,” about twenty miles from where he was born.

So how does Sam Tso feel today about the treatment he received at the hands of the government and about his service on the Island of Iwo Jima?

“Let me tell you. We are still part of the United States, whether it’s called a reservation or not. We are still part of the United States. When I thought about it, I felt that, if were not for the United States, some other country would have come in and taken over, and what would we be? I doubt we would be a democracy. I found out in high school that a democratic form of government is best for people. And that’s what made me decide to go and help in the war.

“People aren’t stupid. Sooner or later they are going to learn to respect everybody. Not only one group, but everybody. It’s best that we be patient. Coming back from the war, I found out that the people of America were really thankful. The reason I say this is because one time President Clinton invited us to go with him to Hawaii to celebrate V-J Day. We followed him over there, and we were at the Punch Bowl, where all those dead soldiers were buried. It was a lot of people. He made a speech, and then he introduced a lot of the top brasses from different parts of the services.

“At the end he introduced us Navajo code talkers. Man, oh, man, I just couldn’t believe it. All the people in that bowl just stood up, yelling and clapping. Some even started running up here to shake our hands, and then one right after another had to have us sign autographs. People wanted to take our pictures. I just couldn’t know how to take that.

“That same year, 1995, the National Geographic paid my transportation back to Iwo Jima. They made a documentary film over there, War Code Navajo. They sent me a copy. I later found out it won an Emmy award.”