Eighty years ago, as the sea swayed him from side to side on an attack vessel heading towards Iwo Jima, Thomas Begay started to feel afraid.
“On the ship, they said: ‘get your last scrap of steak and eggs,’” he recalled. “That gave (me) some kind of feeling in my stomach. What am I doing here? What’s going to happen?”
“It’s a scary thing,” the veteran told CNN from his home in Window Rock, Arizona. “You don’t know where the bullet or the bomb will come from.”
Begay landed on the island as a member of the 5th Marine Division, but his role was unique: He was a Navajo Code Talker, deployed into battle to help the US military send encrypted messages that enemy forces were unable to decipher.
More than 400 Navajo Code Talkers were sent to the Pacific during World War II, operating alongside the Marines at pivotal battles including those at Saipan, Guam, Tinian and Iwo Jima. Their code proved vital: it was never cracked by the Japanese, and allowed US troops to organize their movements without the enemy’s knowledge.
Thursday is National Navajo Code Talker Day – an annual celebration created by President Ronald Reagan in 1982. It is also the 80th anniversary of Japan’s initial surrender in World War II, which effectively ended the costliest war in human history. The documents codifying their surrender were signed a few weeks later.
Today, just two Code Talkers survive. CNN spoke to both – Peter MacDonald, 96, and Begay, who is now 100 – about their recollections from the war and how their contributions are recognized across the US.
But while their service is recorded in history books, how they are remembered remains a live issue. The Code Talkers have been dragged into the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and a years-long effort to create a dedicated national museum has stalled and may stretch beyond MacDonald and Begay’s lifetimes.
For MacDonald, they are trends with troubling historical echoes.
“It’s a form of discrimination,” he told CNN of the Pentagon’s deletion in March of webpages documenting their service – an act the Department of Defense reversed, but which drew fury across the Navajo Nation. “Over 100 years, we lived through all of that discrimination.”
“We need to take a serious look at what we are doing here in America,” MacDonald added. “At what America has done to Native Americans, and maybe other minorities.”
“We need serious discussion,” he said. “We cannot go on this way.”
The secretive and dangerous journey that led MacDonald into America’s history books began when he saw another member of his clan in a Marines uniform. “I asked: where can I get one of those beautiful uniforms you’re wearing?” he told CNN.
MacDonald was told he’d need to enlist with the Marines. But there was a problem: he was only 15, two years below the age requirement.
That didn’t deter him. “We’ve been carrying rifles since we were 7 or 8 years old,” he said, telling his fellow clan member: “We shoot rabbits, we shoot squirrels, we shoot birds, and sometimes I’m a better shot than you.”
MacDonald lied about his age and enlisted. He told CNN that on his visit to the enrollment office, he said: “I don’t want the Japanese to ever come here to Window Rock, Arizona.”
“We had seen enough of (that) stuff before, and we don’t like it,” he told CNN. “This is our land and we’re going to protect it.”
There was an irony to his eagerness. Native people had been full American citizens for just two decades, but they still didn’t have the right to vote. Many Native children, including a significant portion of the Code Talker cohort, were still being taken from their families and forced to enroll in boarding schools, where they were stripped of their language and other traditions.
With the Marines MacDonald was summoned to a meeting, where he found dozens of fellow Navajo. And in that room, he discovered a secret: The same Navajo language that many of his peers were forced to abandon was now being used to win a war.
The idea had been proposed to the Marines by Philip Johnston, an engineer and the son of a missionary who had grown up alongside Navajo children. It was nearly indecipherable: virtually nobody outside the Navajo nation spoke the language.
The Code Talkers developed an extensive and complicated code based on their own language, which substituted key military and geographical terms for related images.
“Tank” became “chay-da-gahi,” which means “turtle.” “Fighter plane” “was da-he-tih-hi,” or “hummingbird.” In many cases, they were forced to invent new words altogether, because Navajo didn’t contain direct translations.
When Code Talkers were deployed in battle they were assigned Marine escorts for protection after multiple Code Talkers were mistaken for Japanese soldiers and confronted by US troops.
“A lot of times we were mistaken for Japanese,” Chester Nez, a Code Talker who died in 2014, said in an oral history interview for the Library of Congress. Nez recalled being stopped by a Marine while walking back to camp with a fellow Code Talker on the island of Guadalcanal in 1942. Nez, barred from disclosing any information about the Code Talker program even to fellow Marines, said the pair were telephone operators.
“He didn’t believe us,” Nez said “This guy took a .45 and stuck it in my head and my body … that was the most scary thing that happened to me.”
Code Talkers spoke into their hefty radios when an instruction needed relaying.
For example, MacDonald explained that on Iwo Jima, a message needed to be sent to headquarters: “Send demolition team to hill 362B.”
The message that was transmitted over radio was: “Sheep. Eyes. Nose. Deer. Destroyer. Tea. Mouse. Turkey. Onion. Sick horse. Three. Six. Two. Bear.”
In all, more than 800 messages were sent between Code Talkers at Iwo Jima.
Begay was one of those on the island, and he remembers how he felt when he saw an American flag raised on Mount Suribachi. It had been hoisted by six Marines days earlier, a moment captured in an iconic photograph by the Associated Press photojournalist Joe Rosenthal.
“My God,” he said. “I was so proud.”
When MacDonald and Begay returned to the US after the war, they were sworn to secrecy. The code talker program remained classified until 1968, in case the military should ever need to reactivate it.
For the Navajo who powered the program, that meant returning to their pre-war lives, excluded from the heroes’ welcome that many other returning soldiers received.
“We had really gotten used to being treated as a second-class citizen,” MacDonald said, adding his experience was “no different” after his return. “We were very much mistreated in America.”
“We were not rich at all,” he continued. “We were just trying to survive. In the meantime, when you go into town, (non-Native) people make fun of you: people tell you … ‘you don’t sit there, you eat over there, you don’t use this, you do that.’”
Begay’s son remembers the day the secret was lifted: his father came home and finally told his family what he had done during the war.
“Right away I started asking him questions at the dinner table,” said Ronald Begay, himself a veteran of the Army. “I didn’t know that, because it was never in the history books. I was proud of my dad.”
Both men had long post-war careers. Begay retired in 1984 after 40 years of federal service as a superintendent at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Chinle, Arizona.
MacDonald’s legacy is more complicated. He served four terms as the Navajo Nation chairman, becoming popular for aggressively championing Navajo sovereignty. But he was sentenced to jail time in 1990 on federal and tribal charges, including bribery and racketeering; his earlier refusal to step down when placed on administrative leave led to a lengthy standoff and ultimately a riot in which two of his supporters died. President Bill Clinton would ultimately commute his sentence to time served.
At a White House reception hosted by President Donald Trump in 2017, MacDonald said he and his then-12 fellow surviving Code Talkers had one last mission: to ensure the memory of their accomplishments was kept alive.
It is not a memory that has always been respected. MacDonald had hoped that “Windtalkers,” a 2002 action movie based on their contributions, would serve as a cultural touchstone for a new generation. But the production was critically panned and criticized for its historical inaccuracies.
“They asked us to come to their opening,” MacDonald told CNN about the movie’s premiere. “And what do we see? About 20% of the movie was Navajo Code Talkers. 80% of the movie was about Nicolas Cage and whatever problem he was having with his girlfriend,” he said.
For several years, one of the best collections of artifacts relating to the Code Talkers was found in an unlikely place: a Burger King in Kayenta, Arizona. Small exhibits also exist in museums in nearby Tuba City and in Gallup, New Mexico, but MacDonald has campaigned for a museum dedicated solely to the Code Talkers. That project is ongoing.
Earlier this year, the surviving Code Talkers experienced an unexpected new assault on their legacy.
Amid a sweeping purge of webpages that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, the Pentagon wiped a number of pages honoring the contribution of MacDonald, Begay and their peers.
It was part of a hurried crackdown that also saw the deletion of information completely unrelated to DEI issues – like Holocaust remembrance, suicide prevention and the Enola Gay aircraft – or pages that commemorated other war heroes like World War II Medal of Honor recipient Pfc. Harold Gonsalves and historically significant service members such as baseball great Jackie Robinson.
“The new administration came in, and I guess they want to change a lot of things,” MacDonald told CNN. “They wanted nothing, no words, about Navajo Code Talkers.”
Multiple defense officials told CNN at the time that military units were instructed to simply use keyword searches like “racism,” “ethnicity,” “history” and “first” when searching for articles and photos to remove.
The Pentagon subsequently restored the pages, and Pentagon press secretary John Ullyot said in a statement at the time: “In the rare cases that content is removed — either deliberately or by mistake — that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components and they correct the content so it recognizes our heroes for their dedicated service alongside their fellow Americans, period.”
The episode became a flashpoint in the national controversy over the Trump administration’s targeting of DEI initiatives. Ronald Begay, who champions his father’s efforts to preserve the Code Talkers’ legacy, said he was “appalled” by the saga.
“I immediately started texting the Navajo Code Talker descendants, as well as some prominent veterans – we support each other in various ways,” he said. “Why would they do that?” he asked. “After all, that’s why we are free … our language was historic.”
The episode was quickly undone. But for the Code Talkers and their descendants, it struck at the heart of a deep-rooted fear: that their legacy will be sidelined once MacDonald and Begay are not longer around to tell their stories.
“We need a good ‘thank you’ from the people who have become wealthy in America,” MacDonald said. He’d like a new movie to be made about their contribution, alongside a permanent, dedicated museum.
MacDonald and other Code Talkers have campaigned for years to make the museum project a reality, but it remains tens of millions of dollars out of reach, the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported in 2023. CNN has contacted organizers of the project for an update on its progress.
“I don’t believe (people) understand this tremendous contribution to the battle in the Pacific War,” he said. “It made all the difference in the world.”
The next time a post-war milestone is met, it is possible that no Code Talkers will be alive to greet it. But MacDonald and Begay hope their contribution to American history is remembered once they are no longer present to tell their stories.
“I believe this is the only country in the entire world blessed by the holy ones,” MacDonald said. “And we need to keep it that way.”
But the Pentagon’s DEI purge and the lack of progress on the long-running effort to cement the Code Talkers’ legacy with a museum has angered him. “We need to get back to serious thinking (about) how we’re gonna live into the next century,” he said.