Last living "code talker" is now 90 years old

Chester Nez is the last living member of the U.S. Marine Corps 382nd Platoon, comprised of 29 Navajos who developed a secret code that the Japanese were never able to break. He was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal on July 26, 2001.

The "greatest generation" won the Second World War and on returning home built America into a super power -- a beacon of freedom. Now those Americans are in their 80s and 90s.

One of them is former Navajo "code talker" Chester Nez --　the subject of a recent article in The Albuquerque Journal, "The Last Code Talker." Now 90 years old, Nez is "the last living member of the U.S. Marine Corps 382nd Platoon, comprised of 29 Navajos who developed a secret code the Japanese were never able to decipher," noted the Journal.

Some 430 bilingual Navajo Americans (fluent in English and their native Navajo) played crucial roles in sending coded tactical messages in their Navajo language during the horrific island-hopping　campaigns in the Pacific.

Among the former code talkers' dwindling ranks, there　are no cynical post-modernists -- even though Nez, as the Journal explained, had a traditional Navajo boyhood -- attending Indian boarding schools where "the children were forced to speak English and were punished when they were caught talking their native Navajo. It was part of the federal government's efforts to acculturate Native Americans."

It's the Journal, not Nez, which dwells on that, however.

　

Nez prefers to talk proudly about his military service and, in particular, a Congressional Gold Medal he received: "one of only 29 in existence -- given to Nez by then-President George W. Bush during a White House ceremony July 26, 2001," noted the Journal.