Code talker

Code Talker is a novel by the American writer Joseph Bruchac, published in 2005 by Dial Books. It is told by a Navajo man looking back on the war he served in, and it is written for young readers.

Ned Begay is sent as a child to a boarding school run by white teachers, where the language he grew up speaking is treated as an obstacle to be worked out of him and where children are punished for using it. When the United States enters the Second World War, the Marines recruit Navajo men, and the language the schools had tried to erase becomes a weapon: the code talkers send messages in Navajo, in a code the enemy cannot break, across the fighting in the Pacific. Ned volunteers, trains as a code talker, and serves with the Marines in the island campaigns.

The novel follows his life from the reservation to the battlefield and back, and its subject includes the double life its narrator has to lead, having been told in one part of his life that Navajo was worthless and finding in another that it was exactly what his country needed.