Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WW II
By: Chester Nez, Judith Schiess Avila / Narrated By: David Colacci
Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
You’d better believe this is a good book about a great man
History? Love it. Military history? Yes, please. The ONLY memoir? I’m THERE!
We’d kinda learned about the Navajo Code Talkers of WWII in grade school, and I thought it was fascinating. It wasn’t, however, until I found Code Talker over on Audible that I found anything truly engaging about that group of young men (And Audible later had it as a Daily Deal, but really. This is very much worth a full credit!). There’s a lot of dry history out there, which is pretty surprising. I mean, how can you make top secret programs and super duper codes boring? It turns out that you can.
Fortunately, this is nowhere near boring. The book follows Chester Nez and his early upbringing where he was forced into assimilation schools and was punished for speaking his native language. It also chronicles his other early traumas of what the government did to his people, the land, the wholesale slaughter of their animals. Deplorable, especially as Nez was a tender boy with a tender heart who had special relationships with those animals.
Let’s face it: Chester Nez was just a flat-out hero (He died in 2014). Despite the strained relationships with the government and the discrimination they faced, young men such as he still chose to serve the country that had treated them so poorly. And Nez couldn’t even tell his family about the program that he was chosen to be a part of for so long. He had to keep it under wraps for 23 years. He came back from the war with PTSD, but couldn’t speak of those specific incidents as they had to be kept secret.
He could barely speak of the horrors of serving in the Pacific. Because these young men didn’t sit in some sterile environment and speak the Navajo language as code, they served with guns in their hands, suffering fear and shrapnel wounds, seeing death, destruction, and decay all around them. Nez’s accounts of all he saw are pretty spare, very graphic. He remembers each scene in minute and gruesome detail. Indeed, he never really was able to let go of any of it, despite coming home and having Navajo healing rituals.
I don’t know why I love military history so much as I usually wind up having nightmares and vivid dreams after each book I read, each audiobook I listen to. And the war in the Pacific was especially horrific. So needless to say, after this account, yeah had vivid dreams again, so you’ve been forewarned. And David Colacci does very well bringing it even more to life with his decent narration (Which I was pleasantly surprised with after having listened to him deliver an Italian accent with vague hints of Russian in it: Donna Leon’s Earthly Remains).
If you’re at all interested in histories of war, and if you want to learn some new stuff, oh do give this a listen. Traumatic, sure, but I must admit that it produced chuckles and outright laughs at times also. Nez was a wry and funny man.
One thing? The audiobook ends with a recorded interview with him, and he was quite the elderly gentleman at the time. And it’s confusing as all get-out. I couldn’t understand him at all, and it made for an uncomfortable coda if I may be so honest. Lovable man—
just couldn’t understand a word he said at the end there—
Good thing the rest of it was just so danged gripping, just so danged good!
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