Another hero gone

By Lindsay Whitehurst The Daily Times
Article Launched: 01/24/2007 12:00:00 AM MST

Courtesy Photo

Everett Howe, right, drew this portrait to honor his uncle, David Tsosie, after Tsosie received a silver Congressional Medal in 2001. Titled "Finally," the pencil, pastel, charcoal and ink drawing won the 2004 Totah Festival poster contest in Farmington.

Courtesy Photo

Eight of the men in this group photo, taken March 1943 at Navajo Mission School in Farmington, became Navajo Code Talkers for the U.S. Marines in WWII. David Tsosie, third from left in this photo, who served in WWII as a Navajo Code Talker, died Jan. 20 in Bloomfield. Samuel Sandoval, fourth from left, who was also a Navajo Code Talker in WWII, lives in Shiprock. (Courtesy photo)

SHIPROCK — David Tsosie, a man honored late as one of the small band of brothers known as Navajo code talkers, died Saturday at age 83.

"It's ingrained in all the code talkers that we don't talk about what we did, what happened," fellow code talker, Samuel Sandoval, 83, of Shiprock, said. "It's because of the secrecy of the code — we were trained never to say a word about it."

Prohibited from speaking Navajo growing up in boarding school, Tsosie learned the traditional language at home and spoke it with friends. But during World War II, when the Japanese cracked every English-based code the American military could come up with, the government depended on the Navajo language to create an unbreakable code.

Their role, however, was kept secret until 1968, when the documents were declassified, and many code talkers were honored with the silver Congressional Medal in 2001. The honor for Purple Heart winner Tsosie, however, came even later. Apparently, because of a gap in record-keeping, his role wasn't confirmed by the military until 2002.

"I was really proud of him. He did some truly wonderful things," Tsosie's nephew, 43-year-old Charles Phillips, of Shiprock, said. "He was calling in to other code talkers, calling into the ship. It was scary, but he just did it."

Tsosie was born in December 1923. His family lived in Shiprock, but he lived at the United Methodist Mission School, a Navajo boarding school in Farmington, for nine months out of every year.

"We were never allowed to be speaking Navajo," Sandoval said. "There was no such thing as a bilingual class. We'd go off when we had time and speak it."

When Sandoval signed up for the military upon graduation in 1943, the recruiter asked him if he knew any more Navajo boys who might like to join.

"I said, Yeah, I think I know some,' not knowing why they wanted young Navajos," he said.

He thought of to Tsosie, a school basketball star who friends nicknamed Spanky" after the character in "The Little Rascals." Even though he was about a year shy of graduation, Tsosie and his brother, George Soce, enlisted. In all, 11 boys from the boarding school signed up. Eight became Marines and code talkers. After Tsosie's death, only two — Sandoval and Wilfred Billey — are left.

All went through basic training in San Diego, Calif., and graduated from code talker school at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where they committed the entire Navajo-based code to memory. Then they were shipped overseas, to New Caladenia in Australia, where the two men were separated.

In June 1944, Tsosie became one of 24,000 casualties during the bloody Battle of Saipan when a piece of flying shrapnel hit him in the leg. He was sent to the hospital in Pearl Harbor to recuperate. Tsosie's nephew, Alfred Bennett, 50, of Bosque Farms, remembered a family story of hat happened when his brother George visited.

"George said, I went to visit him, and I got after him for getting hurt,'" Bennett said. "But I asked (Tsosie) about it, and he said, No, that's not what happened! He just bawled and cried. He was so happy I was alive.'"

After the war ended, Tsosie stayed in the military. He was transferred to Washington, D.C., Bennett said, where he "rubbed shoulders" with the likes of Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy.

Sandoval, meanwhile, met up with his old friend again after his own discharge in 1946. Both men enrolled in Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., where they soon became part of a county-wide basketball team.

And, despite his old injury, Tsosie signed right up.

"He was really good; he didn't mind his leg. He was a very strong man, very agile," Sandoval said. "He was very comical; he always liked to joke."

After graduation, Tsosie went to work for uranium mining company Kerr-McGee Corp., Bennett said, and then for the State of New Mexico Department of Labor.

Growing older, feeling his old injury, and haunted by combat flashbacks, Tsosie returned to a traditional Navajo life of herding sheep.

"He'd tell me he'd be running up, killing people ... he would tell a lot of stories, he had some bad memories, a lot gruesome," Phillips said. "He had a lot of bad memories."

But soon the world came calling. The Navajo code talkers were increasingly being recognized by the United States government, and, in 2001, many received gold and silver Congressional Medals.

For some reason, Bennett said, there was no record of Tsosie having been a code talker at the Navajo Nation government headquarters in Window Rock, Ariz. It took a military inquiry to prove it, but Tsosie received his own medal in 2002.

That's when another of his nephews, Everett Howe, also a Marine, reconnected with his uncle. The ceremony inspired Howe to draw his uncle and other code talkers into a picture that eventually won a recent Totah Festival Poster Contest.

"You know, at first he was really upset," Howe said. But when Tsosie got the honor he earned, "man, you should have seen, his eyes popped wide open, and we told him we were happy for him."

Lindsay Whitehurst

Link to Report

Special thanks to Bea Woodard for the lead.

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January 2007 Reports

Last updated on January 28, 2007