Joe Morris talked to a Dryden employees about his experiences as a Code Talker. NASA Photo / Tom Tschida

Code Talker: Joe Morris shares his story of courage

Frederick A. Johnsen
News Chief

A World War Two Navajo Code Talker was on common ground with his hosts in a NASA auditorium recently as he shared insights about using his largely unwritten language to help assure American victory in the war with Japan. The staff at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert pride themselves in their abilities to come up with unorthodox solutions to aeronautical dilemmas, much as their guest, Joe Morris, Sr., used his Navajo language to solve the problem of sending coded messages that could not be deciphered by the Japanese.

On one level, it was a discussion about mathematics and logic employed to confound the enemy as Morris explained how each letter of the English alphabet was assigned three separate Navajo words to represent it. When spelling a word that repeated a letter, the Navajo Code Talkers would intersperse the alternate code words for those same letters, resulting in an arcane compilation that could only be comprehended by another Navajo - and then only by a trained Code Talker who had memorized the rules of the game.

But on another level, it was a lean-forward-in-your-seat, standing-room-only opportunity to listen to the words of a Native American who grew up without electricity or even schooling until he was 12, and who went on to participate in one of the most clever clandestine efforts of the war. Morris took his audience back to the reservation at Indian Wells, Ariz., where he was born in 1926, painting a rich sepia word picture of a place "where there is no electricity, no running water, no school ... this is about 60 years ago." In this environment, Joe Morris seemed to thrive under the sometimes-strict tutelage of his grandfather who toughened him to survive in the wild west where young Joe tended the family's sheep and other livestock.

When he was 12, Joe's family sent him away to a government boarding school where he learned English. In an irony that would only manifest itself later, Joe was punished if he spoke Navajo at the government school, he said. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had consequences that reached deep into Navajo country, resulting in nightly blackouts, since the school enjoyed the luxury of electric lights. Soon the school was closed - converted, Joe later learned, into an internment camp for Japanese Americans.

Joe Morris went back home, his interrupted education nonetheless a powerful tool for his future. Being idle was not in his nature. "When I was barely 17, I started thinking" about what to do with this life, Morris recalled. Obtaining a draft card would establish Joe with a credential that could help him land a paying job in the community, but he was under age as he headed toward the local draft board. "I went over there and lied about my age," he confessed. With no questions asked, Joe received a draft card, which he then parlayed into a job working for a miner at 75 cents an hour. This was good money in a time when other Navajos worked on the railroad at only 50 cents an hour, Morris explained.

But the toughened teenager who worked the mine was soon notified by the draft board that his services were needed in uniform. Joe faced a battery of exams at the draft board. "I tried my best - real hard - to pass all those tests." And pass he did. Upon telling his family, Joe's mother wept, and his father said he would have a good medicine man pray for him. "No matter how hard it is out there," the medicine man told Joe, "... you're going to come back."

Joe boarded a troop train in Arizona, on his way to become a U.S. Marine at boot camp in San Diego. It was the first time he had left the area, other than his stint at the nearby boarding school. At boot camp, Joe immediately got a taste of legendary drill instructor equal opportunity haranguing. When the instructor confronted the young Navajo draftee upon his arrival, still wearing blue jeans and the black cowboy hat that had protected him from the Arizona sun, the seasoned drill instructor took one look at Joe and hollered, "Hey cowboy! You're not a cowboy anymore! You're a Marine!"

Morris presumed he was progressing toward a traditional Marine Corps posting - until his next assignment took him to Camp Pendleton where the little-known Navajo communications school operated in secrecy. The school's four instructors, all Navajos, were adept at moving fluidly from English to Navajo. They taught a code that gave Navajo words military significance - potatoes were hand-grenades; eggs were bombs. Key to the unbreakable success of the Navajo code was the use of three words to represent each English letter, enabling two Navajo Code Talkers to converse from far ends of a battlefield in a lingo that utterly confounded Japanese attempts to decipher.

To keep the code secret, Code Talkers could not have crib notes to prompt them in the field. It all had to be committed to memory. It was a lot for Joe Morris to learn. "That was OK with me because I knew I could do it," he said. "I wanted to study hard so I wouldn't get behind." Joe said he was admonished "If you get captured by the Japanese don't you ever tell them what you learned here." The Navajo code, he was told, was for the Marine Corps, the Army, the Navy ... "for your country." If captured, Joe said, his instructions were succinct: "Just die for your country."

Morris' migration from the reservation to the far-flung Pacific war brought him into combat on Okinawa from April to June 1945. The battle for Okinawa was a protracted, bloody campaign against a Japanese force well hidden in caves and tropical vegetation. Once he was deposited on the island, Joe observed changes in the air as his Marine force moved closer to the front. Smoke rose high into the sky as the Marines advanced. Closer to the front they passed corpses; grim markers on the road to battle. A fellow Marine, calling Joe "Chief," once asked him if he was scared. Morris denied fear to the Marine, but admitted to his audience at NASA, "I lied." He said he didn't want his own admission of fear to compound any fear in his compatriots.

Joe took pride in using Navajo to relay only urgent and classified messages as the battle for Okinawa churned and clanked around him. And then it was over. Joe Morris came home, a silent hero whose contributions could not be acknowledged publicly because the Marine Corps wanted to retain the veil of secrecy around Navajo Code Talkers in case their services were needed again.

This was particularly difficult for a Navajo society that has relied historically on oral history to preserve the past. By late 2002, Morris said, only 120 of more than 400 trained Code Talkers were still alive. In the late 1960s, deeds of the Code Talkers were finally made known. Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush have publicly honored Code Talkers for their contributions to America's war effort in the Pacific, as the passage of years takes more of this select group in death.

"There's a lot of things I could tell you, but there's not a lot of time." Joe Morris concluded his hour-long presentation at NASA with an apology that rang with prophecy.