thedrifter
11-24-03, 09:09 AM
Young Navajo follow in the footsteps of the code talkers
By Steve Schmidt
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Honor Bound
Young Navajo follow in the footsteps of the code talkers
Photos by Earnie Grafton
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
November 23, 2003
Friday night, May 30, 6 o'clock ...
Wind blowing through his ink-black hair, Nathaniel Bitsui stands on the chalky rim of the Grand Canyon. It's cloudy out. The dirt boils with bugs.
Nate graduates tonight, this spring evening. The Navajo boy wears a shiny red cap and gown to his Grand Canyon High School commencement, held on the rim. When it's over, he flings his cap into the air.
The next day he turns 18.
The day after that he's supposed to leave his northern Arizona home for Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego.
It's overwhelming, all this – first a graduation, then a milestone birthday, then boot camp. Take a deep breath, Nate tells himself. Steady yourself.
The night of his birthday, he starts crying.
"Are you all right?" asks his father, Francis Bitsui.
"I'm sad. I'm just sad."
Each year, 19,000 young men pass through the black metal gates of Marine Corps Recruit Depot near Lindbergh Field for the crucible called boot camp. Most are fresh out of high school and ache to start a new life, even if leaving the old one pains them. They're nervous, patriotic and a bit clueless.
Nate hoped to start boot camp in June. Julio Nez, another 18-year-old from Arizona, planned to start the same month.
They are keepers of a legacy – both are Navajo Indians, both burn to be Marines.
In World War II, the storied Navajo code talkers helped America defeat Japan. At Iwo Jima and other battles, the Marines Corps and the nation's largest Indian reservation forged a blood bond.
The red rock, sheep-studded Navajo Nation straddles three states – Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The Navajo have their own government and language, their own problems with alcohol and poverty, their own myths and proud ways.
Yet their ties to the leathernecks – and San Diego – run deep.
Signs of the Marines are everywhere on the reservation, from code talker displays inside fast-food stands to Semper Fi bumper stickers on pickup trucks. Even in remote corners of the sprawling territory, where rain turns the dirt roads to gumbo much of the year, it's not unusual to spot photographs of someone's dad or uncle at boot camp.
No one made Nate and Julio join.
They could stay home or, armed with their good grades, head to college and watch the war on terrorism on their dorm room TVs.
Or they could take the boldest leap of their lives and spend a grueling 13 weeks of training in San Diego.
Because it's in their bloodline.
Because it's a 9/11 world and they want a role in it.
Because they ache to be tested in ways young men have been tested for centuries.
They know nothing of battle, yet their thoughts are full of it, sometimes in ways others can't fathom. "I really want to see what war is like," Julio says.
But before they dive into the military, they must overcome another challenge: their final months at home, from the complicated goodbyes to the questions and fears that surface as war edges close.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 2003. President Bush declares Saddam Hussein a dire threat. In his State of the Union speech, the president says Iraq must be disarmed. And if the world won't move against Baghdad, U.S. forces will, Bush says. Thousands of Marines and other troops head to the Middle East.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nate walks alone in the rugged Arizona outback in January, gripping a Remington rifle.
It's beautiful and dangerous country; it's also his back yard.
Nate and his family live in the Navajo village of Cameron, Ariz., in a mobile home parked at the end of a dirt road. They have no indoor plumbing or electricity. Nearby is a wood outhouse and a small hogan, a traditional Navajo lodge.
Behind the home is a deep gorge with rattlesnakes, quicksand and gnarled rocks.
Nate likes to burrow for hours into the crevices of the rocky walls of the gorge. He stares through his rifle scope, talking to himself, imagining his place in the world. I'm a Marine sniper. I'm in Baghdad. I'm hunting terrorists.
Bammmmmmmmmmmmm!
The sound ricochets off the gorge's wine-tinted walls.
At 5 feet 10 inches tall, Nate has the lanky build of a long-distance runner, ideal for billy-goating from rock to rock through his back yard. He has brown eyes and walks with a slight slouch.
For a 17-year-old, he's refreshingly short on attitude. He opens doors for adults and watches his manners around girls. He has a tough time saying no.
"You are a nice guy," a classmate writes in Nate's Grand Canyon High yearbook. "Sometimes too nice."
He likes Snickers bars, Navajo fry bread and his white Ford pickup. He likes a lot of girls at school, too, but he has trouble keeping a relationship going more than a few weeks. He's not sure why.
"My truck is my most reliable girlfriend," he likes to joke.
His mom, Esther Bitsui, is a police dispatcher at Grand Canyon National Park. Francis Bitsui works on the park trail maintenance crew. Nate has two sisters, 14-year-old Yolanda and 19-year-old Illanda, who attends nursing school.
When Esther learns her son wants to join the Marines, it spooks her. Bush's saber-rattling State of the Union speech doesn't help.
But Nate has yearned to be a Marine since he was little. He's had relatives in the Marines and believes it's his calling. The call is so strong it overrides any doubts or fears. "It's a debt I owe to my ancestors, to the Navajo, to America."
Sept. 11, 2001, cemented his decision.
"Think of all the people who died in that," he says, clambering over rocks near his home. "Think of how many kids are motherless, fatherless or even orphans now."
Pearl Harbor packed the same punch.
In early 1942, just after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, Marine officers in San Diego turned to the isolated reservation for help. The Marines recruited hundreds of Navajo men to relay battlefield messages in a code based on the tribe's spoken tongue.
For decades, many white teachers on the reservation had discouraged – even physically beat – Navajo schoolchildren for speaking their complex native language.
Now their words were weapons.
After completing boot camp in San Diego, these new Marine code talkers steamed into the Pacific, into the teeth of the enemy.
"The hard-hitting leathernecks needed an unbreakable code and they got it," The San Diego Union reported in 1945. "For three years, wherever the Marines landed, the Japanese got an earful of strange gurgling noises interspersed with other sounds resembling the call of a Tibetan monk and the sound of a hot water bottle being emptied."
The marriage of two warrior worlds, Navajo and Marine, was sealed.
Today the Navy, Army and Air Force comb the reservation for new recruits, dangling money, scholarships and other perks. But the Marines offer something the hardy tribe finds deeply appealing: the challenge of Marine boot camp – the longest of any military branch – and the chance to be part of a historic legacy.
"A lot of recruiters can't persuade anybody to go anywhere else but the Marine Corps," says Marine recruiter Sgt. Gerald Nez, who is Navajo though not related to Julio.
Both the Navajo and the Marines are older than the country. The ancestors of the Navajo settled in the Southwest centuries ago. The Marines were formed in 1775.
Both hold their ghosts close. Navajo culture is rich with tales of spirits engaged in heroic deeds. Marines talk of their storied battles with dewy-eyed reverence.
Both are intensely patriotic, although the Navajo have little reason to be.
The U.S. government waged war on the tribe in the mid-1800s. Frontiersman Kit Carson and others raided their crops and livestock. Thousands of men, women and children were herded hundreds of miles to a desert camp. Many died, while the rest were kept in disease-ridden confinement for years.
Many Navajo still talk of the U.S. attacks and forced marches their ancestors endured.
Yet these are the same people who fought in World War II. The Navajo maintain a veterans cemetery on the reservation, covered with U.S. flags whipping in the wind.
These are the people who raised Nate.
Gorge-climbing, Remington-packing, I'm-fighting-terrorists Nate.
It's January and the high school senior has a job lined up with the Marines. If he survives boot camp, he'll join an elite squad guarding the White House and the president.
He's never been to San Diego. Now, it's almost all he thinks about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March. Bush demands Hussein leave Iraq within 48 hours or face war. There's no doubt Hussein possesses some of the most lethal weapons ever devised, Bush says. "We will help you build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free," he promises Iraqis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Julio Nez stares hard into a mirror.
The Chinle High School senior sits in art class, working on a self-portrait. It's a clear March day on the reservation, thousands of miles from Baghdad.
He stares again. Long eyelashes. A wisp of a goatee. A wide brown face, and broad shoulders built for the long haul.
When Julio decided to join the Marines, he wanted to sign up for 20 years. His recruiter wondered if he was joking. You can only sign up for four, he was told.
Twenty years? How gung-ho is that?
continued..........
By Steve Schmidt
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Honor Bound
Young Navajo follow in the footsteps of the code talkers
Photos by Earnie Grafton
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
November 23, 2003
Friday night, May 30, 6 o'clock ...
Wind blowing through his ink-black hair, Nathaniel Bitsui stands on the chalky rim of the Grand Canyon. It's cloudy out. The dirt boils with bugs.
Nate graduates tonight, this spring evening. The Navajo boy wears a shiny red cap and gown to his Grand Canyon High School commencement, held on the rim. When it's over, he flings his cap into the air.
The next day he turns 18.
The day after that he's supposed to leave his northern Arizona home for Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego.
It's overwhelming, all this – first a graduation, then a milestone birthday, then boot camp. Take a deep breath, Nate tells himself. Steady yourself.
The night of his birthday, he starts crying.
"Are you all right?" asks his father, Francis Bitsui.
"I'm sad. I'm just sad."
Each year, 19,000 young men pass through the black metal gates of Marine Corps Recruit Depot near Lindbergh Field for the crucible called boot camp. Most are fresh out of high school and ache to start a new life, even if leaving the old one pains them. They're nervous, patriotic and a bit clueless.
Nate hoped to start boot camp in June. Julio Nez, another 18-year-old from Arizona, planned to start the same month.
They are keepers of a legacy – both are Navajo Indians, both burn to be Marines.
In World War II, the storied Navajo code talkers helped America defeat Japan. At Iwo Jima and other battles, the Marines Corps and the nation's largest Indian reservation forged a blood bond.
The red rock, sheep-studded Navajo Nation straddles three states – Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. The Navajo have their own government and language, their own problems with alcohol and poverty, their own myths and proud ways.
Yet their ties to the leathernecks – and San Diego – run deep.
Signs of the Marines are everywhere on the reservation, from code talker displays inside fast-food stands to Semper Fi bumper stickers on pickup trucks. Even in remote corners of the sprawling territory, where rain turns the dirt roads to gumbo much of the year, it's not unusual to spot photographs of someone's dad or uncle at boot camp.
No one made Nate and Julio join.
They could stay home or, armed with their good grades, head to college and watch the war on terrorism on their dorm room TVs.
Or they could take the boldest leap of their lives and spend a grueling 13 weeks of training in San Diego.
Because it's in their bloodline.
Because it's a 9/11 world and they want a role in it.
Because they ache to be tested in ways young men have been tested for centuries.
They know nothing of battle, yet their thoughts are full of it, sometimes in ways others can't fathom. "I really want to see what war is like," Julio says.
But before they dive into the military, they must overcome another challenge: their final months at home, from the complicated goodbyes to the questions and fears that surface as war edges close.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 2003. President Bush declares Saddam Hussein a dire threat. In his State of the Union speech, the president says Iraq must be disarmed. And if the world won't move against Baghdad, U.S. forces will, Bush says. Thousands of Marines and other troops head to the Middle East.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nate walks alone in the rugged Arizona outback in January, gripping a Remington rifle.
It's beautiful and dangerous country; it's also his back yard.
Nate and his family live in the Navajo village of Cameron, Ariz., in a mobile home parked at the end of a dirt road. They have no indoor plumbing or electricity. Nearby is a wood outhouse and a small hogan, a traditional Navajo lodge.
Behind the home is a deep gorge with rattlesnakes, quicksand and gnarled rocks.
Nate likes to burrow for hours into the crevices of the rocky walls of the gorge. He stares through his rifle scope, talking to himself, imagining his place in the world. I'm a Marine sniper. I'm in Baghdad. I'm hunting terrorists.
Bammmmmmmmmmmmm!
The sound ricochets off the gorge's wine-tinted walls.
At 5 feet 10 inches tall, Nate has the lanky build of a long-distance runner, ideal for billy-goating from rock to rock through his back yard. He has brown eyes and walks with a slight slouch.
For a 17-year-old, he's refreshingly short on attitude. He opens doors for adults and watches his manners around girls. He has a tough time saying no.
"You are a nice guy," a classmate writes in Nate's Grand Canyon High yearbook. "Sometimes too nice."
He likes Snickers bars, Navajo fry bread and his white Ford pickup. He likes a lot of girls at school, too, but he has trouble keeping a relationship going more than a few weeks. He's not sure why.
"My truck is my most reliable girlfriend," he likes to joke.
His mom, Esther Bitsui, is a police dispatcher at Grand Canyon National Park. Francis Bitsui works on the park trail maintenance crew. Nate has two sisters, 14-year-old Yolanda and 19-year-old Illanda, who attends nursing school.
When Esther learns her son wants to join the Marines, it spooks her. Bush's saber-rattling State of the Union speech doesn't help.
But Nate has yearned to be a Marine since he was little. He's had relatives in the Marines and believes it's his calling. The call is so strong it overrides any doubts or fears. "It's a debt I owe to my ancestors, to the Navajo, to America."
Sept. 11, 2001, cemented his decision.
"Think of all the people who died in that," he says, clambering over rocks near his home. "Think of how many kids are motherless, fatherless or even orphans now."
Pearl Harbor packed the same punch.
In early 1942, just after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, Marine officers in San Diego turned to the isolated reservation for help. The Marines recruited hundreds of Navajo men to relay battlefield messages in a code based on the tribe's spoken tongue.
For decades, many white teachers on the reservation had discouraged – even physically beat – Navajo schoolchildren for speaking their complex native language.
Now their words were weapons.
After completing boot camp in San Diego, these new Marine code talkers steamed into the Pacific, into the teeth of the enemy.
"The hard-hitting leathernecks needed an unbreakable code and they got it," The San Diego Union reported in 1945. "For three years, wherever the Marines landed, the Japanese got an earful of strange gurgling noises interspersed with other sounds resembling the call of a Tibetan monk and the sound of a hot water bottle being emptied."
The marriage of two warrior worlds, Navajo and Marine, was sealed.
Today the Navy, Army and Air Force comb the reservation for new recruits, dangling money, scholarships and other perks. But the Marines offer something the hardy tribe finds deeply appealing: the challenge of Marine boot camp – the longest of any military branch – and the chance to be part of a historic legacy.
"A lot of recruiters can't persuade anybody to go anywhere else but the Marine Corps," says Marine recruiter Sgt. Gerald Nez, who is Navajo though not related to Julio.
Both the Navajo and the Marines are older than the country. The ancestors of the Navajo settled in the Southwest centuries ago. The Marines were formed in 1775.
Both hold their ghosts close. Navajo culture is rich with tales of spirits engaged in heroic deeds. Marines talk of their storied battles with dewy-eyed reverence.
Both are intensely patriotic, although the Navajo have little reason to be.
The U.S. government waged war on the tribe in the mid-1800s. Frontiersman Kit Carson and others raided their crops and livestock. Thousands of men, women and children were herded hundreds of miles to a desert camp. Many died, while the rest were kept in disease-ridden confinement for years.
Many Navajo still talk of the U.S. attacks and forced marches their ancestors endured.
Yet these are the same people who fought in World War II. The Navajo maintain a veterans cemetery on the reservation, covered with U.S. flags whipping in the wind.
These are the people who raised Nate.
Gorge-climbing, Remington-packing, I'm-fighting-terrorists Nate.
It's January and the high school senior has a job lined up with the Marines. If he survives boot camp, he'll join an elite squad guarding the White House and the president.
He's never been to San Diego. Now, it's almost all he thinks about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March. Bush demands Hussein leave Iraq within 48 hours or face war. There's no doubt Hussein possesses some of the most lethal weapons ever devised, Bush says. "We will help you build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free," he promises Iraqis.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Julio Nez stares hard into a mirror.
The Chinle High School senior sits in art class, working on a self-portrait. It's a clear March day on the reservation, thousands of miles from Baghdad.
He stares again. Long eyelashes. A wisp of a goatee. A wide brown face, and broad shoulders built for the long haul.
When Julio decided to join the Marines, he wanted to sign up for 20 years. His recruiter wondered if he was joking. You can only sign up for four, he was told.
Twenty years? How gung-ho is that?
continued..........