John Kinsel used his own language to fool the Japanese

The Japanese tried to crack the code by torturing a poor guy called Joe Kieyoomia who was Navajo, but not a code-talker or even aware of the existence of the program, but they didn't get far. Amazingly, he survived the concentration camp, the Bataan death march and getting nuked in Nagasaki, returning to the US and living until 77.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia

Related. Others?

Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097075 - July 2024 (84 comments)

Why Navajo is the hardest language to learn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38484528 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

Samuel Sandoval, among last Navajo Code Talkers, dies at 98 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32297121 - July 2022 (1 comment)

Navajo Code Talker John Pinto Dies, Age 94 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008374 - May 2019 (2 comments)

Navajo Code Talkers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10059642 - Aug 2015 (2 comments)

Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7848945 - June 2014 (19 comments)

The obituaries are often my favourite part of the Economist. They are edited by Ann Wroe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Wroe - a true legend.

They focus mostly on long-forgotten people and create an intense glimpse into the short timeframe when their life made a big impact.

My favourite obit of all time of hers is the one of Bill Millin: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2010/08/26/bill-millin (https://archive.is/iZifs)

If anyone is passing through Kayenta, AZ (very close to Monument Valley) there's a free small exhibit about the Navajo code talkers. Strangely enough, it's inside a Burger King of all places. Atlas Obscura features a brief article about the display:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/burger-king-navajo-code-...

Strange obituary where the writer do not even mention his real name, Hash-keh Nah-adah, as opposed to the english name that he was forced to use at school years later.

Ironically, we don't call his people by their own name (Navajo is what the Tewa people called the Dine')

So many great parts in this.

1) The sense and importance of community. Both the mention of them coming together when he returned where "the ghosts will be laid". And also the mention of "there was no “I” in his war, only “we”. We're stuck in such an individualist culture where we're told to work hard to stand out, and seem to be shamed if we're weak and in receiving help from others.

2) Words as metaphors. Beautiful examples given in the post, but we should remember the roots of many of our words are also metaphors. My favorite being "persona"[0], coming referring to an actors mask that air goes through. Helps remind me that we're always actors in the world, not some defined Self we're stuck with. Good book[1] on that topic from Jay Garfield.

3) Explanation at the end of his "Navajo Code-Talkers uniform". Mentions that yes, it's more than ok to imagine clothes as images and have meaning beyond "something to wear for efficiency". The Emerald podcast talks about these things, both ornaments in general from human history [2] and more specifically about guardians [3] which is what he considered the Navajo colors were for, to protect him.

The similarity of all these cases, to me, comes to they're not all thoughts he had in his head as words, which is what we're told to do from the smallest of ages. We're told to think hard, and use words (like I'm doing here) to be smarter than others. When looked at, words and thoughts are nothing compared to the experienced feelings that come from community, imaginal metaphors like hopping rabbits that leave tracks in the snow, or looking at colors you're wearing and feeling protected.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona

[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691220284/lo...

[2] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/universe-adorned-ornam...

[3] https://www.themythicbody.com/podcast/guardians-and-protecto...

I've always wondered why the Japanese didn't do the same thing in reverse. There's gotta be some tiny languages from small ethnic groups on the islands. At the time, it's not like we could have gone and looked up the words in a dictionary somehow. Even without it being encoded, it would have worked pretty well. And yet they didn't even think about it, as far as I know.

For this to work, x=D(E(x)) must hold, where x is the message in military English, and E and D are the encoding and decoding functions. Ergo, the Navajo language must have as many possible utterances as military English does. This is neither surprising nor interesting. What is interesting is that E and D were not known by the Germans and could not be effectively reverse engineered in time.

In WW2 there was a lot of panic about "fifth column" infiltration from German special forces. So they came up with a code word that only native speakers can pronounce: Scheveningen.

It's too bad there were never any good movies made about the code-talkers. There was one movie by John Woo, starring Nicholas Cage, named "Windtalkers", but it was terrible; coincidentally, I was just reading an article this morning about the "worst war movies of the last 25 years" and Windtalkers was on it, alongside "Jarhead 2" and others.