Many among the Navajo maintain their cultural and spiritual practices while overseas.
Throughout the battles and in the interstitial downtime, Ned demonstrates how Navajo soldiers integrate with other American soldiers and also how they do not the experience of Native American servicemembers differs starkly from that of their white counterparts. They relay messages among leadership in the Pacific, providing important intelligence that drives tactical decisions.
Though some in the military first doubted the benefits of code-talking, Ned describes how invaluable he and the other code talkers prove themselves to be. From there, they move on to the tiny Pacific island of Pavuvu, and then finally to Iwo Jima and Okinawa, after which point US forces drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting the Japanese emperor to surrender and effectively ending World War Two in the Pacific. Ned takes part in a series of battles in the Pacific, first in Bougainville, then in battles on both the Marianas Islands and Guam. From there, the group is sent to the Solomon Islands, where they experience combat for the first time. Ned and other code talkers in his regiment are sent to Hawaii for training. In this way, the language that Ned and other Navajo youths were taught to abandon by white America becomes a unique and valuable tool for white America’s war efforts. At Camp Elliott in California, Marine officials explain that because it is so esoteric and difficult to learn, Navajo is being used as the basis for a code to transmit indecipherable messages among the Allies. It isn’t until after he has finished boot camp that Ned is told what his role in the military will be: He and the other Navajo recruits will be trained as code talkers for the war effort.
Though he doesn’t enlist with the first group of recruits, when the opportunity arises the following year, Ned, now 16, joins the Marines and is sent to boot camp. When he’s a teenager, the US military is escalating involvement in the conflict overseas, and in 1942 recruiters come to the school looking to enlist Navajos. Too small for sports, he learns English and excels academically, though he and other children defy administrators by maintaining surreptitious use of their Navajo language. It is in this way that protagonist Kii Yázhí becomes Ned Begay. Through often draconian measures, students are forced to assimilate their hair is cut short and they are punished if they lapse back into their Navajo tongue. Here, American Indian children are taught to abandon the ways of their tribes and embrace Anglo-American language and culture. When Ned Begay is just six years old, he is taken more than 100 miles from his family home to the Rehoboth Mission boarding school in New Mexico, which he will attend through high school.
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