They are the last two WWII Navajo code talkers. This is their story.
As young marines, Peter MacDonald and Thomas Begay transmitted top secret military messages using their native language. It was an undercover mission that changed U.S. intelligence operations forever.
The surf slammed against the black volcanic sand as the ramps of the landing craft dropped, and Thomas H. Begay stepped into the chaos of Iwo Jima. It was the morning of February 19, 1945, the first day of one of World War II’s deadliest battles, and the air already smelled of cordite and fear. Assigned to a beach in the direct line of fire, Begay was tasked with a mission as vital as it was invisible: transmitting encrypted battlefield coordinates to offshore naval officers using his native Navajo tongue. But as he helped set up radios under the arc of incoming artillery, that role felt secondary to survival. “I was really scared,” he recalls. “You don’t know what could happen to you.”
By nightfall, two from his unit had died, and three more were wounded. The illusion that being a radioman somehow offered protection died that day too. “People think we were kept out of danger,” he says. “But we were right there, same as everyone else.” Begay stayed on the Japanese island for several more weeks, maintaining constant contact with officers aboard the U.S.S. Cecil.
During WWII, more than 44,000 Indigenous men and women enlisted in the armed forces. Among them was a select group of young Navajo marines like Begay known as “code talkers,” who oversaw a secure communications system relying on Diné Bizaad, the official language of the Navajo Nation, to relay mission-critical messages. Once silenced by the United States, it had suddenly become an invaluable wartime assets. The code, never broken by enemy forces, played a decisive role in key victories across the Pacific theater and, ultimately, helped save thousands of Allied lives.
No other form of military cipher was more efficient or accurate at the time, and as its impact grew, the program expanded to include over 400 code talkers. Today, only two stewards of the uncrackable code remain: Begay, now around 101 years old, who was deployed with the Fifth Marine Division, and Peter MacDonald, 97, who served aboard battleships with the Sixth Marine Division. [Editor's note: Due to poor recordkeeping at the time, Begay's exact birth year remains unclear.]
As the 80th anniversary of WWII’s end nears, Begay and MacDonald spoke with National Geographic about the covert operation that changed military history forever. Their memories endure, not just as war stories, but as proof of the power of Diné Bizaad and those who speak it. “Language,” MacDonald says, “gives us our sovereignty.”
During World War I, the U.S. military used similar strategies to confuse German forces, relying primarily on Choctaw, Cherokee, Ho-Chunk, Comanche, and Osage speakers. Largely unwritten and with few published reference sources, these Indigenous languages were nearly impossible for enemies to decipher. “[The military] could do a lot of radio transmissions to arrange forces in this direction or that direction,” explains Navy Capt. Steven E. Maffeo, USN (Ret.), author of U.S. Navy Codebreakers, Linguists, and Intelligence Officers against Japan, 1910-1941: A Biographical Dictionary. “Even if [the enemy was] listening … they could not figure out what was being said.”
The tactic proved so effective for coordinating attacks and communicating with other units in the heat of battle that military researchers and linguists began studying other Indigenous languages to prepare for future conflicts. What they discovered was that Diné Bizaad is exceptionally tonal, layered, and difficult to decode without deep cultural knowledge, making it practically impenetrable to outsiders.
Most of the code talkers were teenagers when they voluntarily joined the Marine Corps. MacDonald was 15, and Begay was around 17. Begay grew up speaking only Diné Bizaad with his parents. At 13 years old he was sent to Fort Defiance, a government-run boarding school in the western part of the Navajo Nation, which borders Arizona, where he first learned English. He still remembers the moment a classmate told him about the bombing at Pearl Harbor. “We were on the football field,” he says. “One of the boys ran over and said, ‘Hey, the Japanese have taken the United States, and they're coming over to kill us all.’ ” Moved by a sense of duty to protect Nihimá (Navajo for “Our Mother,” the code word used for “America”), he signed up to serve.
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Following medical and physical exams, Begay was transferred to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego and then to Camp Pendleton, where he learned Morse code, semaphore, and field communication tools. He completed Marine boot camp expecting aerial gunner training, but was instead brought to a classroom with other recruits. Upon entering, he remembers thinking, “This is a whole bunch of Navajos!” That’s when a sergeant stepped forward and told them, “You’re all going to be code talkers.”
Only then did they learn their true assignment: to master a code that would aid in defending America. Both Begay and MacDonald were instructed by two of the original 29 Navajo Marine code talkers who helped launch the program in September 1942. “When we were first told our primary job was to provide top secret communication, I felt safer knowing I’d be with fellow Navajos, speaking our language throughout the war,” MacDonald says. “The full importance of our role didn’t sink in until later.”
Every day after training, codes were locked away in the classroom. Worksheets collected. No notes, no books, no discussions about any of it, not even with other marines. Since the recruits were already fluent in Diné Bizaad, they picked up the specialized terms, some 400 in total, quickly. Each letter corresponded to a Diné Bizaad word that began with the same sound. For example, Begay says this would be the translation for Iwo Jima:
I: A-chi (intestine)
W: Gloe-ih (weasel)
O: Ne-ahs-jah (owl)
J: Tkele-cho-g (jackass)
I: A-chi
M: Na-as-tso-si (mouse)
A: Wol-la-chee (ant)
The brilliance of the system was in using a language so unique that it couldn’t be easily transcribed, let alone decoded, explains National Security Agency historian David Hatch: “Because of the unfamiliarity of the words, the enemy was unable even to copy messages down correctly or to break the words into syllables.” Computers could not have cracked the code. “Even if the technology had been more advanced, they couldn’t have interpreted meaning,” says historian Kathryn Barbier, coauthor of Strategy and Tactics: Infantry Warfare. “All [computers] could have done was detect patterns.”
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After completing training, the code talkers received their assignments. Begay was sent to the front lines. MacDonald, meanwhile, worked on command ships during major invasions, including the Battle of Okinawa, the largest amphibious assault of the war. He translated code in real time, dispatching orders to field units and relaying orders back to commanders.
When messages came in, he translated them into English, wrote them down, and handed them off to Navy runners tasked with delivering them directly to the admiral or senior commanders. Any response returned to him stamped “secret” or “confidential” was then translated back into Diné Bizaad before being sent out again. “The admiral and the marine general directed operations from the ship, while both English and Navajo communication networks operated 24/7,” MacDonald explains. “A sailor stood behind us around the clock, ready to deliver or receive top secret messages.”
The end of the war was marked by Japan's formal surrender on September 2, 1945. Both Begay and MacDonald were honorably discharged as corporals in 1946. While the rest of the nation celebrated, the code talkers returned home with the heavy burden of silence. They were sworn to secrecy, and their code remained a highly classified military asset protected for future use. The indispensable role they played was also kept from the public, rendering their contributions invisible and deepening a sense of marginalization. “Our homecoming was bittersweet,” MacDonald says. “Many [of us] returned to no jobs, no livestock, and no recognition.”
During their absence, the U.S. government continued to undermine Navajo livelihoods, as it had been doing for centuries. Under the Livestock Reduction Act, which was enacted in 1934, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been forcing Navajo families to cull sheep flocks, claiming overgrazing was harming the land. But for many, including Begay’s and MacDonald’s families, it felt like a betrayal. The animals were promised to them decades earlier, in 1868, as a means of recovery after thousands of Navajos were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in Arizona and New Mexico, and imprisoned by the U.S. Army at Fort Sumner.
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While some members of the Navajo Nation were off serving in the war, their families were left to contend with devastating losses. Not only a critical food source, sheep also play a central role in Diné Bizaad, often mentioned in prayer and storytelling. When families pushed back, it came at a cost. “Those who resisted were jailed,” MacDonald says. At the same time, “stories [in the media were] about the ‘poor Navajos,’” MacDonald adds. “Nothing about the Navajo Code that helped win the war in the Pacific, because it was still a top secret.”
The code talkers program remained secret until 1968, when the U.S. government finally declassified it as part of a broader effort to acknowledge the contributions of minority groups during the war and to allow veterans to share their stories for the first time. Ronald Begay, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, still remembers the night his father told the family at the dinner table, saying simply, “I was a Navajo code talker.”
The slow process of recognition began. The first official code talker reunion took place in 1969, hosted by the 4th Marine Division in Chicago. As public interest grew, the Navajo Code Talkers Association was formed. By 1971, President Richard Nixon honored them with a letter and a Marine Corps Band performance. Four years later, they marched in the Rose Parade in Pasadena. In 1982, Begay wrote to Arizona Congressman Eldon Rudd, a fellow Marine, asking why Congress had yet to formally recognize them. Later that year, a resolution was passed, and President Ronald Reagan officially declared August 14 “National Navajo Code Talkers Day.” Finally, in 2001, the U.S. awarded the code talkers Congressional Medals: gold to the original 29, silver to the rest.
During some of the Pacific’s bloodiest battles, the code talkers transmitted over 800 error-free messages. Maffeo, the author of U.S. Navy Codebreakers, Linguists, and Intelligence Officers against Japan, 1910-1941, places that impact in a broader context. “This is why the National Security Agency was created after WWII,” he says. “We never wanted another Pearl Harbor.”
Since then, the federal government has poured billions of dollars into code-breaking and code-making technology. Still, language remains fundamental. In 1963, the Department of Defense founded the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in California. “We teach military and government personnel foreign languages ... because we believe we need people seriously conversant with potential enemies’ languages,” Maffeo explains.
For Begay and MacDonald, the legacy of the code talkers is also rooted in the ways their service has helped protect their culture. Other Indigenous languages like Yuchi and Menominee are now known by only a few, but Diné Bizaad is still spoken by roughly 170,000 people. “Our language is [more] powerful than just words—without it we lose not only our identity, but our most vital cultural strength,” MacDonald says. “If the language fades, we risk becoming someone else entirely. Our future depends on preserving it.”
As they reflect on their time as code talkers, Begay says the role helped him live with purpose in the “Navajo way, the warrior way, the traditional way.” And MacDonald hopes future generations will remember his sacrifice. “I want people, especially non-Navajos, to understand what we gave,” he says. “We gave all we had to protect Nihimá.”
