Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code: A Navajo Code Talker's Story

Associated Habit of Mind: Applying Past Knowledge to New Situations

Chester Nez was a boy told to give up his Navajo roots. He became a man who used his native language to help America win World War II.

As a young Navajo boy, Chester Nez had to leave the reservation and attend boarding school, where he was taught that his native language and culture were useless. But Chester refused to give up his heritage. Years later, during World War II, Chester--and other Navajo men like him--was recruited by the US Marines to use the Navajo language to create an unbreakable military code. Suddenly the language he had been told to forget was needed to fight a war.