They had served in a role that had been, by the Marine Corps’ own assessment, genuinely indispensable.

They had skills — the ability to operate under pressure, to manage complex information systems, to function effectively within a large institutional organization — that should have translated into postwar opportunity.

And they carried a specific achievement, the code itself, that was unique to their program and unprecedented in the history of military communications.

None of that was publicly available to them.

The classification meant that the specific achievement was invisible outside the classified circle.

The men who had transmitted the messages that moved Marine operations across the Pacific came home to a reservation where the federal government’s main interest in them was administrative — where they were beneficiaries of a trust system that was, as in the Cobell case that would come decades later, often poorly managed — rather than the subjects of the recognition their service warranted.