What would later be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder affected veterans across all services and communities, and Navajo Code Talkers were not immune.

The cultural resources of the Diné community — healing ceremonies, community support, the maintenance of spiritual practices that provided frameworks for understanding and processing the experience of violence and death — were available to some returning veterans and made a meaningful difference.

But they were not a complete answer to the psychological damage that sustained combat could produce.

The silence about the code added its own layer to the postwar experience.

A man who cannot fully explain what he did, cannot receive recognition for it, cannot even describe it to his children, carries that unexplained thing quietly.

The weight of that quiet is hard to measure, but it is real.