But broader public and governmental recognition took considerably longer.

The documentary and media attention that the Code Talker story began to receive in the 1970s and 1980s was important in building the public awareness that would eventually lead to formal governmental recognition.

The story was, once it could be told, inherently compelling: the language that the government had tried to suppress had been the code the enemy could never break.

The men who had memorized and transmitted that code had done it under fire, in some of the most brutal combat of the Pacific war, and had come home unable to explain it for more than two decades.

That story, once it could be told, did not need embellishment.

The Congressional Gold Medal