It misses the postwar silence in its full human weight.

The declassification of the program in 1968 is often presented as the moment the silence ended, and in a formal sense it was.

But the silence had lasted twenty-three years, during which the men who had served had navigated the specific difficulty of not being able to explain the most significant thing they had ever done.

The psychological and social costs of that experience have not been extensively documented, and the popular narrative tends to move quickly from the war to the eventual recognition without dwelling on the decades in between.

It misses the question of what the Code Talkers’ story means for the ongoing situation of Diné Bizaad today.

The language that proved so strategically invaluable in 1942 remains a living language, spoken on the Navajo Nation and in Diné communities across the Southwest.