It often gets wrong the specific nature of the code, conflating “speaking Navajo” with “using the Navajo code” in ways that obscure the systematic, purpose-built nature of what the original twenty-nine developed at Camp Pendleton.

It repeats, sometimes, claims that the evidence does not support — about bodyguards under orders to kill Code Talkers if capture was imminent, about specific battles being “won” by the Code Talkers’ communications, about the code being unbreakable because of some inherent mystical quality of the Navajo language rather than because of the specific historical circumstances that made Japanese analysis of it practically impossible.

It tends to move too quickly through the postwar decades — through the twenty-three years of classified silence and the slow, inadequate process of recognition — in its eagerness to reach the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony of 2001 and the narrative satisfaction of vindication.

And it often treats the story as finished.

The Navajo Code Talkers have been recognized.

The medals have been awarded.