They carried it into radio handsets in the smoke and noise of amphibious landings.

They carried it through the jungle campaigns and the island assaults and the terrible arithmetic of Pacific attrition.

And when they came home, they carried it back — into the silence that the classification imposed, and then through that silence into the public recognition that eventually arrived, decades too late for some and barely in time for others.

The language survived them, as it had survived the boarding schools.

It is still spoken on the Navajo Nation by people who understand what it cost to keep it alive, and what the men who carried it in their voices into the Pacific were carrying when they did.

That is the deepest thing the simplified version of the story leaves out.