When military recruiters arrived in 1942, they were not arriving in a community that was naive about the federal government.

They were arriving in a community with a long and complicated experience of federal promises and federal power.

The decision of thousands of Navajo men to serve — in the regular military and in the specific Code Talker program — was made against that background, not despite it.

The Training That Made the Code Reliable

The training of Navajo Code Talkers at Camp Pendleton in California was, by the accounts of the men who went through it, an intensive and demanding process that went well beyond learning a vocabulary list.

The physical demands of Marine basic training were the same for Code Talker recruits as for any other Marine.