These ceremonies were culturally appropriate and genuinely meaningful.

They reflected the depth of Diné spiritual and cultural resources for dealing with the specific experiences that combat produces.

Several Code Talkers, in oral histories recorded after declassification, described the Enemy Way as an important part of their postwar recovery — as a framework that their Christian-influenced military culture did not provide and that their community offered instead.

The communities they returned to were also dealing with the changes that the war had produced on the reservation itself.

The war years had brought some economic change — defense industry employment in surrounding cities had drawn Navajo people off the reservation, introducing new economic patterns that would continue to reshape reservation life in the postwar years.

The returning veterans, including the Code Talkers, were coming back to a community in transition, one that was beginning to engage with the postwar American economy and its opportunities in new ways.