Death of a Code Talker

Keith Little has died. He was 17 when he joined the Marines and became one of hundreds of Navajos trained as Code Talkers. They used a code based on the Navajo language, which was not written. They confounded the Japanese, helped win the war, then went unrecognized for their work until someone made a movie of their wartime lives.

“When I went into the Marine Corps … I knew nothing about the Navajo code,” he said in a 2009 interview. “It was really astonishing to me to get to Camp Pendleton and there were a bunch of Navajos there, and they were working with a Navajo code.”