Navajo Code Talker Visits Pentagon

By Eric Cramer
Army News Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12, 2003 — Only 280 Marines from the Navajo tribe saw combat duty as “code talkers” during World War II. Samuel Tom Holiday was one of them.

Samuel Tom Holiday tells a Pentagon crowd about his experiences as a Navajo "code talker" in World War II. Photo By Spc. Bill Putnam

Holiday addressed an enthusiastic crowd at the Pentagon Nov. 12, as part of the Department of the Army’s celebration of National American Indian Heritage Month.Holiday was born in 1924 on a Navajo reservation in Monument Valley, Utah. He said he was 12 years old before he saw a “white man” for the first time.

“I never had an idea what white people looked like at the time,” he said. “I was told that white men took the children away from their parents.”

He and his brothers hid from government agents who came to send Navajo children to boarding schools. Holiday said he was ultimately caught and forced to attend a boarding school where he was not allowed to use the Navajo language.

“One of the hardest times I had was learning to talk the English. I would hide cookies in my pockets to pay the older boys to teach me English,” Holiday said. “Whenever they (the school’s instructors) found out I had talked Navajo, they made me scrub floor, scrub wall. I spent much of the first year scrubbing the wall.”
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