Previous
Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Code Talker, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, Language, and Identity
The Navajo Way and the Life of the Warrior
Culture and Patriotism
War, Healing, and Peace
Summary
Analysis
Sam and Bill also tell Ned that during their early days on Guadalcanal, the Japanese enemy was faceless. They heard the Japanese planes, saw the shells landing, and heard the crack of the Japanese rifles, but they saw no soldiers. There were many Japanese corpses, however. Ned explains that Navajo tradition encourages people to avoid dead bodies, for fear of bad spirits. Although it was hard for Navajo marines to deal with this, he goes on, they did the duty for which they’d been trained.
Like beliefs about water, Navajo beliefs about dead bodies pose a challenge to new recruits, but Ned explains that they are willing to overcome their discomfort in order to endure the same battlefield conditions as everyone else. This is just one example of the many ways in which conforming to the expectations of the white-dominated military could be hard for Navajo people, even though they were committed to doing so.
Themes
Japanese soldiers were trained to never retreat or surrender. Bill and Sam tell Ned that one day, they met a few Japanese prisoners. These men weren’t professional soldiers, but lower-class, uneducated men who’d been forced to fight. Bill describes them as “lost and sad,” “not monsters at all.” It made them realize, Sam adds, that “our enemies were just human beings.”
Once he gets into combat himself, Ned, too, will be challenged to recognize the humanity of Japanese soldiers. It’s easy to make assumptions about their motives from a distance, but they can only really be understood as individual human beings.
Themes
