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Chapter 21
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
During the last days of fighting on Guam, Ned gets shot in the shoulder by a Japanese sniper. He only remembers being carried to the medic by Georgia Boy. He later wakes up in the operating room on the hospital ship. The wound is small and, Ned says, hardly worth mentioning. Not everyone is able to carry on as easily as Ned does, though. Some men are hurt not physically, but in their spirits. The armed forces call this “battle fatigue.”
Because of Ned’s characteristic modesty, it’s hard to tell how serious the wound really was. However, battle fatigue—what would likely be categorized as PTSD more recently—was undeniably real and serious, taking many soldiers out of action.
Themes
Ned says that battle fatigue is hard for many people to understand, especially people who have not been through combat themselves. Sufferers from battle fatigue were sometimes accused of cowardice. But Ned says that Navajos understand battle fatigue because their ancestors saw what war does to people’s spirits. The old Navajo stories tell how even the Holy People experienced such injury. After Monster Slayer killed the many beings that had been destroying the people, he was sickened from combat and killing. That’s when the Enemyway ceremony was created. Though Ned experiences battle fatigue himself, he is shipped back to the line as soon as he recovers from his physical wounds.
Ned classifies battle fatigue as being a kind of injury to the spirit, in keeping with his view of warfare as something that throws souls out of balance. He also sees battle fatigue as something that the Navajo people are in a unique position to understand and empathize with, which again shows how Ned’s Navajo heritage prepares him to be a warrior in unique ways. Later, Ned himself will undergo an Enemyway ritual to restore him to balance, just as Monster Slayer himself is believed by the Navajo to have done.
Themes
