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  • Under the Eagle: Samuel Holiday, Navajo Code Talker by Samuel Holiday and Robert S. McPherson
  • Mary Kay Quinlan
Under the Eagle: Samuel Holiday, Navajo Code Talker. By Samuel Holiday and Robert S. McPherson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. 266 pages. Softbound, $19.95.

If you are an avid scholar of World War II or a fan of Tony Hillerman’s best-selling mystery novels featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, you will find Under the Eagle a fascinating, multidimensional reflection by an old marine [End Page 389] from the desert Southwest on the role he and his Navajo comrades played during the war in the Pacific.

Robert S. McPherson, a history professor at Utah State University, Blanding, and a scholar of Navajo history, language, and culture, presents the details of the Navajo belief system, in which the young Samuel Holiday was steeped, and the details of the wartime experiences Holiday and the other code talkers endured. McPherson does so with an exhaustively researched book that draws on the nineteenth century history of the Navajo tribe, the fundamentals of the Navajo religion, interviews with Holiday and Holiday’s family members, and archival collections of interviews with other code talkers. Readers who are also Hillerman fans, in fact, may find themselves drawn into the detailed footnotes as they immerse themselves in McPherson’s descriptions of the Navajo Holy People, of First Man and Changing Woman, Monster Slayer and Born for Water, and of ceremonies like the Enemy Way and Blessing Way.

McPherson and Holiday make clear that appreciating the Navajo belief system is, in fact, critical to understanding Holiday’s wartime experiences. Holiday recounts receiving an eagle feather and corn pollen in a small medicine pouch in one of the ceremonies at his mother’s rural hogan when he was on leave after his Marine Corps training. “The teaching behind these things are very important and are what kept me alive,” Holiday says. “My protection ceremony blessed me with courage and safety before going to war. The stories provide a pattern of what to do, who the evil enemies are, and how to protect yourself so that they will not become strong enough to overtake and kill you” (88–90).

Holiday joined the Marines in 1943, the year after the Marine Corps started the code talker program, which eventually employed 420 Navajo men. While the Navajo program is most well-known and was the largest, members of twenty-one tribes altogether were code talkers during the war. Some, such as the Navajo, Comanche, and Chippewa-Oneida, developed a code within their native languages, while others, including bands of Sioux, Cree, Kaw, and Choctaw, used their native languages alone, “which for the enemy was confusing enough,” McPherson notes (15). The concept of using indigenous languages for secret military communication was not, however, a World War II invention, McPherson reports. During World War I, two infantry regiments used nineteen members of the Choctaw tribe from Oklahoma in various field company headquarters to transmit radio messages unintelligible to the Germans. Members of the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Comanche, Osage, and Yankton Sioux also put their languages to use in the final Meuse-Argonne offensive just before the end of the war.

Holiday was among the World War II Navajo code talkers who played a critical role in the Battle of Iwo Jima. He was among the second wave of marines who landed, and he recalled struggling up the slippery, sandy slope with his heavy equipment pack, recalling that “there had already been a lot of marines [End Page 390] killed, so we crawled through the bodies. I wormed my way to a marine, shook his feet, asked him about the enemy and if we should move on to find a foxhole. He was already dead. I patted him on the back and said good-bye then moved up through the bodies until I was almost at the top of the slope” (160). Holiday also described the earth-shattering explosions and the chaos of the battle to take Mount Suribachi: “By now the black clouds of dust covered the whole island. It was all such a horrible sight. Even the sun seemed sad...

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