Sameul Sandoval

The last of an American Legend: Code Talkers

One of three surviving Code Talker American Indians, Sameul Sandoval, has just passed away July 1, 2022 at age 98. Rising to the call of the United States during WW2, the Code Talkers were fluent in the Navajo language. This led them to use a form of communication that utilized several American Indian languages to talk in code so the Japanese army could not intercept the radio traffic of soldiers in the South Pacific. When this was too complicated, they would speak direct Navajo and describe scenes for words that did not exist in Navajo. For example: iron fish was substituted for the word submarine. The Navajo were not the only American Indians to be utilized, and in WW1 the Choctaw were the first to develop battlefield communications to encrypt radio messages resulting in several battles won by the Allies. Many Code Talkers were used in Europe during WW2 as well.

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. With Valor these men threw themselves into combat and used words to fight. RIP Samuel Sandoval Code Talker.