97 pages • 3 hours read
Joseph BruchacCode Talker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Shipping Out to Hawaii”
While the code talkers are training at Camp Elliott, the war rages on. The US military, under the leadership of Admiral Nimitz, is involved in efforts to secure Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands. At first, it’s assumed the mission will be easy, but the Japanese forces are stronger than expected. Ned learns that he’ll be sent to Hawaii under the command of Admiral Halsey. He’s eager to see exotic foreign places that he’s only read about, but this moment foreshadows a change in perspective: “Little did I know how many of those tropical islands would become all too familiar to me in the two years that lay ahead. And most of them would be the opposite of paradise during my stay” (86).
Ned and the other Navajo soldiers are excited to join the fight and speculate about how they’ll rise through the ranks. Ned reveals in the narration that no Navajo was ever promoted above the rank of corporal, adding that Navajos “were kept invisible” (87).
Though Ned is eager to ship out, he’s also apprehensive about traversing the immense Pacific Ocean. He reflects that young Navajos are warned to stay away from deep water, for fear of sea monsters and other terrors. Before Ned ships out, he performs his corn pollen ritual again, adding a special request to the Holy People to protect him from sea monsters. On the day of embarkation, Ned is nervous, but another Navajo from his platoon named Bill Toledo helps allay his fears by reminding him to look up at Father Sky, who will never forget them.
On route to Hawaii, the soldiers practice their code. Ned breaks down the two-man code talker system, in which two men in the field will receive messages via radio and relay them back to another two-man code talker team at Mission Command. Once the soldiers reach Hawaii, all the code talkers convene to update the code vocabulary, which is constantly evolving. Ned speaks with Sam Begay and Bill McCabe, a pair of code talkers who have already seen combat, and they relate the story of their disoriented arrival on Guadalcanal and how when they tested the code for their lieutenant, officers listening in on the radio mistook the Navajo for Japanese and assumed the enemy was using their radio frequency. Once the code talkers learned to preface their message with a coded ID, they impressed the lieutenant with the speed and accuracy of their method.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Enemies”
Bill and Sam tell Ned about encountering enemy combatants for the first time. Throughout his training Ned felt that he was dealing with a “faceless” enemy, an impression echoed by Bill and Sam, who say that other than contending with constant enemy shelling and sniper fire, all the Japanese soldiers they initially encountered were dead. Seeing corpses is deeply unsettling for Navajo soldiers; in their culture a dead body is thought to harbor a bad spirit, one that can make an onlooker sick. The Navajos are disturbed by the sight of the corpses, and in some cases they are forced to remain in close quarters with the dead bodies, as in the case of sharing a foxhole overnight with a “slain comrade.”
The Japanese soldiers are trained to fight to the death, even when stripped of their weapons, so that few are taken prisoner. Ned and his fellow soldiers learn from those few prisoners that many of the Japanese soldiers are common laborers and poor men who were forced into service. Bill and Sam relate that the formerly faceless enemy is actually comprised of “small men who looked lost and sad. Not monsters at all […] just human beings” (97).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Field Maneuvers”
The recently arrived Navajo platoon is taken to the Big Island of Hawaii for a two-day training in the island’s desert region, a landscape not unlike Ned’s home on the reservation. Their leader, Lieutenant “Stormy,” tasks them with crossing the desert in two days with just one canteen of water each. Unlike the rest of the trainees, the Navajo soldiers know about the water reservoir inside prickly pear cacti, so they augment their water supply. The rest of the trainees, including Lieutenant Stormy, collapse and must send for help.
Shortly thereafter, Ned and several other code talkers ship out to the Solomon Islands as part of the First Marine Amphibious Corps. Their mission is to force a landing on Bougainville Island. Before the mission, soldiers go to Guadalcanal to practice field maneuvers. Because a mission can go awry in myriad ways, the Marines need to feel what it is like to “wade through the surf up onto a boiling hot sandy beach and then stare into the thick mysterious green of a steamy hot jungle” (101). Ned catalogues the land and sea predators of the island’s dense, tropical jungle, which range from malarial mosquitos and other poisonous insects to alligators, sharks, and jellyfish.
Indigenous peoples also inhabit the islands, having lived there long before the Japanese invasion and occupation. Ned feels a commonality between the Navajo experience and that of the occupied Solomon Islanders. Many of the islanders were enslaved and otherwise tortured or killed. They speak pidgin, and Ned communicates with the indigenous people more than his white military counterparts do. He recounts a conversation with a man named Gene, an islander who escaped the Japanese forces. Gene communicates his sense of belonging to his home, which has now been overtaken.
The landing exercise on Guadalcanal involves debarking men and supplies from an offshore boat onto smaller boats, which will then land on the beach. As a code talker, Ned wears an 80-pound TBX radio strapped to his chest, which weighs him down but also provides a kind of shield as he runs ashore.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Bombardment”
Ned is reunited with his friend from boot camp, Georgia Boy. The attack on Bougainville is part of the larger Operation Cartwheel—a plan to put Allied forces on the offensive in the war. Ned describes how the US soldiers come up with nicknames for planes and weaponry used in the fighting. In this way, landing boats become “alligators,” Japanese fighter planes are “Zekes” and “Zeros,” and “Vals” and “Kates” are types of enemy bombers. Ned speculates that the nicknames “made the frightening things more familiar, even a little funny in the midst of the seriousness of war” (107).
The attack is meant to neutralize the whole island. Marines scout a strategic place to gain the beach and establish a perimeter. Another Marine regiment then lands elsewhere on the island, to box in the Japanese. Ned foreshadows that the US commanders are hubristic and have underestimated the US casualties that will be sustained. The original plan is compromised when Admiral Nimitz demands the use of a carrier group that Admiral Halsey was planning to use.
The night before the attack on Bougainville is sleepless; the soldiers are nervous, checking their weapons before dawn and making light jokes. Ned is aboard the President Adams, which will land only after battleships and minesweepers have “softened” the beach. Those preliminary efforts bombard the beach heavily: “It was pounding like the giant heart of the war itself or a great thunderstorm without end” (111). Ned fears that the enemy still awaits them.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Ned goes first to Hawaii and then to the Solomon Islands, where he will take part in an attack on Bougainville. In these foreign places his Navajo upbringing comes into contact with new surroundings—especially the flora and fauna of the tropical climes—and new challenges. Though the tropical atmosphere initially seems exotic and lush, Ned presages how his sense of the humid jungle environment changes after seeing combat there. Some of the perils and tolls of war are revealed in this section as Ned’s story progresses. He lays eyes on a dead body, which makes the conflict more corporeal. Humor becomes a way to keep moods light, as evidenced by the soldiers’ habit of nicknaming deadly weapons.
The value of Navajo culture is further asserted in these chapters, as Ned and other Navajo soldiers distinguish themselves from non-Indigenous soldiers, demonstrating the resourcefulness and skills they learned growing up on the reservation. However, Ned also recalls how historical acts of exile and alienation take new forms during the war. Few Navajo Marines get to wear the Marine Corps’ iconic dress blue uniform, for example, and no Navajo soldier is promoted beyond the rank of corporal. Instead, they are “kept invisible” (87). Ned posits that this is partially due to their classified role in the war, but also because they “were Indians in what was still, even in the Marines, a white man’s world. It was easy to forget Indians” (87).
The theme about empathy in wartime develops more fully in these chapters, as code talkers from other platoons tell Ned about their experiences in combat and Ned gets a sense of the enemy and the work of code-talking. Bill and Sam describe the Japanese combatants as “pathetic […] small men who looked lost and sad. Not monsters at all” (97). Their realization that these enemies “were just human beings” (97) reflects the human cost of war, something Ned confronts himself in later chapters. The human element of this conflict is also reflected in the new, non-Indigenous friends Ned makes, forging ties that will last throughout his service and demonstrating a bond that supersedes race and culture of origin.
Finally, these chapters illustrate how Ned’s view of the war differs from that of his white counterparts. As a Navajo, he can relate to the experience of being colonized and oppressed. Thus, when he comes in contact with indigenous peoples on his tour, he identifies with their plight and demonstrates a particular concern for their future well-being. Ned recognizes the humanity in everyone touched by the war.
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