It’s been 80 years since the first Navajo Code Talkers joined the Marines, transmitting messages using a code based on their then-unwritten native language to confound Japanese military cryptologists during World War II — and Thomas H. Begay, one of the last living members of the group, still remembers the struggle.
“It was the hardest thing to learn,” the 98-year-old Begay said Sunday at a Phoenix ceremony marking the anniversary. “But we were able to develop a code that couldn’t be broken by the enemy of the United States of America.”
