The word "hero" is bandied about a lot lately, and often rightly so. Servicemembers returning from war are heroes, and wounded warriors are heroes for persevering in the face of adversity.

November is National American Indian Heritage Month, and a perfect time to pay tribute to a group of often-overlooked American heroes whose ingenuity and courage helped turn the tide of war.

During the early years of World War II, the Japanese military managed to break all codes that the U.S. developed. This led to longer and more intricate codes, which could take hours to encrypt and decipher. But with battles raging, time was precious. U.S. forces needed a code that was unique, easily and quickly transmittable and impossible for the Japanese to break.

Enter Philip Johnston, a World War I vet who knew that a group of Cherokee and Choctaw soldiers had served the U.S. military as radio operators during the Great War.

"They were able to encode and decode messages at conversational speed, significantly increasing the flow of information during combat without sacrificing security of communications," said Peter Vleck, a historian from Olympia who holds a B.A. in History (with focus on military and diplomatic history) from the University of Puget Sound.

So Johnston, who had grown up on a Navajo reservation with his Protestant missionary family and spoke the language fluently, approached U.S. Naval commanders in Los Angeles. He  demonstrated that the Navajo language, which has no alphabet and is spoken almost exclusively by members of the Navajo people in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado, could serve as an unbreakable code.

The Navy agreed, and in 1942, the U.S. military implemented a plan to use Navajo Indians as "walking secret codes." During the course of the war, about 400 men ranging in age from 15 to 35 volunteered to become U.S. Marines and Navajo Code Talkers. Recruits were required to meet enlistment qualifications and attended basic training like all other marines.

At Camp Elliott, Calif., the first 29 Navajo Code Talkers (known as "the Original 29") were tasked with coming up with Navajo terminology for items that didn't exist in the Navajo world. They devised more than 200 words with military related meanings, such as "gini" (chicken hawk) for dive bomber, "Din-neh-ih" (clan) for Corps and "Ne-he-Mah" (our mother) for America. They then had to memorize the terms and prove they could translate effectively during combat-like conditions.

Once training was complete, the Code Talkers were assigned to a unit. From 1942 to 1945, they served in all six Marine divisions and saw action throughout the Pacific, including on Iwo Jima, Guam, Palau and Okinawa.

"The ability to communicate information through unsecure channels, in this case radio broadcasts, at conversational speed without any concern of enemy decoding gave the units in which Code Talkers were utilized an advantage almost unheard of in warfare," said Vleck, who lives in Olympia and has studied the war in the Pacific and the Code Talkers program extensively.  

The Navajo code was never broken, and the rest of the world didn't learn about the Code Talkers until the program was declassified in 1968. And, let's face it, most of us learned about it from the forgettable 2002 Nicolas Cage movie Windtalkers.

In 2000, an "Honoring the Code Talkers Act" was signed into law, and in 2001, President George W. Bush presented Congressional Gold Medals to four of the five living Original 29.  

Did the Code Talkers help the U.S. and its allies turn the tide of the war? They certainly contributed to it.  

"The Navajo code was not a necessary prerequisite for victory in any of the campaigns that it was used in ... but its efficacy at the operational level was unparalleled," Vleck said. "The ability to mask the movements of troops and materiel, as well as calls for support (such as calling in artillery or close air support), undoubtedly increased the combat efficiency of units using Code Talkers."

Furthermore, the Navajo Code Talker program, and its Cherokee/Choctaw predecessor during World War I, demonstrates the ingenuity and innovation of the U.S. military to "think outside the box" to defeat a powerful enemy. It also shows that, despite years of persecution, Native Americans were willing to step up and use their unique cultural tools to help their country.

"(The Code Talkers) had to rely on memory, the kind of memory that is developed in what anthropologists call an ‘oral culture,'" said UPS Professor of History Dr. Doug Sackman.  "The Navajos believe that their oral tradition - their creation stories - are vital to keeping their culture  strong.  In WWII, their oral tradition turned out to be vital to keeping America strong."

For more information, visit www.navajocodetalkers.org or www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-2.htm. 

Photo: Bill Toledo, who served as a Navajo code talker with 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines and is a native of Laguna, N.M., and Sidney Bedoni, who served as a Navajo code talker with the 2nd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and is a native of White Cone, Ariz., speak about their time as code talkers to marines at the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma chapel.