GORMAN-CARL

AN  ORIGINAL  NAVAJO  CODE  TALKER

Carl Nelson Gorman joined the Marine Corps in 1942 and was a member of the first group of Navajo Code Talkers who developed the Navajo Code, a fact that many friends and family did not know until declassification of the operation in 1968.  He has been described as an unsung hero of World War II for the vital role he played for the American cause and saved many lives. In 2000 the original twenty-nine Navajo code talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in recognition of their extremely valuable work.

Gorman was born in 1907 on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle, Arizona, where his father was a cattleman and a trader.  His mother was an accomplish weaver who also worked closely with Presbyterian missionaries to translate religious hymns into Navajo.  This bicultural setting prepared him for a lifelong work as an interpreter between Navajo and Anglo cultures.  In 1942 Gorman learned young Navajos on the reservation were being recruited into the Marine Corps and he enlisted.  Following recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, his group of Navajo Marines was informed they had been selected for a very special mission - to establish a code to be used by the Marines during their island-hopping Pacific sweep.  Thus, he was one of a group of the original twenty-nine Navajos who turned their native language into a deadly secret weapon, a Navajo based code that allowed orders and complex messages to be spoken on open radio circuits with confidence in knowing that the Japanese did not have the foggiest idea what all the guttural chatter was about.  Navajo is a language without an alphabet and with such a complex, irregular syntax that in 1942 it was estimated that no more than 30 non-Navajo people had any knowledge of it and none of them were Japanese. 

It was a wonder that Gorman or any other Navajos still spoke Navajo in the face of a long and concerted Federal campaign to suppress Indian languages. At 10-years old, he was sent to Rehoboth Mission School where teachers beat him for speaking his native language.  It has been said the mission of the school was to get the savages civilized and fit them in with American society.  Gorman refused to speak English and as punishment, he was locked in a basement in the middle of winter with little food and water.  He and his younger brother soon ran away and walked for three days back to their home on the reservation.  Later he attended Albuquerque Indian School, a government boarding school, which discouraged native ways of life.    The aim of the school was to Americanize native children by forcing them to speak English and to pursue vocational trades.  At his graduation, instead of a high school diploma, he received a certificate stating he was satisfactory in farming.  Gorman has related that as a student at a mission school he had once been chained to an iron pipe for a week because he insisted on speaking his native tongue.  As he grew into an adult, he found himself in the position of translating between his people and the English speaking American government.  He found the demands of the government to his people was a thankless and endlessly frustrating role and watching the government's promises to his people go unfilled created in him a deep anger and sense of loss.  When he was among a group of Indians fired from their jobs while all the white men kept theirs, it left him with a sense of total failure.  Finding himself jobless and broke he decided to enlist and lied about his age of 35 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps.  He was the oldest of the many Navajos who served as Navajo Code Talkers and became a leader among the original group of Talkers.

From the invasion of Guadalcanal to Saipan, with a hot stop on Tarawa along the way, Gorman spent much of WWII in the Pacific on his belly at the front lines, a radio rather than a rifle in his hands.  While on Saipan he fell gravely ill with malaria and was airlifted to Pearl Harbor for medical care.  He and all the other Navajo volunteers made sure that the vaunted Japanese code crackers, who broke the Army, Navy and Air Corps codes, would never learn anything from intercepted Marine radio messages.  Their mission was so successful that their work was classified and some historians have described the secrecy that surrounded their work as classified as the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb.

After the war Gorman studied art in Los Angeles and was involved in a Navajo history project which conducted oral interviews with Navajo elders.  He also became a technical illustrator for Douglas Aircraft and an instructor in Native American Art at the University of California in Davis where a renowned contemporary art museum has been named in his honor.  In 1990 Gorman received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters to acknowledge his role in creating harmony and understanding between the Navajo people and other Americans.  He has been quoted as saying, "I want to help my Navajo people preserve their beautiful arts and crafts, which are rapidly vanishing.  Indian art is dying out and we Navajo people must do something to prevent this great loss.  Our young Navajo people do not realize the valuable heritage they have.  They need training and help."

In an interview in 1995 Gorman said, "Many people ask me why I fought for my country when the government has treated us pretty bad.  But, before the white man came to this country, this whole land was Indian country and we still think it's our land, so we fight for it.  I was very proud to serve my country."  Gorman died on January 29, 1998, in a hospital at Gallup, New Mexico.  As he was mourned throughout the Navajo Nation the Navajo President said, "Here is a man who has contributed tremendously to the country, the United States, and to the Navajo Nation, his people.  We are very proud he served in the armed forces and the Code Talkers."

Submitted by CDR Roy A. Mosteller, USNR (Ret)