Samuel Billison, 78; Navajo Code Talker Became an Educator, Speaker

He was born on the floor of a humble hogan, destined to be a sheepherder.

Instead, he became a respected educator and -- because he had been a member of it -- an expert on arguably the most elite and secretive corps in World War II.

He was a Navajo "code talker."

Samuel Billison died of heart disease Nov. 17 in Window Rock, Ariz. He was believed to be 78.

As a young Navajo on a reservation, Billison dreamed of joining the Marines. With World War II already in progress, he enlisted the day he graduated from high school in 1943.

The decision changed his life. At war's end, GI Bill in hand, he never returned to sheepherding.

Billison earned a doctorate in education and studied law at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and went on to be a teacher, principal and administrator who helped reorganize the reservation education system under the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

He served on the Navajo Nation Council and, in 1971 -- three years after their highly secretive work was finally declassified -- helped organize the Navajo Codetalkers Assn., serving for years as president.

The former teacher, in demand as a speaker for Native American heritage programs, mesmerized audiences with tales of the code talkers. It was dramatic stuff.

In 1942, Billison explained, Japanese cryptographers were breaking U.S. military codes seemingly at will. To combat the problem, Philip Johnston suggested a novel solution. A World War I veteran and engineer, Johnston, as the son of missionaries, had grown up on a Navajo reservation and knew the language, a subtly inflected tongue.

He suggested devising a code from the unwritten language, which was hardly spoken outside the Navajo Nation. Camp Pendleton became the testing site and later training ground.

The Marines initially recruited 29 Navajos ages 16 to 18 and told them to come up with a code incomprehensible even to other Navajos outside the program.

They gave aircraft the names of birds, naval vessels the names of fish, and land vehicles that of animals. A dive bomber was the Navajo word for "hummingbird," a destroyer was a "shark," a tank a "turtle," a torpedo a "potato" and an amphibious vehicle a "frog."

For the multitude of words without Navajo equivalents, including place names such as Guadalcanal, the group spelled them out using a Navajo word for each letter -- ant for A. To keep the Japanese, who never broke the code, from deciphering anything from repeated sounds, each letter of the alphabet was represented by an accepted set of three alternating Navajo words. So A might be expressed as ant, ax or apple.