Da Hawg Frog Blog

Merril Sandoval

For decades these men lived in anonymity. After their heroic service to this country during the Second World War they returned to their homes and kept quiet about their great sacrifices and achievements. It wasn’t until the movie, “Windtalkers” came out that the general public became aware of the service these men rendered to their country.

Recently some of them men were honored at the Museum of Flight. As this recognition comes most of the Code Talkers have passed on.

November 17, 2004 Navajo code talker, Sam Billison died. Sam returned from his duties in the Pacific and returned to school. A few years ago he revealed some of the methodology used by the code talkers.

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 [in California] 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 the names of animals. A dive bomber was the Navajo name 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’, etc. 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.’ (Source: )

Another code talker, Merril Sandoval, explained what motivated him to serve. Merril, like Billison has Walked On and he is missed.

Merril’s desire to join the Marine Corps was fueled by his brother Sam’s enlistment in May, 1942-however his father was reluctant to let the younger boy join until the following year when Merril turned 16.

“‘Go, get your brother and bring him home,’” Gary Sandoval, Merril’s oldest son, quoted Julian Sandoval. “But the two never did see the other.”

The Sandoval brothers, like other Navajos enlisted in the Code Talker training program, attended basic training in San Diego before radio communications training at Camp Pendleton, sealing his military career as a Code Talker-Merril served the Second and Fifth Marine Divisions. (Source: nhonews.com)

After returning to his homeland in the Navajo nation Merril got on with his life. He raised his family and asked nothing in return for his service. Then one day he decided to apply to the VA for a home. In typical fashion the VA screwed up.

Gary told of how his father had waited almost his entire life to apply for a Veteran’s Affairs home-and how one day Merril called him to tell him that two semi trucks had dumped the parts of the house in the yard.

“‘What am I going to do? I’m 80 years old, how can I build a house?’ Dad said. I came over and helped unload the trucks, and then we hired private contractors to help put up the foundation,” Gary said. “A reporter wrote a story about this, and through this we met a savior-Robert Bowman and his sons Justin and Craig-who volunteered to build his house free of charge.”

The recognition these men so richly deserve is long overdue. It is a shame it comes so late in life for them. The debt owed them can never be repaid.

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