By LEONARD GRAY

LAPLACE – The event was a celebration of military veterans and their sacrifices during wartime.

The celebrity of the day, however, was a quiet man who smiled often and said little. In his day, however, Jimmy Begay had a lot to say, and what he said saved lives.

Begay, 79, a native and resident of Ft. Defiance, Ariz., recently took part in the Armed Forces Walk Across Louisiana.

The event cumulated Saturday in an Armed Forces Day program at the USS Kidd Memorial in Baton Rouge. Five teams of veterans from the portion of Louisiana east of the Mississippi River and six from the western side converged on the state capital.

The walk was conducted over three days with teams walking from points in the eastern and western parts of the state. This Remembrance Walk was devoted to all those current and passed who served in the U.S. Armed Forces, with special recognition being accorded to those who were killed in action, missing in action, prisoners of war, and those wounded in action.

One team paused at the Percy Hebert Building in LaPlace on Friday, where Begay met with local veterans and public officials for an overnight rest stop. He smiled a lot, spoke a little and signed autographs.

What makes him remarkable is that the Navajo Indian is one of the few surviving “Code Talkers” used in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II to confound the Japanese, trying to decipher encrypted American signals.

Fellow “Code Talkers,” Keith Little of Navajo, N.M., and Wilfred Buck of Window Rock, Ariz., also participated in the walk.

During the early months of the war, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code attempted by the United States for combat messages. Japanese forces were learning the time, place and direction of every American attack, and something had to be done, or the war effort in the Pacific was doomed to failure.

The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their complex language fluently. Johnston, reared on the Navajo reservation, was a World War I veteran who knew of the military’s search for a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it.

He also knew that Native American languages – notably Choctaw – had been used in World War I to encode messages.

Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.

Early in 1942, Johnston met with Maj.-Gen. Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff to convince them of the Navajo language’s value as code. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds.

Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job. Convinced, Vogel recommended to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos.

In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp. Then, at Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, Calif., this first group created the Navajo code. They developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training.

Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The code talkers’ primary job was to talk, transmitting information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications over telephones and radio.

The volunteers attended a 13-week training course and devised a code based on logical associations from their own language. Thus, the Navajo word for white hats, “ch’ah fgia,” was sailors. Similarly, potatoes became grenades, eggs were bombs and America became “nihlma” (our mother).

When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the Navajo words “wol-la-chee” (ant), “be-la-sana” (apple) and “tse-nill” (axe) all stood for the letter “a.” One way to say the word “Navy” in Navajo code would be “tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca).”

Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them. Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The developers of the original code assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Several examples: “besh-lo” (iron fish) meant “submarine,” “dah-he-tih-hi” (hummingbird) meant “fighter plane” and “debeh-li-zine” (black street) meant “squad.”

At full strength, there were 400 “code talkers” making it possible for America to win the war against Japan. Maj. Howard Conner, signal officer of the Fifth Marine Division, commented: “While we were landing and consolidating our shore positions, I had six Navajo radio networks operating around the clock. In that period alone, they sent and received over 800 messages without an error.” Conner went on to say that “were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

“I guess they knowed they were in trouble,” Begay said of the Japanese he opposed. He enlisted in November 1942 and was discharged in October 1945. He participated in landings in the Solomon Islands and Guam.

After the war, the Code Talkers were sworn to secrecy, and they maintained their vow of silence, even to the grave. Finally, on June 28, 1968, the Marines honored their contribution with special gold medals.

A film, “The Wind Talkers,” will be released in mid-summer to pay tribute as well, telling their long-guarded story at last. The Armed Forces Walk Across Louisiana was sponsored by two Louisiana chapters of the Special Forces Association.