I recently found a gem in a military documentary. On Christmas, my son gave me a dvd on the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II. It was a perfect gift for one interested in war movies and the different cultures of the world particularly the Native American Indians. For those unaware, the Navajos played a major part in our battle with Japan. Several of these brave men tell their stories in the documentary. However, one of stories stood out to us. Marine Samuel Nakai Tso tells us some of the horror and the grace he experienced in one particular battle:
This is for real. Keep your eyes open all the time and keep your bullets in there, just lock it. While we were doing that, all of a sudden, he said, “Here they come. Here they come.” He starts blasting away, so we just grabbed our rifles. All you could do was just to start shooting, and all the rest of the guys start shooting. As soon as I went over that sandbar, this crater hole there, there’s a guy still leaning down. I though he was still alive with his helmet, and then a blast from that shell took his head off. From then on, the sergeant starts screaming, “Loosen your chinstrap,” so we’ll loosen them up. Those forces out there, it has a lot of force it can push your neck in. So that’s why we loosen our chin straps. If it blows it up, he blows it away, but some guys get saved like that. It did not take long for them to go across. We cut them across so they won’t exchange any water, footd, or ammunition. Marines went that way and we went north on the other side. By that time, from here, the ships were all out there blasting away. On the other side, they had some ships over there on the other side. That’s real deafening. When it explodes over there, you can hear it. You look over to the ship, and that sound goes back to the ship…
I didn’t know we were going to hit Iwo Jima at all, but somewhere on February the 16th or 17th, we were coming in early in the morning. We saw the mountain right there looming up. It was this little island, we just overrun that thing with all these ships coming in. We just run over that little island and go on home. But we land there and we fought, and it anybody says, many people ask me if I was scared. I say, “Yeah, I was scared.” I don’t want to tell no lies or anything. I was scared, I say. But one thing for sure, one night I dreamed a young Indian maiden came to me and gave me something. She says you wear this, you’ll come to us. I dreamed about it. One of my buddies in the foxhole kicked me and woke me up. They asked me if I had a nightmare. I woke up and that dream was so clear in my mind. I just sat there. Everybody went to breakfast. Came back, I was still sitting there thinking about it. All of a sudden, they said mail call. I don’t get no mail from anybody. I didn’t know anybody. My parents, my sisters and brothers, they are uneducated. They couldn’t write to me. So I don’t go to mail call. All of a sudden, one guy comes running back and says, “Hey, Chief, you got a letter. You got a letter.” We tore open that letter, and there was an Indian made sort of like, a rosary from a Catholic Church made out of cedar beads with a cedar cross on it, and then I just looked at it. Who would write to me? No address on it. Then “Oh, yeah, I’m supposed to wear this.” So I reached over and put it over my neck. Just the moment I put that thing on my neck, all fear disappeared, and I keep saying, “I’m going home. I’m going home.” Up to this day, I have not found who ever sent me that rosary. Nothing. So if you believe in your dreams, I quit believing, but that helped me. When I say that it helped me, I went to the rest of the time without any fear even when we ran across death valley.
I was so intrigued over his story, that after the film, I looked up Sam Tso to find out more about him. I immediately discovered more interview clips from him here: >https://www.c-span.org/video/?459728-1/navajo-code-talker-samuel-tso-oral-history-interview
The Navajo Times had a nice write up about him 8 days after Mr. Tso’s death on May 9, 2012 with pictures of his funeral. It appeared that Samuel Nakai Tso had a funeral mass at St. Isabel Mission Catholic Church for Navajo Indians, in Chinle, Arizona and buried with full military honors at Veteran’s Navajo Cemetary.
50% of all US Marines of World War II were Catholic. Let us never forget the sacrifice of these brave American heroes and the Navajo warriors like Samuel Tso who said, “I found out my land and my people. I found out my land was the whole United States, my people were all citizens of the United States. That was my people.”
In these dark days of America and the world, let us also pray for our country and the Church and not let the sacrifice of these men be in vain. And pray most fervantly for those souls in Purgatory.
Speray's Catholicism in a Nutshell 