As Arizona honors World War II vets, LM’s Bill Frazier remembers his mentor.
August 13, 2021
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Growing up in Navajo Nation, Bill Frazier had no idea what a Navajo Code Talker was, much less that they were hiding in plain sight.
“When I was older, they started to come out and reveal themselves in parades and other public appearances,” said Frazier, a site manager for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Legacy Management (LM). “It was a secret for a while because [the U.S. government] thought they might use that code again.”
The Navajo Code Talkers program was declassified during President Ronald Reagan’s administration and a proclamation making Aug. 14 National Navajo Code Talkers Day was issued in 1984. This year marks the first time the observance is a legal state holiday in Arizona.
August 14, 2021, marks the first official National Navajo Code Talkers Day as a legal state holiday in Arizona.
“The Navajo Code Talkers are American heroes. They assisted on every major operation involving the U.S. Marines in the Pacific theatre, using their native language to come up with an unbreakable code,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement after signing the legislation in March. “More than 400 Code Talkers answered the call to serve our nation, and Arizona is grateful for their dedication to protecting our nation.”
During World War II, the U.S. government recruited more than 400 Navajo men to serve as elite cryptographers, encoding and transmitting messages in their native tongue. Their impenetrable code was based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language that assigned words to key phrases and military tactics.
“I know the language is powerful. That’s what we were told as Native people growing up,” Frazier said. I think it’s a great thing. These men did a tremendous service and they made sacrifices.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s, when the Code Talkers emerged from the shadows of history, that Frazier discovered some of them had played formative roles in his life. Among them was Samuel Billison, one of the most famous Navajo Code Talkers.
Billison was not only a source for books and Hollywood movies, but his voice was recorded for the Hasbro Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe action figure. Before all that fanfare, Frazier knew him as his middle school basketball coach at St. Michael’s Indian School near Window Rock, Arizona.
“When (the action figure) came out, it was a big deal and getting one was a big deal,” Frazier said.
Several years later, Frazier donated his Navajo Code Talker G.I. Joe action figure to the Atomic Legacy Cabin in Grand Junction, Colorado, where LM’s mission to preserve, protect, and make legacy records and information accessible is on full display. He becomes emotional as he recalls the moment he held the coveted action figure (now a collector’s item) as an adult, pulled the string, and heard his late mentor’s voice.
“My coach had been gone for a few years and it was so great to hear his voice again. It was like it was just yesterday,” Frazier said. “All these memories came flooding back. He came alive in that moment.”