Read "Code Talker" by Joseph Bruchac online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It turned out that none of us code talkers could go home as soon as the end of the war was announced. There was still work for us to do. Two Navajo code talkers, Paul Blatchford and Rex Malone, were reassigned to Army and Navy Intelligence and shipped out with special teams to Japan to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki ahead of our troops. They sent their reports back to San Francisco in Navajo code where others of us had been sent. I was one of those in San Francisco who received their messages. Those messages shocked me.
Paul and Rex were horrified at what they saw where our two atomic bombs had fallen. All the buildings were flat and burned. Pitiful, injured survivors were camping out in sheds made from pine trees. Those sheds looked to Paul and Rex just like the lean-tos made back home by our own Navajo people. Many of those Japanese survivors looked so Indian that they might have been Navajos. They said it was hard to look at those people and think of them as enemies.