There are only 2 Navajo Code Talkers left alive, and one of them is 101 years old and expected in Phoenix today. August 14 is National Navajo Code Talkers Day. Reagan made it official in 1982, and a crowd is gathering at the Arizona State Capitol to mark it. Thomas H. Begay, 101, is one of the two men still here. The Marine Corps recruited and trained more than 400 Navajo men during World War II to build a code out of a language that had never been written down. Between 1942 and 1945 they sent thousands of secret messages on enemy troop movements and battle tactics. It became the largest code talking program in the military, and it helped save thousands of Allied lives. The granddaughter of one of the original 29 put it plainly. “Our language saved this country.” The mission stayed classified until 1968. When those men came home they couldn’t tell anyone what they had done, not even their own families. Arizona’s poet laureate, whose father was a Code Talker, says he was punished at ...