Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, N.M., died Wednesday of kidney failure, member station KPCC reports. He was the last of the 29 U.S. Marine Code Talkers who were the subject of the 2002 film Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage.
According to azcentral.com, Nez was in the 10th grade when he was recruited in the spring of 1942 by representatives of the the U.S. Marines, who came to his Arizona boarding school looking for Navajo speakers.
Azcentral.com says:
"The military, ferrying troops to battle sites across the Pacific, was urgently seeking an undecipherable code to transmit classified information. It had attempted to use various languages and dialects as code, but each was quickly cracked by cryptographers in Tokyo."
