In early 1942, during the darkest months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a group of 29 Navajo Marines, young and fresh out of boot camp, were taken into a room with bars on the windows and a guard at the door. Their task: devise a top-secret code that would thwart the sharpest cryptanalytic minds in Imperial Japan. And they succeeded. This book documents their staggering wartime achievement: the formation and use of the Navajo Code. But the book is also about the lives of eight Navajo Code Talkers, told in their own words: the difficult living conditions faced during their childhood, and their boarding school experiences where the Navajo language was strictly sometimes brutally suppressed. This is their story. It's a story about a code of humble origins; a code that the most brilliant minds were unable to break; a code that saved thousands of American lives in World War 2. It's a story about their hazardous duty from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima and Okinawa often performed under murderous enemy fire, with some paying the ultimate price. It's a story about intelligence, courage, and ultimately, about patriotism.