Kayenta Burger King Honors Navajo Code Talkers

NAVAJO CODE TALKERS

KAYENTA BURGER KING

Restaurant hosts Code Talker museum

by Sam Lowe - Dec. 5, 2008 

Special For The Republic

KAYENTA - As most travelers know, it's not uncommon to discover little treasures in the most unusual places. A classic example is the Navajo Code Talkers exhibit in the Burger King in Kayenta.

This display shares space with booths, burgers and fries in the restaurant on U.S. 160 near where U.S. 163 branches north toward Monument Valley.

Most of the artifacts on display were the possessions of King Mike, one of the Navajo servicemen who transmitted secret messages during World War II. He was a private first class in the Marines and served on the front lines during the Pacific campaign. But, like most Code Talkers, he never discussed it.

"I found out about it one day when a picture postcard fell from some of his stuff while I was doing some rearranging," said Richard Mike, King Mike's son, who owns the Burger King and is the founder and curator of the exhibit. "I asked my father about the photo, and he got very upset and didn't want to say anything about it."

The photo showed Sugar Loaf Hill on Okinawa, where King Mike had served with the Marine Corps Sixth Division. Speaking Navajo, he directed naval gunfire, ground artillery and aerial bombing against the hill. Later, he wrote on the back of the postcard " . . . the bloodiest and dirtiest fight in the South Pacific was fought on this hill - the Marines had taken the hill ten times and all ten times the Japanese took it back. The Marines finally took it after it was bombed and naval gunfire flattened it out."

More than 7,500 servicemen died on Okinawa, which is why King Mike refused to discuss the matter, even after the Code Talkers' role in the war effort was declassified in 1968. Little by little, however, Richard persuaded his father to let him display some of his belongings in the restaurant as a tribute.

"He wasn't resentful," Richard said, while conducting a tour. "He just didn't like to talk about it. But he was pleased with the exhibit. He liked it."

King died on Christmas Day 1996.

The exhibit contains fewer than a third of the artifacts King brought home from the war, Richard said. It features helmets, flags, documents and photographs. There's also a brief history of the Code Talkers, who were organized in the early 1940s. Beginning with the battle for Guadalcanal, the Navajos used their language to relay messages and, because there were no written texts in Navajo, the Japanese couldn't decipher the dispatches. Code Talkers participated in some of the fiercest battles of the war, including at Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, Kwajalein Island, Saipan, Guam and Iwo Jima.

Visitors fortunate enough to stop at the Burger King when Richard is there will find him a gracious host, eager to discuss the heroics of his father and his father's comrades. He will, for example, recount that his father's commanding officers would never loan any Code Talker to other units because "they knew they'd never get them back; that's how valuable these men were."

But Mike also owns a nearby hotel, is involved in local politics and is building a heritage park next to his Burger King, so he's rarely available. He plans to build a larger museum dedicated to his father in the heritage park so he can display the rest of his Code Talker collection.

"We have here in Kayenta more Code Talker memorabilia than the Pentagon does," Mike said.