Eighty years ago, as the sea swayed him from side to side on an attack vessel heading towards Iwo Jima, Thomas Begay started to feel afraid.

“On the ship, they said: ‘get your last scrap of steak and eggs,’” he recalled. “That gave (me) some kind of feeling in my stomach. What am I doing here? What’s going to happen?”

“It’s a scary thing,” the veteran told CNN from his home in Window Rock, Arizona. “You don’t know where the bullet or the bomb will come from.”

Begay landed on the island as a member of the 5th Marine Division, but his role was unique: He was a Navajo Code Talker , deployed into battle to help the US military send encrypted messages that enemy forces were unable to decipher.

More than 400 Navajo Code Talkers were sent to the Pacific during World War II, operating alongs

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