On the eve of their deployment to Vietnam, Chief Albert Wanatah and five of his fellow Indian friends from Oklahoma and the south suburbs gathered at Assumption Catholic Cemetery in Glenwood to drink beer and plan their future graves.
They were preparing for what might come of their sprint as code talkers, but staying strong as they considered it their duty to serve their country. They also wanted to remain united, even in death.
“We said, ‘We want to be together, this is where I want to be buried, I want to be buried next to you,'” Wanatah recalled.
When the Cook County sheriff’s police arrived to break up their party, one older officer was so moved by their words and the letter they carried of President Johnson’s greetings to them that he teared up and could barely talk.
It was that sense of patriotism and duty, that brought Wanatah, a member of the Comanche Nation, to prepare his words at the Wall that Heals, the Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall during Saturday’s candlelight vigil at Marian Catholic High School.
He was one of the few code talkers from his group to return from Vietnam alive, serving from late 1966 through 1968.
Code talkers were on a secret mission to call in the positions of the Viet Cong to the Navy or Air Force in their own language, which he pointed out was thousands of years old.
He said his ancestors were massacred by Col. George Armstrong Custer’s army in Oklahoma in 1876.
“We’re part of this country because it’s our country, nobody else was here, only Native Americans,” said Wanatah.
He grew up an orphan alone in a mud house, though visited by adults periodically, on a reservation in south central Oklahoma. There was no running water, toilet or street address.
In the 1950s and early 1960s he traveled to Illinois to work for Ford Motor Company, during the summers and later full-time. There he met friends and relatives.
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Wanatah wanted to attend the United States Military Academy West Point or at least a major university, but said he was rejected because he was Indian. He had his paperwork from the National Board of Examiners, too.
“We didn’t become citizens until 1924 and we were here for thousands of thousands of years. We could not even vote until the mid ’60s, yet we were subjected to military service,” said Wanatah.
He was drafted but went willingly, he said, because he had been taught that the first chapter of Numbers in the Bible said God told Moses to take a census for the purpose of going to war. Wanatah also thought he was saving people from communism.
“God is the one who invented the draft,” said Wanatah. “What is military service? It is to go out and kill other human beings.”
Yet after the war, Wanatah felt defeated by the government’s treatment of veterans.
“The government didn’t want to take care of us after the war because we lost the war,” said Wanatah. “It was a very unpopular war and it was the government that sent us there.
He also said the government doesn’t want to care for people who were exposed to Agent Orange, which causes diabetes, which he has.
David Simonetti provided photo, July 2022, Glenwood, Hegewisch, Illinois
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The Rev. David Simonetti, pastor of Christ Our Light Catholic Church in Hegewisch, who met Wanatah at Assumption Cemetery during a Memorial Day event to honor some of his relatives killed in the Vietnam War, was impressed.
“What struck me most about Chief Wanatah is how his life has come full circle,” said Simonetti. “As a teen he stood in this very cemetery with his friends the night before they left for Vietnam picking out their graves.
“He had faced such discrimination in his life … Now our country has corrected such an indignity,” said Simonetti.
Speaking at the traveling wall was a way to let the younger generation know the history of the war and how many dedicated soldiers were lost, Wanatah said. But the wall should also remind the government that they owe these veterans some help and gratitude, he said.
“Not to embarrass them, but to do something about it,” said Wanatah.
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.