A Tale of Two Mountains

The beach was ash, a loose volcanic dust that slid treacherously under combat boots already filled with sweat, when suddenly the verdant dimpled butter pat that was Mount Suribachi disappeared. Instead, Ashkii was digging his bare heels into the fine loamy sand spread against the cliffs and riverbeds of Shiprock, New Mexico. The peaks of Tsé Bitʼaʼí towered over all in distant benediction. Junipers clustered like sheep in the folds of rocky hills. Smooth stones radiated heat in the sun; in the shadows cast by striped rock formations they sent cold aches from his soles all the way through to the nerve endings of his teeth. All Kee had to watch for were the wapiti and the mounds of pricklypear lying in wait for his feet. 

“Holy Mother of God!” 

With a shock of guilt, Kee wrenched himself back to the present. A bombardment of shells fell around him and the other members of the 28th Regiment. From his left came the death shriek of a private, younger even than Kee. He was no longer a boy of the Navajo Nation but a man, a Marine, wading through the still-warm bodies of dead soldiers.

Kee held his head down and gritted his teeth. He pushed forward blindly, helmet colliding with the rifle laid on his shoulder. Artillery continued to rain from the base of the mountain and the mouths of secret caves barely larger than a man’s body. The entire island of Iwo Jima crawled with a hidden tunnel system.

Reach the coast. Secure Suribachi. Reach the coast. Secure Suribachi… The rhythm of the mantra regulated Kee’s breath. His jackrabbit heart began to slow. Reach... Secure... Secure...

It happened again. The air became sluggish and hazy. Kee was paralyzed in a strange calm, while the scenes of his past life presented themselves before him without his permission. Perhaps it was fear that slowed him, but there had been other times, other places he had been more afraid: Bougainville, Kwajalein, the Marianas, Guam. Even these memories had faded like bad dreams. Kee did not think about the machine guns or the death peering from the gangrenous caverns hanging above them. What was real was the desert, the plateau, the perfectly round and shallow caves carved into Tsé Bitʼaʼí like the houses of so many malevolent spirits.

“Houses of the dead.” Bitsie Chee, Red Mule’s woman, paused her weaving to spit over her shoulder. “It is a filthy thing to disturb the dead.” Bitsie did not speak of “sin” the way the missionary’s wife Mrs. Harris spoke of sin, but of “filth,” something that to Kee sounded deeper and more evil. “They are punished who climb the sacred rock”– she meant the Societies and Associations, the Anglo tourists who could not quite believe a mountain might be anything other than an obstacle to be quickly and neatly overcome. Tsé Bitʼaʼí – Shiprock – The Rock With Wings. “It is a filthy thing to climb the rock.” Kee did not need to be told. He had always known. It was like knowing the existence of the sun. Having Bitsie Chee tell him so was itself a sort of sacrilege: an embarrassing admission of the depths to which man was capable of sinking, the same as Mrs. Harris teaching them at the Indian School, “Thou shalt not kill.” Those scenes from childhood he remembered with almost frightening clarity: the tall Anglo woman in low heels, her blonde perfumed presence, his secret shameful erections, and over it all the soft clipped voice saying as though it were something possible not to believe, “Thou shalt not kill.”

And yet here he was, armed, advancing against the mountain of a people who until a few short years ago had been to him only a myth.

But of course the commandment was more complex than it seemed. His family slaughtered lambs and cattle for every meal, so surely they did not count; Red Mule had stabbed a man in self-defense and gotten off without punishment; the Diné had fought and killed their enemies, the Utes and the Kiowa, for hundreds of years. The fine distinctions danced and blurred until Kee felt dizzy and had to rub his palms into his eyes to wash them away. When a code talker came to recruit at the Indian School, a man of his own race dressed in dignified Marine blues, Kee reasoned that this war was like a raid against the Apache. Or maybe self-defense. It didn’t seem to matter, so much, when he volunteered that same afternoon.

Kee did not realize he had survived the beach until he found himself thrown unceremoniously into a foxhole.

“Screw your head on, Yazzie,” growled the big-jawed corporal commonly called Beefsteak by the regiment. “Don’t pass out on us before you’re killed. It’s gonna take a lot of blood to get to the top of that hill.” Hill– Kee supposed that, even compared to Tsé Bitʼaʼí, Mount Suribachi wasn’t much more than that. It smoked now with explosives rather than lava, its brilliant green foliage steaming with rain and sickness even in February. The Marines around him breathed heavily. Their dirty faces closed with exhaustion in the brief respite afforded by the narrow trench. Kee closed his eyes and tried to count backwards from ten in Navajo and for the first time found he could not. 

It was as if his mind were a ceramic dish that had been dropped. All the words had seeped through the cracks, running in rivers down the slope of rock too hard for absorption, leaving only the outlines of bright shapes in their place. Kee supposed he had no reason to be surprised. He’d barely spoken his native language in years. He had not been chosen to be a code talker, but a regular Marine. His family was completely illiterate: they did not read English, and Navajo had no written form, not until the code talkers invented one, so they did not write. It was strange to think the tongue that tied him to his past was gone. Kee let his mind stall and opened his eyes to stare upwards at the gray sky.

This was not a life any of his ancestors could have imagined for him. Three years ago heʼd seen a train for the first time in his life, the one that took him from the Navajo Nation to San Diego and from there to Camp Pendleton. Trains and planes, palm trees and harbors had seemed so wonderful to Kee until at last he saw the real monsters: warships, the endless ocean, the jungle islands of the Pacific. The infinite and unknown– that was real fear. 

So Kee was not afraid but weary when the order came to move south.

The abandoned island felt lonely as the regiment resumed their creep. Kee was told there was a small civilian population, which had been forcibly evacuated the year prior. His reluctance to climb Mount Suribachi grew to repugnance. Japanese fire forced the Marines out of their route, circling the squat mountain with some semblance of organization. With painful delay the clouds changed from the intensity of midday to the dark suggestion of evening. They dug into the northeast face and numbed the urge to name and number the dead.

Houses of the dead: these foxholes, these pillboxes, these lined faces. He would always be haunted, no matter how many healing ceremonies his family held for him. There was nothing that could protect him from that coming wrath. Not even Asdza – Kee’s heart made the familiar contortion seen sometimes in the mortal agony of animals, slow, mesmerizing, exposing finally the pale underbelly to an unforgiving sun. The pain was no longer emotional but only physical; it was a comforting routine he could recall when all else had spiraled out of control. Asdza must be married to another man by now. Diné women married so young – Kee’s mother at age twelve – Asdza was eighteen this year. Kee did not remember her exact birthday, or the features of her face, just the fall of her long dark hair in the twilight. Long, dark hair. Smooth. Flowing. Long and dark.

Kee lifted himself from the trench and inched forward on his belly. It was night and the Japanese had ceased firing. He was not seen. For the first time that day he allowed himself to stretch to his full standing height of five foot four. It felt good. The threat of discovery seemed very far away, like a rumor about something that had happened to a friend of a friend. A line of short trees gave him a sense of protection more closely resembling companionship than any actual security against death. He walked among them and regretted that he could not give them names. In Shiprock he knew them well: aspen and mahogany, yucca and pine, chollas and Mormon-tea. He walked slowly, not trying to arrive or escape, only to walk. Soon even the names of the plants left him beyond recall. He had lost Navajo; he was losing English as well. The words deserted him as he deserted the foxhole. Kee thought he could see their backs as they slunk away. He no longer thought in words but colors and shapes. Dark, long. Long and dark.

A war dog began barking close by. The treeline rustled softly and a camouflaged helmet appeared above a white, trembling face. A rifle shook in hands webbed with tense blue veins. Kee recognized him immediately as a member of the 147th Infantry. He’d heard stories of these young men mistaking the dark, round-faced Navajo for Japanese soldiers, capturing or killing them in fear. If he could only speak – but he could not – and he was, without having consciously chosen such a path, a deserter. Instinctively Kee raised his own rifle to take aim.

For a split second, or perhaps an hour, the men stood barely a few yards apart, motionless besides the cold shiver of the one and the rise of Kee’s khaki shirt torn open in the heat. Then Kee lowered his weapon. He looked intently into the eyes of the soldier. He had probably never seen combat. He was almost certainly from the Ohio River Basin, as much of or more of a stranger than Kee to this dormant volcano, this bloodbath. His pinprick pupils drowned in irises of icy blue, perfect reflections of Lake Eerie. Kee knew his own eyes were bottomlessly black, the pupils drowning the irises, images of thick shadow swarming the rock face. He was the natural son of the houses of the dead.

Suddenly Kee felt a surge of great, wordless love for this poor boy who had likely lied about his age for the privilege of dying for his country and who had come face to face with someone as foreign to him as the enemy. If killing was self-defense, if it had to be one or the other, Kee did not want to be the one who lived. The last words Kee ever managed to remember were echoes from his childhood: “Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not kill.”