Code Talker
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50 free Code Talker trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Joseph Bruchac's Code Talker follows Ned Begay, a Navajo boy sent away to a mission school where his own language is forbidden. A few years later the Marines want that same language badly enough to build a secret code around it, and Ned, still a teenager, carries a radio through some of the hardest island fighting of World War II. This quiz covers the whole book: the school years, enlistment and boot camp, code school, the friends Ned makes, the landings he survives and the homecoming that follows. It also steps outside the novel to the real history, including how the code worked, who dreamed it up, the animal and bird names that stood in for ships and planes, and the honors that arrived decades late. It is written for middle school readers and their classes, book clubs and anyone curious about the code that was never broken. The questions start gently and get tougher, and each answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works as a review after the last chapter or as a printable check on reading.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Navajo had no word for submarine, so which animal phrase did the code talkers use instead?
Iron fish
Iron fish, or besh-lo, joined a coded fleet in which destroyers were sharks and minesweepers were beavers.
Q 02In the Navajo code used by the Marines, which bird's name stood for a fighter plane?
Hummingbird
Hummingbird, da-he-tih-hi in Navajo, was one of several bird names in the code: a bomber was a buzzard and a dive bomber a chicken hawk.
Q 03In Code Talker, what does Mr. Reamer scrub inside Ned Begay's mouth for greeting him in Navajo?
Soap
Soap was the punishment for one polite Navajo greeting on Ned's second day at the mission school. An older boy, Jesse Chee, helped him back to the dormitory and comforted him in Navajo.
Q 04Major Howard Connor said the Marines would never have taken which island without the Navajo code talkers?
Iwo Jima
Iwo Jima's first two days saw six Navajo code talkers send and receive more than 800 messages without a single error.
Q 05In Joseph Bruchac's Code Talker, to whom does the elderly Ned Begay tell the story of his war service?
His grandchildren
His grandchildren ask about a medal he owns, and the whole novel is his answer. He tells it as a Navajo elder would, handing family history on to the next generation.
Q 06In the Navajo code, bombs were called by the word for which food?
Eggs
Eggs, a-ye-shi in Navajo, suited a code in which a bomber was a buzzard, so the bird laid its eggs over a target. Grenades got a food name too: potatoes.
Q 07Which 2002 John Woo war film stars Nicolas Cage as a Marine guarding a Navajo radio operator?
Windtalkers
Windtalkers cast Adam Beach as the code talker, Private Ben Yahzee, and set its biggest battle scenes during the invasion of Saipan.
Q 08In Code Talker, how does non-swimmer Ned Begay cross the boot camp pool after being pushed into the deep end?
Walks along the bottom
Walks along the bottom is what he does, blindfolded, after sinking straight down. Navajo stories link deep water with monsters, he explains, and he is the last man in his platoon to learn to swim.
Q 09In Code Talker, a classmate bursts into Ned Begay's dormitory with news of a Japanese attack on which place?
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor changes everything for Ned: within months the Marines are asking for men fluent in the very language his school punished.
Q 10Why did the Marines judge the Navajo language ideal for an unbreakable battlefield code?
Few outsiders understood it
Few outsiders understood it: by one estimate, no more than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could follow the language when World War II began.
Q 11In Code Talker, which protective ceremony must Ned Begay undergo before his parents let him enlist?
Blessingway
Blessingway is led by Hosteen Mitchell, a respected singer, who has Ned ceremonially bathed and then sings over him through the night at the family home.
Q 12In Code Talker, which Boston-born Marine is secretly assigned to stop Ned Begay being mistaken for the enemy?
Smitty
Smitty, whose real name is John Smith, had a double assignment that Ned learns of only long after the war. Navajo Marines risked being shot by their own side as supposed infiltrators.
Q 13In Code Talker, which blond Marine does Ned Begay offer to teach to read during boot camp?
Georgia Boy
Q 21In Code Talker, which of the Solomon Islands is the site of Ned Begay's first combat landing?
Bougainville
Bougainville greets Ned with jungle, mud and an erupting volcano, and he spends two months there before the Army takes over.
Q 22In Code Talker, Ned Begay is fighting on which island when radio brings news of President Roosevelt's death?
Okinawa
Okinawa is the last battle Ned fights, and the news moves him to tears. Few Marines had known how ill the president was.
Q 23Which Pima Marine, a friend of Ned Begay in Code Talker, appears in Joe Rosenthal's famous flag-raising photograph?
Ira Hayes
Ira Hayes hated the fame the picture brought, and in the novel he tells Ned how lonely it is to be the only Indian in it. His story later became a nationally popular ballad recorded by Johnny Cash.
Georgia Boy admits in the mess hall that he has been memorizing whatever he was supposed to read. The friendship shows Ned that white men do not know everything, whatever his school had claimed.
Q 14Which frontiersman, called Red Shirt in Code Talker, led the 1860s campaign that drove the Navajo into exile?
Kit Carson
Kit Carson's campaign is family history for Ned: his great-grandfather was a boy when the Navajo were driven hundreds of miles from home.
Q 15In Code Talker, on which island does a Japanese sniper shoot Ned Begay in the shoulder?
Guam
Guam is also where Ned and his tent-mate take in an orphaned Chamorro boy of about seven. Ned calls the wound itself hardly worth mentioning.
Q 16In Code Talker, the bitter Atabrine pills Ned Begay pretends to swallow guard against which disease?
Malaria
Malaria was carried by the island's hordes of mosquitoes, and Ned fools the officer handing out the awful-tasting pills until he is caught.
Q 17What is the traditional Navajo home of earth and logs, like the one Ned Begay leaves in Code Talker?
Hogan
Hogan doors traditionally face east to welcome the rising sun. The building can be round, cone-shaped, multi-sided or square.
Q 18Which award did the first Navajo code talkers receive under a law President Clinton signed in 2000?
Congressional Gold Medal
Congressional Gold Medal presentations followed in July 2001, when President George W. Bush honored four surviving originals in the Capitol Rotunda.
Q 19In Code Talker, which future president does a friend point out to Ned Begay as a young lieutenant?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy is stepping out of a boat in the Solomon Islands when Ned, shy with strangers, declines the offer of an introduction. The two never do meet.
Q 20In Code Talker, which relative drives six-year-old Ned Begay by wagon to the mission boarding school?
His uncle
His uncle, the only one in the family who had attended a white school, argues that Navajo children must learn English because the laws they live under are written in it.
Q 24What name is given to the forced 1860s march of the Navajo to Fort Sumner, recalled by Ned Begay's family?
The Long Walk
The Long Walk sent some 10,000 Navajos to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, and they were allowed home only after a treaty in 1868.
Q 25In Code Talker, which career does Ned Begay pursue after the war, going to college on the G.I. Bill?
Teacher
Teacher is a goal Ned set as a schoolboy, and being thrown out of a bar that refused to serve Indians, while in uniform, hardens it. He wants Navajo children to learn their own language and history.
Q 26In Code Talker, what does Ned Begay carry in a pouch and scatter at dawn as a daily prayer?
Corn pollen
Corn pollen links Ned to home throughout the war: he prays with it on the morning of a landing, and it is part of the ceremony that sends him off to the Marines.
Q 27In Code Talker, which corporal from the first all-Navajo platoon returns to recruit and inspires Ned Begay to enlist?
Johnny Manuelito
Johnny Manuelito stands tall in a spotless uniform and reports that not one man of the Navajo platoon washed out of boot camp. He later instructs Ned at code school.
Q 28In Code Talker, which Navajo ceremony finally frees Ned Begay from his nightmares after he returns home?
Enemyway
Enemyway, as Ned tells it, was first held for Monster Slayer, a hero sickened by all the killing he had done. On its first night Ned dreams of the jungle at peace.
Q 29In Code Talker, the surname Begay comes from Mr. Reamer mishearing Navajo words with what meaning?
Son of
Son of, or biye' in Navajo, is what Ned said when he called himself the son of a man with a gray mustache. He adds that many Navajo children of his era got the surname the same way.
Q 30In the Navajo code, as in Bruchac's Code Talker, America is named with words meaning what?
Our Mother
Our Mother, ne-he-mah in the code, sat beside other country names built from description: Britain was 'between waters' and Germany 'iron hat'.