The Choctaw Telephone Squad
A Novel of the First Code Talkers

About this book:

They were not citizens of the country that drafted them. Their language had been beaten out of them in boarding schools. Their land had been carved up and sold from under their feet. But when the 142nd Infantry shipped out to the Western Front, eighteen Choctaw men turned the tongue the government tried to erase into the only code the Kaiser couldn't break.

*The Choctaw Telephone Squad* follows Otis Leader, Solomon Louis, and their brothers-in-arms from the red hills of McCurtain County into the meat grinder of the Meuse-Argonne. In the static of tapped field phones and the chaos of No Man's Land, their native language—dismissed as obsolete by generals and missionaries alike—became a weapon more decisive than artillery. While history remembers the Navajo code talkers of World War II, this is the untold story of the first Americans to weaponize their own suppression.

Meticulously researched and propelled by the rhythm of a forgotten warrior tradition, this novel restores the Choctaw code talkers to their rightful place at the vanguard of military cryptography. It is a war story unlike any other: where the front lines run through stolen homelands, and victory speaks in a language the enemy never imagined they'd hear.