Chester Nez at age eight was sent to a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and given his English name, Chester, after Chester A. Arthur. While at a government-run boarding school in Tuba City, Arizona, Nez was recruited into the Marine Corps and served as a Navajo code talker in the Pacific Theater in WWII. After the war he worked as a painter for twenty-fie years at a VA hospital in Albuquerque. On July 26, 2001, Nez was one of the five living code talkers who received the Congressional Gold Medal from President George W. Bush, and in 2011 he wrote his memoir Code Talker.