Young Philip Johnston loved the Navajo culture; it was the environment within which he grew up as a child of missionary parents. By age five, Philip knew the Navajo language well enough to serve as a translator, and by age nine, when most boys that age were riding their bicycles and trading baseball cards, he had served as the official translator of a Navajo delegation sent to the nation’s capital to negotiate expanded rights for the Navajo Indians.

In time, however, Philip Johnston would grow into manhood and when his country entered World War I, he would leave the Southwest to enlist and serve in the war to end all wars. After the war, Philip earned a degree in civil engineering at the University of Southern California and when war came once more to America’s shores on 7 December 1941, Johnston was hard at work as an engineer for the…