Codebreaking

Text

Editor's note: Louvinia Jordan scored in the top sixth on the test to join the Signal Corps.

"They thought I was smart because I did that... I was shocked.... A lot of math. ‘Cause my work was all in math. They just hit what I knew on the test.

Well, they put you out to work when you got too dumb to learn. They let you stay in there until you got too dumb to learn, and then they put you out on a job. This is true! And I was told—the first thing I was told was 'if you mention even where you work, the penalty is death! You will be put in a firing squad.'

I wasn’t afraid. I never was afraid... It was important. We were decoding messages. Actually, what I did was find the unknown, which was which category they go in. There was three categories. And once those three sergeants that worked there got the overlaps, and put them on there, they could read it, but we couldn’t."