The symbol was too useful and too appealing.

The actual man, and the actual community he came from, were more complicated.

The Cold January Morning

He was thirty-two years old.

In ten years of adult life after the war — ten years during which he moved from place to place, from the reservation to Chicago and back again, from stability to disruption and back again, from public celebration to public arrest and back again — he had not found a way to live at peace with what the photograph had made of him, or with what Iwo Jima had left in him.

The specific facts of the night of January 23-24, 1955, are limited.