It does not transform him into bronze thirty-two feet high.

It places him in the community and the landscape that shaped him.

It says, in the way that community memorials say things, that he was one of us, and we remember him.

That memory includes the difficulty of his life after the war.

It does not flinch from it or apologize for it or sanitize it.

Communities that have experienced the kinds of pressures the Akimel O’odham have experienced understand that people struggling under those pressures sometimes fail to thrive, sometimes fall into the patterns that the wider culture uses to dismiss them, and that this is not the measure of the person or the people.

Hayes was not the only member of his community who struggled after the war.