It will eventually be too fragile even to display.

But the image of the moment it was raised is permanent in ways the flag itself is not.

Ira Hayes touched that flag.

His hands were on the pole as it went up.

The photograph captured that contact — the physical connection between a young Akimel O’odham Marine from the Gila River reservation and a piece of cloth that would become one of the defining images of the twentieth century.

He could not have known what that moment would become.