For Ira Hayes, the tour was a particular kind of ordeal.

He was quiet and reserved by nature — a man who, by all accounts, was more comfortable listening than speaking, more comfortable in small groups than in crowds.

He was being asked to be the opposite: a public figure, a symbol, a face of heroism on a national stage.

He was being asked to tell a story — the story of the flag raising — that he found impossible to separate from the larger story of what Iwo Jima had actually been: not a moment of triumph but thirty-six days of slaughter, in which 6,821 Americans died and his own comrades, including the men who had raised that flag with him, were killed.

He was also confronting something specific to his experience as a Native man being celebrated by white America.