What he brought back with him is what every combat veteran of a brutal campaign brings back: memories that don’t arrange themselves into a coherent narrative, that surface at unpredictable moments and refuse to stay in the past.

In 1945, the medical and psychological communities did not have the diagnostic framework for post-traumatic stress disorder that exists today.

The condition had different names in different wars — shell shock in World War I, combat fatigue or battle fatigue in World War II — and was often understood, if it was acknowledged at all, as a weakness rather than as an injury.

Ira Hayes had watched men die on the beaches and slopes of Iwo Jima.