The Pima Indian who had raised the flag was now the drunk Indian being arrested.

The contrast was treated as a story of personal failure rather than as an indictment of a system that had taken this young man, used him, celebrated him, and then abandoned him.

None of which is to say that Ira Hayes had no agency or no responsibility for his own choices.

He was a full human being making choices under conditions of extraordinary psychological pressure and trauma, without meaningful access to the kinds of support — medical, psychological, community-based — that might have made different outcomes possible.

The framing that reduces his post-war struggles to a morality tale about celebrity or weakness misses what the actual circumstances looked like.