He had known who was in that photograph.

He had been there.

The official record had gotten it wrong, and in getting it wrong, it had taken something from a dead man and his family — the accurate historical acknowledgment of his presence at a moment that his country had decided was monumentally significant.

Hayes fought to give that back, and he succeeded.

It was, given everything else that was happening in his life during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a remarkable act of persistent advocacy.

It required him to keep engaging with the story of Iwo Jima and the photograph at a time when engaging with that story was personally painful.