The particular quality of Akimel O’odham life and culture and history that shaped who he was.

The particular experience of being a Paramarine — the training, the camaraderie, the specific way that elite military service forms a young man’s sense of himself.

The particular experience of the second flag raising, which took minutes and which has been endlessly analyzed and reproduced but which he described, in so many words, as just a moment in the middle of a battle.

And the particular experience of spending the rest of his life with something that the rest of the world regarded as a moment of historic triumph, but which he experienced as inseparable from everything else that happened on that island — the deaths, the terror, the chaos, the loss.