The photograph also cannot contain Ira Hayes’s discomfort with being in it — with being one of the faces of a moment that the country chose to treat as purely triumphant, when what he knew about that moment was so much more complicated.

He said, repeatedly and in various ways over the years, that he felt like a fake.

Not because the flag raising didn’t happen, not because he wasn’t there, but because the image of triumph that the photograph projected didn’t match what he had seen and done and survived.

He had not felt triumphant.

He had felt, as anyone who has survived a battle in which others died must feel, some version of guilty and shaken and uncertain.

And then he had been taken off the island and told he was a hero and sent around the country to prove it, and the gap between what he knew about himself and what the country wanted him to be was a gap he was never able to close.