It was on stamps and posters and eventually on a thirty-two-foot bronze memorial.

It was reproduced in every history book.

It followed him everywhere he went.

Other veterans who struggled after World War II could at least be anonymous in their struggle.

Hayes could not be anonymous.

His face was known.

The second was his identity as an Akimel O’odham man from the Gila River reservation — a member of a people who had been dispossessed, whose community struggled with poverty and limited opportunity in the same years that the country was using Hayes’s image to sell war bonds and inspire national pride.

The dissonance between the symbol and the reality was not just psychological for Hayes.