The Photograph That Changed Everything<\/p>\n
On the morning of February 23, 1945, on a volcanic island eight miles long in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, six men raised an American flag on a mountaintop they had just helped capture at tremendous cost.<\/p>\n
One of them was a twenty-two-year-old Akimel O’odham man from the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.<\/p>\n
His name was Ira Hamilton Hayes.<\/p>\n
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal was on the mountain that morning.<\/p>\n
He had climbed Suribachi not knowing exactly what he would find, carrying his camera and doing the job he had done on dozens of Pacific island battlefields.<\/p>\n
When he saw the men preparing to raise a larger replacement flag on a length of heavy pipe, he scrambled to position himself on a mound of dirt and volcanic rock, aimed, and pressed the shutter at what he later described as a moment he almost missed entirely.<\/p>\n
The resulting photograph \u2014 six Marines and Navy corpsmen raising a flag against a grey Pacific sky \u2014 became the most reproduced photograph in American history.<\/p>\n
It appeared on stamps, posters, war bond materials, and eventually became the basis for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.<\/p>\n
It was transmitted around the world within days.<\/p>\n
It landed on the front pages of newspapers from New York to London to Sydney.<\/p>\n
Franklin Roosevelt saw it and understood immediately what it meant for public morale in a war that still had eight brutal months to run.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes is on the far left of the photograph, one hand on the pole, his face turned slightly away from the camera.<\/p>\n
He would spend the rest of his life inside that image \u2014 and find that there was almost no room left for the actual person.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-two years old when the picture was taken.<\/p>\n
He would be dead before he turned thirty-three.<\/p>\n
What happened in between is a story that the famous photograph, frozen at its moment of triumph, has never been able to tell.<\/p>\n
Where He Came From<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Gila River Indian Community sits in the Sonoran Desert of south-central Arizona, southeast of Phoenix.<\/p>\n
In the 1920s and 1930s, when Ira Hayes was growing up there, it was a place that had survived enormous historical disruption and was still living with the consequences.<\/p>\n
The Akimel O’odham \u2014 the River People \u2014 had been farming the Gila River valley for centuries.<\/p>\n
Their sophisticated irrigation systems turned desert land into productive fields.<\/p>\n
They grew cotton, wheat, and corn.<\/p>\n
In the mid-nineteenth century, they had been notable enough allies to American settlers and military forces moving through the Southwest that government reports praised them as peaceful, industrious, and hospitable.<\/p>\n
When the California gold rush sent thousands of migrants along the southern route through Arizona, Akimel O’odham farmers sold food to travelers who might otherwise have starved in the desert.<\/p>\n
In return, over the following decades, the water that sustained their civilization was systematically diverted upstream by Anglo-American settlers.<\/p>\n
By the late nineteenth century, the Gila River had been reduced to a trickle.<\/p>\n
Fields that had fed thousands went dry.<\/p>\n
The agricultural economy that had made the Akimel O’odham largely self-sufficient collapsed within a generation.<\/p>\n
The federal government did not restore the water.<\/p>\n
What it did, in the early twentieth century, was establish a reservation, suppress traditional governance, and send children to boarding schools designed to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures.<\/p>\n
The Gila River Indian Community that Ira Hayes grew up in was a community that had been stripped of the resource base that had defined it, subjected to federal policies of forced assimilation, and left to adapt to poverty and dependency in the middle of the desert.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ira Hamilton Hayes was born on January 12, 1923.<\/p>\n
His father, Joe Hayes, was a farmer who tried to work the dry land the reservation still offered.<\/p>\n
His mother, Nancy, was known as a devout Christian and a stabilizing presence in the family.<\/p>\n
Ira was one of nine children.<\/p>\n
By most accounts he was a quiet child \u2014 thoughtful, a little reserved, someone who observed more than he spoke.<\/p>\n
He attended school on the reservation, then the Phoenix Indian School, a federal boarding institution that operated on the assimilationist model.<\/p>\n
Students at Phoenix Indian School were discouraged from speaking their Native languages and trained in practical trades.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The education Ira received there was functional if limiting.<\/p>\n
But it gave him something his parents’ generation had been denied: literacy, English fluency, and some familiarity with the wider American world.<\/p>\n
He came of age in a community that had given enormous amounts to the United States \u2014 land, water, labor, military service \u2014 and received comparatively little in return.<\/p>\n
Akimel O’odham men had served in World War I.<\/p>\n
They would serve again in World War II in numbers far exceeding their proportion of the general population.<\/p>\n
Native Americans across the country volunteered and were drafted at rates that, per capita, exceeded those of any other group.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes turned eighteen the month after Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
He enlisted in the Marines at the age of nineteen.<\/p>\n
Why A Pima Kid From Arizona Joined The Marines<\/p>\n
In the months after December 7, 1941, enlistment offices across the country were flooded with young men who wanted to fight.<\/p>\n
The shock of Pearl Harbor, the outrage it produced, the sense that the country had been attacked and that attack required an answer \u2014 these were powerful motivators.<\/p>\n
They worked on Ira Hayes the same way they worked on millions of other young American men.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But there was something else operating for Hayes and for many Native men who volunteered in those years.<\/p>\n
Military service was a continuation of a warrior tradition that had deep roots in Akimel O’odham culture, even as that culture had been substantially transformed by federal policy.<\/p>\n
Serving in the armed forces was also, for many Native men, one of the few avenues through which they could achieve standing in the broader American society that had otherwise kept them on the margins.<\/p>\n
The military offered wages, travel, training, and a form of recognition that reservation life \u2014 with its chronic unemployment, limited opportunities, and structural poverty \u2014 often could not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And for a twenty-year-old who had grown up on the Gila River reservation in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Marines specifically carried a particular appeal.<\/p>\n
They were the toughest, the most selective, the most demanding.<\/p>\n
They were the branch that turned young men into something formidable.<\/p>\n
If you were going to go to war, and you were young and physically capable and not afraid of difficulty, the Marines were a logical choice.<\/p>\n
Hayes enlisted in August 1942 at the age of nineteen.<\/p>\n
He reported to boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego.<\/p>\n
By the accounts of those who served with him, he was a capable, determined recruit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was small \u2014 five feet seven, about 150 pounds \u2014 but he was fit and he had the kind of physical endurance that rural agricultural life builds into a person.<\/p>\n
He completed boot camp and then applied for and was accepted into parachute training.<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps Parachute Battalion \u2014 the Paramarines \u2014 was an elite unit that existed briefly in the early years of the war.<\/p>\n
The training was rigorous, the attrition rate was high, and the men who made it through were regarded as among the Corps’s finest.<\/p>\n
Hayes completed parachute training at Camp Gillespie in California and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, earning the designation of Paramarine.<\/p>\n
Private First Class Ira Hayes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Twenty years old.<\/p>\n
From the Gila River reservation.<\/p>\n
A Paramarine.<\/p>\n
He was assigned to the 3rd Parachute Battalion, which deployed to the Pacific in 1943.<\/p>\n
The Paramarines initially trained for airborne operations \u2014 jumps behind enemy lines, the kind of mission the Army’s airborne divisions were conducting in other theaters.<\/p>\n
But the Pacific geography proved inhospitable to large-scale parachute operations.<\/p>\n
The islands were too small, the terrain too difficult, the available aircraft too limited.<\/p>\n
The Marine Paramarines were eventually used as elite infantry, fighting on Vella Lavella in the Solomon Islands in 1943.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In early 1944, the Marine Corps dissolved the Parachute Battalions.<\/p>\n
The men were reassigned to regular infantry units.<\/p>\n
Hayes was transferred to E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division.<\/p>\n
He was now heading toward the largest amphibious assault the Marine Corps had ever attempted.<\/p>\n
He was heading toward Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n
The Island No One Wanted To Take<\/p>\n
The strategic logic of Iwo Jima was straightforward, if brutal.<\/p>\n
By late 1944, American B-29 bombers based in the Mariana Islands were conducting bombing raids on the Japanese home islands.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The raids were increasingly effective but also costly.<\/p>\n
The round trip from the Marianas to Japan and back was nearly three thousand miles.<\/p>\n
Bombers that were damaged over Japan had nowhere to land.<\/p>\n
They ditched in the Pacific and their crews were lost.<\/p>\n
Fighter aircraft couldn’t fly that range at all, which meant the B-29s flew without escort.<\/p>\n
Iwo Jima, sitting roughly midway between the Marianas and Japan, changed that equation.<\/p>\n
A Japanese-held air base on Iwo Jima, it was used to intercept the B-29s and provide early warning to Japan’s defenses.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If the United States could take the island, they would eliminate that threat, provide an emergency landing field for damaged bombers, and eventually put fighter aircraft close enough to Japan to escort the B-29s over the target.<\/p>\n
The price of taking it would be terrible.<\/p>\n
The island’s volcanic terrain \u2014 black sand beaches, rocky ridges, tunnels and caves carved into the volcanic rock by tens of thousands of Japanese defenders who had spent months preparing \u2014 made it one of the most fortified pieces of land in the Pacific.<\/p>\n
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commanding the Japanese garrison of approximately 21,000 men, knew that the island would be attacked.<\/p>\n
He designed a defense intended not to repel the invasion at the beaches \u2014 a conventional defense that air and naval bombardment had proven could be defeated \u2014 but to draw the attackers inland into a maze of interlocking positions from which every approach was covered by fire.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The pre-invasion naval and air bombardment that preceded the February 19, 1945, landing was the largest in the Pacific war up to that point.<\/p>\n
It did less damage to the Japanese defenses than expected.<\/p>\n
Kuribayashi’s garrison sat in tunnels and concrete bunkers and waited.<\/p>\n
When the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions hit the beaches on the morning of February 19, the Japanese allowed them to come ashore in large numbers before opening fire.<\/p>\n
The black volcanic sand on the beaches was unlike any the Marines had trained on \u2014 soft and yielding, it trapped the landing vehicles and made movement exhausting.<\/p>\n
Men sank ankle-deep with every step.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The volcanic rock that lay just beneath the surface made it nearly impossible to dig foxholes deep enough for real protection.<\/p>\n
The Japanese opened fire from positions so well concealed that Marines couldn’t locate them.<\/p>\n
Men fell on the beach without ever seeing where the fire was coming from.<\/p>\n
By the end of the first day, the Marines had suffered more than 2,000 casualties and had barely penetrated the island’s outer defenses.<\/p>\n
Iwo Jima would take thirty-six days to secure.<\/p>\n
By the time it was declared secure on March 26, 1945, nearly 7,000 Marines and Navy personnel had been killed and more than 19,000 had been wounded.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Of the approximately 21,000 Japanese defenders, only around 200 survived to be taken prisoner.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes landed on Iwo Jima on February 19, 1945 \u2014 the first day, on the black sand beach, under fire from positions he could not see.<\/p>\n
He survived the first day when many around him did not.<\/p>\n
He was among the Marines selected to assault Mount Suribachi.<\/p>\n
What It Cost To Get To The Top Of That Mountain<\/p>\n
Mount Suribachi is not an impressive peak by any objective geological standard.<\/p>\n
It rises 556 feet above sea level at the southern tip of Iwo Jima \u2014 about the height of a moderately tall office building.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But on a small flat island, 556 feet is a commanding height.<\/p>\n
From its summit, Japanese observers had clear sightlines over the entire landing beach and much of the island.<\/p>\n
Every Marine who came ashore on February 19 was visible to the spotters on Suribachi, who could call down accurate artillery and mortar fire on virtually any point of the beachhead.<\/p>\n
Taking Suribachi was one of the 28th Marines’ first assignments.<\/p>\n
The regiment attacked the mountain from the north, fighting through Japanese defensive positions that had been months in the preparation \u2014 bunkers, spider holes, machine gun positions, artillery emplacements all linked by tunnels that allowed the defenders to move and survive even under heavy bombardment.<\/p>\n
The fighting up Suribachi’s slopes cost the 28th Marines heavily.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The black sand gave no cover.<\/p>\n
The terrain provided the defenders with every advantage.<\/p>\n
Marines crossed open ground under fire and died.<\/p>\n
They used flamethrowers and explosives to clear bunkers one at a time.<\/p>\n
They lost men to fire from positions they couldn’t see, to snipers, to grenades rolled down slope, to the specific lethal ingenuity of a garrison that had prepared for exactly this assault.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes was in it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was a rifleman in Easy Company, and he did what riflemen do in that kind of fighting: he moved forward when ordered, he took cover when he could, he fired at positions when he could identify them, and he watched men around him get hit.<\/p>\n
By February 22 \u2014 three days after the landing, and four days of combat \u2014 the regiment had fought its way to the base of the summit cone.<\/p>\n
On the morning of February 23, a patrol of forty Marines was selected to push to the top.<\/p>\n
Easy Company’s 3rd Platoon was among them.<\/p>\n
Hayes was part of that patrol.<\/p>\n
The patrol moved up the summit cone, through terrain that had been fought over for days and now showed the evidence of it \u2014 shattered rock, destroyed Japanese positions, the residue of battle.<\/p>\n
They encountered resistance but less than they had feared.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Japanese garrison on the summit had been reduced by the fighting.<\/p>\n
Some had escaped through the tunnel system that honeycombed the mountain.<\/p>\n
When the patrol reached the summit, they found a length of Japanese pipe and, using a small American flag carried by a member of the patrol, raised it at 10:20 a.m. on February 23, 1945.<\/p>\n
This was the first flag raising on Mount Suribachi.<\/p>\n
Marines on the beach and on ships offshore saw the flag and cheered.<\/p>\n
It was a visible symbol of progress in fighting that had been savage and costly and had so far offered few visible markers of achievement.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The flag was small \u2014 roughly three feet by four and a half feet \u2014 but the men on the beach could see it.<\/p>\n
Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had come ashore that morning to observe the assault.<\/p>\n
When he saw the flag go up, he turned to General Holland Smith and said, according to later accounts, that raising the flag on Suribachi meant that the Marine Corps would exist for the next five hundred years.<\/p>\n
He wanted the flag as a souvenir.<\/p>\n
The Marine battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chandler Johnson, heard about the plan to take the first flag and decided to replace it with a larger one \u2014 a flag that the whole beachhead could see, and one that would stay on the mountain rather than disappear into a military collection.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He sent runners back to the beach to find a larger flag.<\/p>\n
One was located on a transport ship \u2014 a flag roughly four feet ten inches by eight feet, roughly twice the size of the first.<\/p>\n
A five-man patrol \u2014 Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, Private First Class Rene Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Private First Class Franklin Sousley \u2014 plus Navy pharmacist’s mate John Bradley, was assigned to take the larger flag to the top and raise it.<\/p>\n
They carried the heavy metal pipe that would serve as the flagpole.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joe Rosenthal was on his way up the mountain with two other photographers when he encountered Marines coming back down.<\/p>\n
They told him that a flag had already been raised.<\/p>\n
He continued up anyway, unsure of what he’d find.<\/p>\n
He arrived near the summit as the second group was preparing to raise the larger flag.<\/p>\n
He almost walked past.<\/p>\n
He scrambled to position himself on a mound of rubble nearby, raising himself enough to shoot over the heads of the Marines.<\/p>\n
The pole with the flag attached went up.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rosenthal saw the moment coming, calculated his angle, pressed the shutter.<\/p>\n
He wasn’t sure he had gotten it.<\/p>\n
He shot a second picture \u2014 a posed group shot of the Marines waving and cheering \u2014 which he was certain was a good image.<\/p>\n
He sent both frames back to Guam for processing without having seen either one.<\/p>\n
The photograph that came back from the darkroom was the candid shot.<\/p>\n
The one he almost missed.<\/p>\n
Within days, it was everywhere.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What The Photograph Became Before Hayes Left The Island<\/p>\n
Joe Rosenthal’s photograph was transmitted by radiophoto from Guam on February 25, 1945.<\/p>\n
Within forty-eight hours, it had appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the United States and around the world.<\/p>\n
The image landed at a particular moment in the war.<\/p>\n
The Pacific campaign had been grinding and costly and distant \u2014 fought on islands whose names most Americans couldn’t have located on a map before they became sites of bloody battles.<\/p>\n
The photographs that came back from the Pacific were often technically difficult to capture and sometimes showed things the public found hard to look at directly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rosenthal’s image was different.<\/p>\n
It was dynamic, compositionally perfect, and it carried a symbolic charge that was immediately recognizable: men working together to raise their country’s flag on a height captured at great cost.<\/p>\n
President Roosevelt saw it and ordered the six men identified and brought home for a war bond tour.<\/p>\n
The Seventh War Loan drive needed a boost.<\/p>\n
The war in Europe was approaching its end, but the Pacific war still stretched toward a horizon that military planners estimated could include a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands.<\/p>\n
The photograph could be the centerpiece of a bond campaign.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The men in it could be the faces of that campaign.<\/p>\n
There was one problem.<\/p>\n
Identifying the men took days, and the identifications had to be made under combat conditions on an island where the fighting was still intense.<\/p>\n
Three of the six men in the photograph \u2014 Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, and Private First Class Franklin Sousley \u2014 were killed in action on Iwo Jima within two weeks of the flag raising.<\/p>\n
They would never leave the island alive.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The initial identifications made on Iwo Jima were not entirely accurate.<\/p>\n
Harlon Block was initially misidentified as Hank Hansen, a Marine who had taken part in the first flag raising.<\/p>\n
This error \u2014 made in haste under combat conditions \u2014 would persist for years in official records and would eventually become one of the causes Ira Hayes took up after the war, at considerable personal cost.<\/p>\n
The three survivors \u2014 Private First Class Rene Gagnon, Pharmacist’s Mate John Bradley, and Private First Class Ira Hayes \u2014 were pulled off Iwo Jima as the fighting was still in progress and brought home for the bond tour.<\/p>\n
Hayes, by some accounts, did not want to leave.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The island was still being fought over.<\/p>\n
His comrades were still in the fight.<\/p>\n
The idea of going home to be celebrated while other Marines continued to die on the same ground he had just come from was, to Hayes as he later expressed it, deeply uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
He reportedly asked to stay with his unit.<\/p>\n
He was ordered to go.<\/p>\n
The Bond Tour And The Gap Between The Image And The Man<\/p>\n
The Seventh War Loan tour began in April 1945 and took Rene Gagnon, John Bradley, and Ira Hayes across the country on a schedule that would have exhausted men in much better shape than combat veterans who had just come off one of the most brutal battles in Marine Corps history.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They appeared at rallies, at fundraising dinners, at sporting events, at factory gatherings, at political celebrations.<\/p>\n
They met politicians and celebrities and military leaders.<\/p>\n
They were photographed endlessly, often posed in reenactments of the flag raising for promotional images.<\/p>\n
They spoke \u2014 or were expected to speak \u2014 about their experience, about the battle, about the meaning of the flag and of what they had seen.<\/p>\n
The total raised by the Seventh War Loan drive was enormous \u2014 over $26 billion in war bonds, which was substantially more than previous drives had generated.<\/p>\n
The photograph and the tour were credited with much of that success.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For Ira Hayes, the tour was a particular kind of ordeal.<\/p>\n
He was quiet and reserved by nature \u2014 a man who, by all accounts, was more comfortable listening than speaking, more comfortable in small groups than in crowds.<\/p>\n
He was being asked to be the opposite: a public figure, a symbol, a face of heroism on a national stage.<\/p>\n
He was being asked to tell a story \u2014 the story of the flag raising \u2014 that he found impossible to separate from the larger story of what Iwo Jima had actually been: not a moment of triumph but thirty-six days of slaughter, in which 6,821 Americans died and his own comrades, including the men who had raised that flag with him, were killed.<\/p>\n
He was also confronting something specific to his experience as a Native man being celebrated by white America.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was constantly described in press coverage as the Pima Indian, the Indian Marine, the American Indian from the Arizona desert who had helped raise the flag.<\/p>\n
His Akimel O’odham identity was used as a kind of flavor for the story \u2014 a bit of American color, a symbol of national unity that crossed racial lines.<\/p>\n
But the actual content of that identity \u2014 the history of the Gila River people, the dispossession, the federal policies that had impoverished his community, the fact that he came from a place where the political and legal status of Native people was markedly unequal to that of white Americans \u2014 none of that was part of the story the bond tour wanted to tell.<\/p>\n
Hayes reportedly told people who asked about his experience that the real heroes were the men who didn’t come home \u2014 men like Michael Strank and Franklin Sousley and Harlon Block.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He is said to have repeated some version of this in various forms throughout the tour.<\/p>\n
He was describing what he actually believed.<\/p>\n
He had survived when others hadn’t, and the photograph had elevated him and the other survivors to a symbolic status that he felt those who died deserved at least as much.<\/p>\n
The bond tour also introduced Hayes to a pattern that would follow him for the rest of his life: alcohol.<\/p>\n
He began drinking heavily during the tour.<\/p>\n
The social engagements required drinking.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The settings were almost always ones where alcohol was present and where declining would have been conspicuous.<\/p>\n
He was a young man under enormous and unfamiliar pressure, far from home, separated from the community and the landscape that had shaped him, being asked to be something he wasn’t \u2014 and alcohol was available and it helped, for a while, in the way it helps.<\/p>\n
By the time the tour ended, the pattern was established.<\/p>\n
It would prove very hard to break.<\/p>\n
What He Carried Back From Iwo Jima That No One Could Photograph<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The bond tour ended in the summer of 1945.<\/p>\n
The war in Europe had ended in May.<\/p>\n
The war in the Pacific ended in August following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan’s subsequent surrender.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes was discharged from the Marine Corps in December 1945.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-two years old and he had been to Iwo Jima and back and had spent months being a public symbol of American heroism.<\/p>\n
He went home to the Gila River reservation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What he brought back with him is what every combat veteran of a brutal campaign brings back: memories that don’t arrange themselves into a coherent narrative, that surface at unpredictable moments and refuse to stay in the past.<\/p>\n
In 1945, the medical and psychological communities did not have the diagnostic framework for post-traumatic stress disorder that exists today.<\/p>\n
The condition had different names in different wars \u2014 shell shock in World War I, combat fatigue or battle fatigue in World War II \u2014 and was often understood, if it was acknowledged at all, as a weakness rather than as an injury.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes had watched men die on the beaches and slopes of Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had participated in the kind of close-quarters combat that kills not just bodies but something less easily named.<\/p>\n
The marines around him in those thirty-six days had been reduced, sometimes literally, to components.<\/p>\n
He had survived and they had not, and the question of why \u2014 why him, why not them \u2014 is one that combat survivors carry without being able to answer it, and the carrying of an unanswerable question does its own kind of damage.<\/p>\n
He also carried a specific guilt that had a specific name: survivor’s guilt.<\/p>\n
He had been pulled off the island while the battle was still ongoing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had been taken away from his unit and sent to be celebrated.<\/p>\n
And the men he had raised a flag with \u2014 Strank, Block, Sousley \u2014 had stayed, and had died.<\/p>\n
The three men who came home from the flag raising were the survivors.<\/p>\n
The three who didn’t come home were dead.<\/p>\n
There was no logic to it.<\/p>\n
There was no comfort in the bond tour, which had taken him further from the truth of what he had experienced rather than closer to it.<\/p>\n
The reservation he returned to was the same one he had left.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The poverty was the same.<\/p>\n
The limited opportunities were the same.<\/p>\n
The federal policies that constrained Akimel O’odham economic and political life were largely unchanged.<\/p>\n
The war had not transformed the Gila River Indian Community.<\/p>\n
The country had celebrated Hayes and what he represented without meaningfully addressing the conditions of the community he came from.<\/p>\n
He tried farming.<\/p>\n
He tried working in cotton fields.<\/p>\n
He tried other jobs.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He found stability difficult to maintain.<\/p>\n
The photograph followed him everywhere \u2014 people recognized him, expected him to be the symbol they had seen on the posters and the stamps, and were often confused or disappointed by the quiet, struggling man they found instead.<\/p>\n
The drinking continued.<\/p>\n
It intensified.<\/p>\n
He was arrested for public intoxication multiple times in multiple states.<\/p>\n
Newspapers covered the arrests with a consistency they had shown for no other aspect of his post-war life, and the coverage often carried an undercurrent of something close to mockery \u2014 the war hero fallen, the symbol reduced.<\/p>\n
The racism embedded in some of that coverage was not always subtle.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Pima Indian who had raised the flag was now the drunk Indian being arrested.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
None of which is to say that Ira Hayes had no agency or no responsibility for his own choices.<\/p>\n
He was a full human being making choices under conditions of extraordinary psychological pressure and trauma, without meaningful access to the kinds of support \u2014 medical, psychological, community-based \u2014 that might have made different outcomes possible.<\/p>\n
The framing that reduces his post-war struggles to a morality tale about celebrity or weakness misses what the actual circumstances looked like.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Correction He Fought For<\/p>\n
In the years after the war, Ira Hayes took on a mission that may seem small from the outside but that mattered to him enormously: correcting the official identification of Harlon Block.<\/p>\n
The initial identifications of the flag raisers, made on Iwo Jima under combat conditions, had misidentified Block \u2014 a young Marine from Rio Grande City, Texas \u2014 as Hank Hansen, a different Marine.<\/p>\n
Block and Hansen were both in the 28th Marines; both were described as large men with similar physical builds.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the chaos and haste of identifying the men in the photograph, the error was made and recorded.<\/p>\n
Hayes knew the error was an error because he had been there.<\/p>\n
He knew who he had raised that flag with.<\/p>\n
The man officially listed as Hank Hansen was Harlon Block.<\/p>\n
Hayes said so, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen.<\/p>\n
He said it to the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n
He said it to reporters.<\/p>\n
He said it to the Block family, who had been told that their son was not in the photograph.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps was not immediately receptive to correcting the record.<\/p>\n
Official identifications, once made and publicized, take on an institutional weight that makes revision uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
There were also subsequent complications: Hank Hansen had been publicly celebrated as one of the flag raisers, photographs had been taken of him in that role, families had been told things, public narratives had been built.<\/p>\n
Undoing an official identification required admitting an official error.<\/p>\n
Hayes persisted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was not wrong, and eventually the evidence supported him.<\/p>\n
By 1947, following a formal investigation and additional evidence \u2014 including the examination of the photograph itself and the testimony of people who had known both Block and Hansen \u2014 the Marine Corps officially corrected the record.<\/p>\n
Harlon Block was identified as the figure formerly listed as Hank Hansen.<\/p>\n
The Block family learned that their son had been in the photograph after all.<\/p>\n
This correction mattered to Hayes more than most accounts of his life have taken time to explain.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had known who was in that photograph.<\/p>\n
He had been there.<\/p>\n
The official record had gotten it wrong, and in getting it wrong, it had taken something from a dead man and his family \u2014 the accurate historical acknowledgment of his presence at a moment that his country had decided was monumentally significant.<\/p>\n
Hayes fought to give that back, and he succeeded.<\/p>\n
It was, given everything else that was happening in his life during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a remarkable act of persistent advocacy.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He did it anyway because it was right.<\/p>\n
The Symbol He Could Not Escape<\/p>\n
Around 1950, a reporter asked Ira Hayes what it felt like to be famous.<\/p>\n
Hayes’s response, as it was later reported, was something close to: he didn’t feel famous.<\/p>\n
He felt like Ira Hayes, and he just wanted to be left alone.<\/p>\n
The photograph would not leave him alone.<\/p>\n
Joe Rosenthal’s image had by this point achieved a status that went beyond famous.<\/p>\n
It had become something close to sacred in the American visual vocabulary \u2014 a representation of collective effort, sacrifice, and triumph that carried a symbolic weight no single image should perhaps be asked to carry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It appeared on a 3-cent postage stamp in 1945, reproduced millions of times and sent through the mail with every ordinary transaction of American life.<\/p>\n
It was recreated in bronze as the central image of the Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954 at a ceremony attended by President Eisenhower, which sits across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
The memorial is enormous \u2014 the figures stand nearly thirty-two feet tall \u2014 and it shows the six flag raisers in the moment Rosenthal captured, rendered permanent in metal.<\/p>\n
The names of every Marine Corps engagement since 1775 are inscribed on the monument’s base.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It has become one of the most visited memorials in the Washington area.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes attended the dedication ceremony.<\/p>\n
Photographs from that day show him standing with other veterans, in a dark suit, looking at the monument that bore his likeness thirty-two feet high.<\/p>\n
What he thought about it, in that moment, is not recorded.<\/p>\n
He died six weeks later.<\/p>\n
Between the end of the bond tour and the dedication of the memorial, Hayes had lived a decade of struggle.<\/p>\n
He worked when he could and drank when he couldn’t stop.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was arrested more than fifty times for public intoxication by various accounts, in Arizona, in Illinois, in other states where his travels took him.<\/p>\n
The news covered the arrests.<\/p>\n
The coverage was often condescending or worse.<\/p>\n
He returned to the Gila River reservation repeatedly, drawn back by family and community and the landscape that was the only landscape he had ever called home.<\/p>\n
The reservation offered little in the way of economic opportunity \u2014 the systematic denial of water rights that had defined Akimel O’odham history for decades was still an open wound \u2014 but it offered belonging.<\/p>\n
He was not the Pima hero there.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was Ira.<\/p>\n
He was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone the community had watched grow up.<\/p>\n
But he could not stay stable.<\/p>\n
The drinking took him away repeatedly.<\/p>\n
The pattern cycled: stability, disruption, arrest, return.<\/p>\n
He tried to stop drinking.<\/p>\n
By his own accounts and those of people who knew him, he was not indifferent to what was happening to him.<\/p>\n
He was not simply self-destructive or careless.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was a man with an addiction he couldn’t defeat without help that he didn’t have access to, dealing with psychological wounds that the medical establishment of his era had little framework for treating, in a community that had its own layers of historical trauma and limited resources.<\/p>\n
None of this is a simple story.<\/p>\n
None of it fits neatly into a narrative of either heroic suffering or personal failure.<\/p>\n
It is a human story, which means it is more complicated and more painful than either of those frames allows.<\/p>\n
The Night The Story Ended<\/p>\n
On the morning of January 24, 1955, Ira Hayes was found dead on the Sacaton Flats area of the Gila River Indian Reservation.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The circumstances of his death have been described variously by different sources, and it is important to be precise about what is documented and what is uncertain.<\/p>\n
He had been drinking the previous evening at a card game.<\/p>\n
He was found face-down in a shallow irrigation ditch.<\/p>\n
The official cause of death was listed as exposure and alcohol poisoning.<\/p>\n
It was winter in the Arizona desert \u2014 cold at night, cold enough to be dangerous to a man who had passed out in the open.<\/p>\n
The exact sequence of events that led to his death was not fully reconstructed and may not be reconstructable at this distance.<\/p>\n
He was found on his reservation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the land his people had been living on since before any written record of the region existed.<\/p>\n
On the land from which the water had been taken, the land to which he had returned again and again throughout his adult life, the land that was the ground of everything he understood about himself.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old.<\/p>\n
He had survived Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n
He had survived the bond tour.<\/p>\n
He had survived a decade of struggle that would have defeated many people much sooner.<\/p>\n
He had corrected Harlon Block’s identification.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He had tried to live in the shadow of a photograph that was everywhere and that refused to release him.<\/p>\n
And then, on a cold January night on the reservation where he was born, he died.<\/p>\n
News of his death spread quickly.<\/p>\n
It was major news \u2014 the Pima Indian from the famous photograph, dead at thirty-two.<\/p>\n
The coverage was generally respectful in tone, though some of it carried the same limitations that had characterized coverage of his life: a focus on the photograph, a framing that saw him primarily through the lens of what that image had made him, rather than through the lens of who he actually was.<\/p>\n
What Happened At Arlington<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The United States government buried Ira Hayes at Arlington National Cemetery on February 2, 1955.<\/p>\n
Vice President Richard Nixon spoke at the service.<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps provided full military honors.<\/p>\n
The ceremony was attended by representatives of the military, by officials, by family members who had traveled from Arizona to be there.<\/p>\n
It was a state occasion, fitting for someone whose image had become so central to the national self-image during the war.<\/p>\n
Arlington National Cemetery, where Hayes was buried, is the most honored burial ground in the United States \u2014 the resting place of presidents, generals, Supreme Court justices, and hundreds of thousands of American service members.<\/p>\n
Hayes was buried there because he was a decorated Marine, a veteran of one of the most famous battles of World War II.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was given a place that the country reserves for those it has decided to honor.<\/p>\n
There is a particular complexity to this.<\/p>\n
The country that buried Ira Hayes at Arlington was the same country whose federal policies had stripped the Akimel O’odham of their river water and left his community in poverty.<\/p>\n
The military that gave him full honors was the same institution that had pulled him off Iwo Jima and sent him on a bond tour he didn’t want.<\/p>\n
The ceremony was dignified and genuine in its way, but it was also, at least in part, a continuation of the same process by which the country had used Ira Hayes as a symbol without fully reckoning with what his life had actually contained.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
His family was from the Gila River reservation.<\/p>\n
His community was the Akimel O’odham.<\/p>\n
The ground that made the most sense, in terms of the life he had lived, was the Arizona desert where he had been born and where he had died.<\/p>\n
But he was buried at Arlington, in the national cemetery, because the nation had decided he was its symbol.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-six years old when the photograph was taken.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two when he died.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the six years between the dedication of the Marine Corps War Memorial and his death, he had been reduced by many accounts to a figure of tragedy rather than seen as the complex human being he was.<\/p>\n
How Later America Tried To Understand Him<\/p>\n
The years after Hayes’s death produced a series of attempts to tell his story \u2014 in music, in film, and in other cultural forms \u2014 that collectively reveal how difficult it has been for American culture to see him clearly.<\/p>\n
The most famous of these is “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” written by Peter LaFarge and recorded most influentially by Johnny Cash in 1964.<\/p>\n
The song tells the broad outlines of Hayes’s story \u2014 the flag raising, the bond tour, the post-war struggle, the death \u2014 in a ballad form that emphasizes tragedy and injustice.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Cash’s recording was a powerful piece of advocacy music; he fought to have it included on his Columbia album over the label’s objections, and the song helped bring Hayes’s story to an audience that might not otherwise have known it.<\/p>\n
But a ballad, by its nature, simplifies.<\/p>\n
It has to.<\/p>\n
It compresses a human life into a verse-chorus structure with three or four minutes to make its case.<\/p>\n
The Hayes of “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” is a figure of pure tragedy \u2014 unjustly discarded by the country he served, destroyed by its indifference.<\/p>\n
That narrative is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete.<\/p>\n
It turns Hayes into a symbol again \u2014 this time a symbol of Native American suffering and American hypocrisy \u2014 in a way that, while sympathetic, still doesn’t quite leave room for the full human being.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 1961 film The Outsider, starring Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes, took a similar approach.<\/p>\n
Curtis played Hayes sympathetically \u2014 the film acknowledged his post-war struggles and the pressures that fame had created \u2014 but it suffered from the inevitable limitations of a Hollywood production of its era, including the casting of a white actor in the central role.<\/p>\n
The film reached large audiences and helped solidify Hayes’s place in the popular consciousness, but it filtered his story through the conventions of 1960s Hollywood storytelling.<\/p>\n
Other cultural treatments have varied in their sensitivity and accuracy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hayes has been the subject of poetry, of theatrical productions, of documentaries, of biographical essays.<\/p>\n
The cumulative picture that emerges from this body of work is of a man who has inspired genuine sympathy and admiration, whose story has been used repeatedly to make points about Native American history and the costs of war and the gap between public image and private reality \u2014 but who remains, in much of this work, more symbol than person.<\/p>\n
What gets lost in the symbolic version is the specificity.<\/p>\n
The particular texture of growing up on the Gila River reservation in the 1930s.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The particular quality of Akimel O’odham life and culture and history that shaped who he was.<\/p>\n
The particular experience of being a Paramarine \u2014 the training, the camaraderie, the specific way that elite military service forms a young man’s sense of himself.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 the deaths, the terror, the chaos, the loss.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Photograph And What It Cannot Contain<\/p>\n
Joe Rosenthal’s photograph is a great photograph.<\/p>\n
It is compositionally brilliant \u2014 the diagonal line of the flagpole against the sky, the upward reach of the figures, the sense of collective effort and upward momentum \u2014 and it captures a genuine moment rather than a staged one.<\/p>\n
Rosenthal did not direct the men.<\/p>\n
He found his angle and pressed the shutter at the right moment.<\/p>\n
The image is real in that fundamental sense.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But every photograph is a slice of time.<\/p>\n
It contains what was in front of the lens for the fraction of a second the shutter was open.<\/p>\n
It contains nothing before that moment and nothing after.<\/p>\n
It cannot contain the four days of brutal fighting that preceded it, or the context in which the men who raised that flag had been living.<\/p>\n
It cannot contain the deaths of Strank, Block, and Sousley, who would be killed in the weeks following the flag raising.<\/p>\n
It cannot contain the full weight of what it meant to be alive on Iwo Jima in February 1945.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The photograph also cannot contain Ira Hayes’s discomfort with being in it \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
He said, repeatedly and in various ways over the years, that he felt like a fake.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
He had not felt triumphant.<\/p>\n
He had felt, as anyone who has survived a battle in which others died must feel, some version of guilty and shaken and uncertain.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That gap is not unique to Ira Hayes.<\/p>\n
It is a common experience of combat veterans who are celebrated as heroes by people who have not seen combat \u2014 the mismatch between the symbolic function the veteran serves and the actual experience of the war they carried.<\/p>\n
But Hayes’s version of this gap was sharpened by two additional dimensions.<\/p>\n
The first was the photograph itself, which was not just famous but ubiquitous.<\/p>\n
There was no escaping it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was on stamps and posters and eventually on a thirty-two-foot bronze memorial.<\/p>\n
It was reproduced in every history book.<\/p>\n
It followed him everywhere he went.<\/p>\n
Other veterans who struggled after World War II could at least be anonymous in their struggle.<\/p>\n
Hayes could not be anonymous.<\/p>\n
His face was known.<\/p>\n
The second was his identity as an Akimel O’odham man from the Gila River reservation \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The dissonance between the symbol and the reality was not just psychological for Hayes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was political.<\/p>\n
The country that celebrated him as a hero had not and would not address the fundamental injustices that structured life in his community.<\/p>\n
What The Water Finally Meant<\/p>\n
Here is a detail that matters and that rarely appears in the simplified version of Ira Hayes’s story.<\/p>\n
The water that had been diverted from the Gila River \u2014 the water that the Akimel O’odham had been farming with for centuries, the water whose absence had collapsed the agricultural economy of Hayes’s community before he was born \u2014 was finally, partially, restored through federal action decades after his death.<\/p>\n
The Central Arizona Project, which began delivering Colorado River water to the Gila River Indian Community in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent legal settlements that confirmed substantial water rights for the Akimel O’odham, represented the beginning of something the community had sought for a century.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The 2004 Arizona Water Settlements Act eventually provided the Gila River Indian Community with the largest single water rights settlement in American history to that point.<\/p>\n
The water that had been taken from them was, in some legal and practical measure, being returned.<\/p>\n
This happened fifty years after Ira Hayes died.<\/p>\n
He did not live to see it.<\/p>\n
He did not live to see the water come back to the community his people had built along the river.<\/p>\n
He did not live to see the legal recognition of rights that should have been protected all along.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old when he died on the flats of the reservation, and the settlement that partially addressed the injustice his community had suffered was still half a century away.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The story of the water is the story behind the story of Ira Hayes.<\/p>\n
It is the history that explains the poverty he grew up in.<\/p>\n
It is the history that explains why the opportunities available to him when he came home from the war were so limited.<\/p>\n
It is the history that the bond tour didn’t mention and the photograph didn’t show and the bronze memorial in Arlington couldn’t contain.<\/p>\n
He was the son of a people who had been rich in the thing that matters most in the desert, and from whom that thing had been taken.<\/p>\n
He grew up in the absence of what should have been there.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He carried that absence with him into the Marine Corps and onto the slopes of Suribachi and into the bond tour and back to the reservation, and it was there, that absence, underneath everything else that happened to him.<\/p>\n
What He Said That We Should Have Listened To<\/p>\n
Across the decade between the war’s end and his death, Ira Hayes gave various interviews, made various public statements, and was quoted in various newspaper articles.<\/p>\n
He was not a man who sought attention or who enjoyed the spotlight, which makes what he did say, when he said it, worth attending to carefully.<\/p>\n
He talked about the men who died.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He talked about Strank and Sousley and Block \u2014 he named them, returned to them, insisted on their presence in the story.<\/p>\n
He did not want credit for something he understood as a shared act, and he absolutely did not want credit at the expense of the men who had done the same thing and not survived.<\/p>\n
His insistence on naming the dead was not false modesty.<\/p>\n
It was a form of witness.<\/p>\n
He was testifying to what he had seen.<\/p>\n
He talked about not deserving the attention he was getting.<\/p>\n
This is often framed, in later accounts, as evidence of his humility or his psychological fragility.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But it can also be read as a more specific claim: that the public understanding of what he had done was wrong, and that being celebrated for a simplified version of something complex was its own kind of injury.<\/p>\n
He talked, less frequently and more carefully, about the reservation and his community.<\/p>\n
He knew that his public role required him to be a symbol of national unity \u2014 the Indian fighting for America, proof that this was a war for all Americans regardless of background.<\/p>\n
He performed that role because he had been asked to and because he was not without patriotism.<\/p>\n
But he was also a man who knew what he was going home to, and the gap between the national celebration and the reality of that homecoming was not one he could fully articulate in the settings he was put in.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If we had listened more carefully to what he said, we might have heard in it a critique that his public role prevented him from making directly: that a country which uses its Native veterans as symbols of its greatness while failing to address the conditions in those veterans’ communities is not fully honoring what it claims to honor.<\/p>\n
He was a patriot who knew that the country he had served had not fully kept its part of the deal.<\/p>\n
He honored the men he served with.<\/p>\n
He tried to set the historical record straight when it was wrong.<\/p>\n
He struggled, very publicly and very painfully, with the damage that the war and the fame had done to him.<\/p>\n
And he died young, on his reservation, in the desert.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Long Echo<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes has not faded from American memory.<\/p>\n
In some ways, his presence in the culture has grown rather than diminished since his death.<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954 and renewed and visited constantly in the decades since, keeps his image permanently in view \u2014 thirty-two feet of bronze, just across from the capital of the country he served.<\/p>\n
The postage stamp.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Cash song.<\/p>\n
The Tony Curtis film.<\/p>\n
The documentaries.<\/p>\n
The museum exhibits.<\/p>\n
The entries in every significant reference work on World War II.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in Washington, D.C., in 2004, mounted extensive discussions of Native American military service that included Hayes’s story \u2014 this time told with more attention to the Akimel O’odham context, to the history of his community, to the dimensions of his experience that earlier tellings had minimized.<\/p>\n
The Gila River Indian Community has honored Hayes in various ways over the years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A memorial to him stands on the reservation.<\/p>\n
He is remembered there not primarily as the man in the photograph but as one of their own \u2014 someone who left, served, suffered, and came back, as many of their people did.<\/p>\n
The Akimel O’odham continue to live on the Gila River reservation, which now has a functioning water supply and a tribal economy that includes a major resort casino and various enterprises that have substantially improved the community’s economic situation compared to the decades Hayes lived through.<\/p>\n
The continuity between his world and the present-day community is real, even as the specifics have changed enormously.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Native American veterans continue to serve in the United States military at rates that exceed their proportion of the general population.<\/p>\n
The tradition of military service that brought Hayes to the Marines in 1942 continues.<\/p>\n
The complications that come with that service \u2014 the question of what it means to fight for a country that has not always fulfilled its obligations to your community \u2014 also continue, though the specific context is different in every generation.<\/p>\n
The identification controversy around the Iwo Jima flag raisers has not been fully settled, even now.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the Marine Corps launched an extensive review of the identifications of the men in the photograph, using modern forensic and documentary evidence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The review concluded that John Bradley \u2014 the Navy pharmacist’s mate long identified as one of the six men in the photograph \u2014 may actually not be in it, and that Navy corpsman Harold Schultz may be one of the figures instead.<\/p>\n
This finding, which Bradley’s family disputed, suggests that the identification process has been even more complicated than previously understood.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes’s identification in the photograph has not been seriously disputed.<\/p>\n
He was there.<\/p>\n
He raised the flag.<\/p>\n
The photograph shows him, on the far left, one hand on the pole.<\/p>\n
That much, at least, is certain.<\/p>\n
What The Photograph Still Cannot Tell You<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Look at the photograph again.<\/p>\n
Joe Rosenthal’s image, the most reproduced photograph in American history, the image that became a postage stamp and a bronze memorial and a symbol of the national will.<\/p>\n
Six figures, leaning into the effort of raising a heavy metal pipe with a flag attached to the top.<\/p>\n
The pole rising diagonally across the frame.<\/p>\n
The grey Pacific sky behind them.<\/p>\n
The volcanic rock and debris of the summit of Mount Suribachi beneath their boots.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On the far left, a young man with his left hand on the pole.<\/p>\n
His face is partially turned away from the camera.<\/p>\n
He is one of the six.<\/p>\n
He is twenty-two years old.<\/p>\n
He has been on this island for four days.<\/p>\n
In those four days, he has seen things that will stay with him for the rest of his life, which will last only ten more years.<\/p>\n
Three of the six men in this photograph will be dead within the month.<\/p>\n
The battle for this island is not over.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It will not be over for another thirty-two days.<\/p>\n
By the time it is, 6,821 Americans and virtually the entire Japanese garrison will be dead.<\/p>\n
The young man on the left will be pulled off this island in a few weeks and taken home to be celebrated as a hero.<\/p>\n
He will be told, in effect, that this photograph is his life now \u2014 that he exists, in the public imagination, at this moment, in this posture, on this mountain, raising this flag.<\/p>\n
He will spend the next decade trying to live inside an image that was never large enough to hold him.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He is Ira Hamilton Hayes.<\/p>\n
He is Akimel O’odham.<\/p>\n
He is from the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.<\/p>\n
He is the son of farmers who tried to work land from which the water had been taken.<\/p>\n
He is a Marine who completed parachute training and chose the hardest path because it was the hardest path.<\/p>\n
He is a young man who survived something terrible and came out of it carrying everything that survival in such circumstances requires a person to carry.<\/p>\n
He is not the symbol.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He is the man.<\/p>\n
The photograph captured the symbol.<\/p>\n
This story is about the man.<\/p>\n
They are not the same thing.<\/p>\n
They never were.<\/p>\n
And the distance between them \u2014 the distance between the permanent image of triumph and the actual human being who lived and struggled and died on the Gila River reservation at thirty-two \u2014 is where the real story lives.<\/p>\n
That distance is what we owe it to him to see.<\/p>\n
The Reservation In January<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Gila River Indian Community in January is the desert in winter \u2014 dry, cold at night, the light hard and bright in the daytime.<\/p>\n
The land that Ira Hayes was born on and died on stretches flat in most directions, the mountains visible in the distance, the sky enormous in the way that only desert sky can be enormous.<\/p>\n
It is the land that his people had been farming for centuries before anything called the United States existed.<\/p>\n
It is the land from which the water was taken.<\/p>\n
It is the land to which the water has begun to be returned, slowly, through the legal and political processes that move at the pace of institutions rather than the pace of human lives.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died there on a cold January night.<\/p>\n
He was found in the morning.<\/p>\n
He was buried at Arlington, because the country wanted to bury him in the most honored ground it had.<\/p>\n
But the land that made him was the Gila River land.<\/p>\n
The people that made him were the Akimel O’odham.<\/p>\n
The traditions that shaped his sense of obligation and honor and community were the traditions of a people who had survived centuries of change and pressure by holding onto what mattered most.<\/p>\n
He carried those traditions into the Marines and into Iwo Jima and onto the slopes of Suribachi and into the cold Pacific morning when the flag went up.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He carried them through the bond tour and the arrests and the decade of struggle.<\/p>\n
He carried them back to the reservation, again and again, because that was home and there was nowhere else that was home.<\/p>\n
The photograph is still everywhere.<\/p>\n
It will always be everywhere.<\/p>\n
It has passed into the permanent iconography of American history in a way that no single life story, however carefully told, can undo.<\/p>\n
But behind the photograph, in a specific place in the Sonoran Desert, a community still exists that knew him not as a symbol but as a person.<\/p>\n
His name is remembered there the way names are remembered in communities that have survived by remembering their people: not as an image on a stamp or a figure in bronze, but as someone specific.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Someone who grew up here.<\/p>\n
Someone whose family is still here.<\/p>\n
Someone who went away and came back and went away again and finally came back to stay.<\/p>\n
Ira Hamilton Hayes.<\/p>\n
Akimel O’odham.<\/p>\n
The man before the photograph.<\/p>\n
The man inside the photograph.<\/p>\n
The man the photograph could never quite reach.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The man who deserves, at this distance, to be seen whole.<\/p>\n
The Men He Raised The Flag With<\/p>\n
To understand what Iwo Jima cost Ira Hayes, it helps to understand the men who were standing next to him when Rosenthal pressed the shutter.<\/p>\n
Sergeant Michael Strank was twenty-four years old, a Czech immigrant’s son from Franklin Borough, Pennsylvania, who had enlisted in the Marines before Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
He was the senior man in the group \u2014 the one who, by various accounts, gave the quiet command that set the flag raising in motion.<\/p>\n
The men who served under him described Strank as someone who put his Marines first, the kind of sergeant who placed himself between danger and his men when he could.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Strank was killed on March 1, 1945, six days after the flag raising, by a mortar round.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-five.<\/p>\n
Corporal Harlon Block was from Rio Grande City, Texas.<\/p>\n
He was nineteen years old at the time of the flag raising.<\/p>\n
He had been a football star at Mission High School, recruited to play at the University of Texas, but had enlisted in the Marines instead.<\/p>\n
His mother, Belle Block, later said she had recognized him in the photograph almost immediately \u2014 from his posture, from the way he planted his body.<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps initially said he wasn’t in it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hayes knew that Belle Block was right.<\/p>\n
Block was killed on March 1, 1945 \u2014 the same day as Strank, possibly by the same mortar round.<\/p>\n
He was nineteen.<\/p>\n
Private First Class Franklin Sousley was from Flemingsburg, Kentucky.<\/p>\n
He was nineteen years old, the youngest of the group.<\/p>\n
He had grown up on a tobacco farm and enlisted in the Marines in the spring of 1944.<\/p>\n
By the accounts of those who knew him, he was cheerful and well-liked, someone who kept the men around him in better spirits.<\/p>\n
Sousley was killed on March 21, 1945, by a Japanese sniper.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was nineteen years old, and the war ended less than five months after his death.<\/p>\n
Private First Class Rene Gagnon was from Manchester, New Hampshire.<\/p>\n
He was seventeen when he enlisted \u2014 his mother had to sign his enlistment papers \u2014 and eighteen at the time of the flag raising.<\/p>\n
Gagnon survived the war and went home to New Hampshire, but his post-war life was in many ways as difficult as Hayes’s, though less publicly documented.<\/p>\n
He struggled to find work and to build a stable life in the shadow of the photograph.<\/p>\n
He died in 1979 at the age of fifty-four.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Navy Pharmacist’s Mate John Bradley was from Antigo, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-one at the time of the flag raising.<\/p>\n
Bradley survived the war, returned to Wisconsin, married, raised a family, and ran a funeral parlor.<\/p>\n
He rarely spoke about Iwo Jima in the decades that followed and reportedly did not discuss it with his children.<\/p>\n
His son James Bradley wrote about him in the 2000 book Flags of Our Fathers, which later became a Clint Eastwood film.<\/p>\n
The 2016 Marine Corps review of the identifications raised questions about whether Bradley was actually in the photograph, suggesting his figure may have been Navy corpsman Harold Schultz instead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bradley died in 1994.<\/p>\n
These were the men Ira Hayes raised the flag with.<\/p>\n
Three of them were dead within a month.<\/p>\n
One survived the war but struggled afterward.<\/p>\n
One rebuilt a quieter life in the Midwest.<\/p>\n
And Hayes came home to Arizona and the Gila River reservation, carrying all of them.<\/p>\n
When he said the real heroes were the men who didn’t come home, these were the names he was speaking.<\/p>\n
Strank and Block and Sousley.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The three who stayed on the island.<\/p>\n
He carried their names for ten years.<\/p>\n
What The Bond Tour Required Of Him<\/p>\n
It is worth spending more time with the bond tour, because the experience of it shaped everything that followed in Hayes’s life, and because the standard accounts tend to summarize it in ways that miss what it actually demanded of a specific kind of young man.<\/p>\n
The Seventh War Loan drive began in April 1945, with Iwo Jima barely secured and the Pacific war still grinding toward an uncertain end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The scale of the drive was enormous \u2014 the Treasury Department needed to raise funds for what military planners estimated could be the most costly phase of the entire war: the invasion of the Japanese home islands, which was still the assumed path to victory before the atomic bombings changed the strategic calculus entirely.<\/p>\n
The bond tour featuring the three surviving flag raisers was central to the marketing campaign for the drive.<\/p>\n
Rene Gagnon, John Bradley, and Ira Hayes were flown to Washington in April, met by military officials and politicians, issued new uniforms, and immediately placed in the machinery of a nationwide promotional campaign.<\/p>\n
They attended events in Washington, New York, Boston, Chicago, and dozens of other cities.<\/p>\n
They appeared at baseball games, at department stores, at factory gatherings of tens of thousands of workers, at formal dinners with business leaders and politicians.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The events were choreographed to maximize the emotional impact of their presence.<\/p>\n
They were frequently asked to reenact the flag raising for promotional photographs \u2014 standing on elevated platforms with a replica flagpole, in poses meant to echo Rosenthal’s image.<\/p>\n
These photographs, of which there are many, show Hayes and his companions posing with practiced expressions of heroic determination for cameras that surrounded them on all sides.<\/p>\n
What those photographs cannot show is the interior experience of performing heroism for an audience when what you know about the actual event is so different from the performance being staged.<\/p>\n
Hayes drank at the events.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The nature of the social occasions \u2014 formal dinners, receptions, cocktail parties \u2014 meant that alcohol was universally present and that abstaining would have been conspicuous in a way that would have created its own problems.<\/p>\n
He was not the only person on the tour who drank, but he drank more than he should have, and by some accounts his behavior at certain events caused concern among the tour’s organizers.<\/p>\n
He was also, during this period, being subjected to something that would be called, in modern terms, racialization.<\/p>\n
The press coverage of the tour consistently identified him as the Pima Indian \u2014 often as the only identification, as though his being Native American was the primary fact about him that warranted comment.<\/p>\n
The other two survivors were described in more individualized terms: Gagnon was from New Hampshire, Bradley was from Wisconsin.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hayes was from the Pima tribe.<\/p>\n
The specificity applied to the white survivors was a different kind of specificity than the generic racial category applied to Hayes.<\/p>\n
This was not subtle, and it was not lost on Hayes.<\/p>\n
He was being used as evidence that America’s war was a war for all its people \u2014 even, implicitly, its Indigenous people.<\/p>\n
The image of a Pima Marine raising the flag alongside white Marines was powerful precisely because it seemed to transcend the racial divisions that still structured American life in 1945.<\/p>\n
But the transcendence was symbolic, not real.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hayes was going to go home to a reservation where the water rights of his people had still not been restored, where economic opportunity was still severely limited, where the legal status of Native Americans remained in important ways unequal to that of white citizens.<\/p>\n
He performed the symbol because he had been ordered to and because it would have taken a kind of political analysis that the nineteen-forties did not offer him to have articulated what he seems to have understood intuitively: that the country was using him in ways that did not fully reckon with who he actually was.<\/p>\n
He was not the only one.<\/p>\n
The bond tour used all three survivors instrumentally.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But Hayes’s use was sharpened by race, and he felt it.<\/p>\n
The Specific Texture Of The Post-War Struggle<\/p>\n
After the bond tour ended and Hayes returned to the Gila River reservation, he entered a period that has been described in many accounts as a decade of drinking and arrests, and that is accurate as far as it goes.<\/p>\n
But it doesn’t go far enough.<\/p>\n
He tried, repeatedly, to build a stable life.<\/p>\n
He worked in cotton fields \u2014 the same kind of agricultural labor his family had always done, now that the Akimel O’odham were farming on land that had been substantially reduced from what their pre-contact territory had been and without the water systems that had made their traditional agriculture flourish.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He tried other work.<\/p>\n
He moved at various points to Chicago and to other cities, where he thought opportunities might be better.<\/p>\n
Chicago, in particular, was a destination for many Native Americans in the post-war years.<\/p>\n
The Bureau of Indian Affairs operated a relocation program that encouraged Native people to move from reservations to urban areas, ostensibly to take advantage of better economic opportunities.<\/p>\n
The program was part of a broader federal policy in the late 1940s and 1950s called termination \u2014 a policy aimed at ending the special legal relationship between the federal government and tribal nations, assimilating Native people into the general American population, and ultimately dissolving the reservation system.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hayes was part of the generation that experienced this policy shift, which represented yet another form of the federal government changing the terms of its relationship with Native people without adequate consultation or consent.<\/p>\n
He moved to Chicago for periods but returned repeatedly to the Gila River reservation \u2014 not because the reservation offered better opportunities, but because it was home in a way that Chicago could not be.<\/p>\n
The arrests for public intoxication that marked this period were real, and they were also public in a way that arrests of a non-famous person would not have been.<\/p>\n
Newspapers covered Hayes’s arrests because he was newsworthy \u2014 because the juxtaposition of the war hero from the famous photograph and the man being picked up for public drunkenness was a story that sold papers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The coverage was rarely cruel in an explicit way, but it was also rarely careful about the larger context that might have made it more honest.<\/p>\n
What the arrests reflect, more than personal failure, is the intersection of several things simultaneously: untreated trauma from combat experience, alcohol dependency that had developed during the bond tour and deepened afterward, the absence of meaningful economic opportunity in his community, the psychological weight of being a symbol rather than a person, and the historical context of a community that had been systematically denied the resources that would have made flourishing more possible.<\/p>\n
He was also, during this period, continuing his effort to correct the official identification of Harlon Block.<\/p>\n
This required him to keep engaging with the military, with the press, and with the official apparatus that managed the public memory of Iwo Jima \u2014 all of which were painful for someone who was struggling with that memory.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He persisted anyway.<\/p>\n
It was, in some ways, the most consistent sustained effort he made during these years, and it succeeded.<\/p>\n
The Native Veteran In The American Story<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes was not the only Native American veteran whose post-war experience revealed the contradictions in how the country treated its Indigenous service members.<\/p>\n
Native Americans fought in World War II in large numbers and in every branch of the service.<\/p>\n
The Navajo Code Talkers \u2014 men who used their language to develop an unbreakable battlefield communications code in the Pacific Theater \u2014 are perhaps the most famous example, but Native Americans served in the infantry, in the armored divisions, in the Navy, in the Army Air Forces, across the full range of American military operations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By some estimates, more than 44,000 Native Americans served during World War II, out of a total Native population of approximately 350,000 \u2014 a participation rate higher, per capita, than any other group.<\/p>\n
They came home to reservations that had not fundamentally changed in their legal and economic status.<\/p>\n
They returned to communities where they often could not vote \u2014 Native Americans did not have citizenship rights in all states until 1924, and the right to vote was withheld in some states until much later.<\/p>\n
They returned to places where the federal policy framework that governed their lives was shifting again, toward termination and relocation and away from the tribal sovereignty principles that had characterized the Indian New Deal era of the 1930s.<\/p>\n
The contrast between the contributions Native Americans made to the war effort and the conditions to which they returned was not invisible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was noted by Native leaders, by some journalists, by some members of Congress.<\/p>\n
But it was not acted on in any systematic or transformative way.<\/p>\n
Hayes was one of many Native veterans experiencing this contradiction.<\/p>\n
But he was uniquely visible, because of the photograph, which meant that the contradiction in his specific case was uniquely available to be observed \u2014 if the country had been willing to look at it directly rather than through the flattering lens of the symbol.<\/p>\n
The country was not, in general, willing to do that.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The symbol was too useful and too appealing.<\/p>\n
The actual man, and the actual community he came from, were more complicated.<\/p>\n
The Cold January Morning<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old.<\/p>\n
In ten years of adult life after the war \u2014 ten years during which he moved from place to place, from the reservation to Chicago and back again, from stability to disruption and back again, from public celebration to public arrest and back again \u2014 he had not found a way to live at peace with what the photograph had made of him, or with what Iwo Jima had left in him.<\/p>\n
The specific facts of the night of January 23-24, 1955, are limited.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is documented: Hayes had been drinking at a card game in the Sacaton Flats area of the reservation.<\/p>\n
He was found dead the following morning, outside, face down.<\/p>\n
The official cause of death listed on his death certificate was exposure and alcohol poisoning.<\/p>\n
He was on the Gila River Indian Reservation, the land he had come from and to which he had returned so many times.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old.<\/p>\n
By comparison, Rene Gagnon died at fifty-four.<\/p>\n
John Bradley died at seventy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The document that most immediately connects Hayes to the famous photograph \u2014 the photograph itself \u2014 will outlast everyone who appears in it by centuries, at minimum.<\/p>\n
The photograph is permanent.<\/p>\n
The man was not.<\/p>\n
That asymmetry \u2014 between the enduring image and the brief human life \u2014 is something that the photograph cannot acknowledge from within itself.<\/p>\n
It is something that requires the story behind the photograph to tell.<\/p>\n
He was found in the desert.<\/p>\n
He was buried at Arlington.<\/p>\n
The country that buried him with honors had not solved the problems that had shaped his life.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Those problems \u2014 the water rights, the economic opportunity, the treatment of Native veterans, the question of what a country owes the people it has used as symbols \u2014 those problems outlasted him by decades and some of them are still being worked on.<\/p>\n
He did not live to see any of the progress.<\/p>\n
He died before the water came back to the Gila River.<\/p>\n
He died before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 fully protected Native American voting rights in practice.<\/p>\n
He died before the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 began shifting federal policy toward tribal sovereignty.<\/p>\n
He died before the American Indian Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s brought Native rights into national conversations in ways that his own story had never quite managed.<\/p>\n
He died at thirty-two, in the winter, on the land he came from, and the country gave him a state funeral at Arlington and kept using the photograph.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After The Memorial Was Dedicated<\/p>\n
The Marine Corps War Memorial was dedicated on November 10, 1954 \u2014 the 179th birthday of the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n
The ceremony was attended by President Dwight Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and thousands of others.<\/p>\n
The monument was unveiled to considerable public attention and was immediately recognized as a landmark.<\/p>\n
Ira Hayes was there.<\/p>\n
Photographs from the dedication ceremony show him with other veterans, watching the unveiling.<\/p>\n
He had driven from Arizona, by some accounts, making the journey to be present for the dedication.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The monument showed him, thirty-two feet tall in bronze, at the moment the flag was raised \u2014 permanently young, permanently in the act of raising the flag, permanently at the moment of triumph.<\/p>\n
He was thirty-one years old that November, and he would be dead six weeks later.<\/p>\n
What he thought, looking up at the monument, is not recorded.<\/p>\n
He did not speak extensively about it in the accounts that exist.<\/p>\n
What can be said is that by that point in his life, he had been living with the photograph for nearly a decade \u2014 seeing it reproduced, encountering it in unexpected places, being recognized by strangers because of it, carrying the weight of what it meant for the public while also carrying the weight of what Iwo Jima had actually been.<\/p>\n
The monument made that weight permanent and architectural.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It made it thirty-two feet tall in bronze and placed it across the river from the capital.<\/p>\n
It would stand there for as long as the metal held and the ground beneath it remained solid.<\/p>\n
Six weeks later, he was dead.<\/p>\n
The Distance Between Arlington And The Gila River<\/p>\n
There is a geographic and symbolic distance between Arlington National Cemetery and the Gila River Indian Reservation that is worth dwelling on.<\/p>\n
Arlington is on the Virginia bank of the Potomac River, directly across from Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
It is surrounded by the infrastructure of American federal power \u2014 the Pentagon is nearby, the capital is visible across the river, the graves of presidents and generals and justices cover rolling hills of carefully maintained green lawn.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is a place of order and solemnity, maintained to a high standard by the federal government, visited by millions of people every year who come to honor the dead.<\/p>\n
The Gila River Indian Reservation is in the Sonoran Desert southeast of Phoenix.<\/p>\n
It is a specific kind of landscape \u2014 flat, dry, ringed by mountains that seem close in the clear desert air, hot in summer and cold at night in winter, a landscape that demands adaptation and rewards intimate knowledge.<\/p>\n
The Akimel O’odham have been adapting to it and accumulating knowledge of it for longer than the country that buried Hayes at Arlington has existed.<\/p>\n
He was born on the Gila River land.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He died on the Gila River land.<\/p>\n
He is buried at Arlington.<\/p>\n
The burial at Arlington was an honor, and it was also a continuation of the process by which the country incorporated Ira Hayes into its national narrative \u2014 making him part of the landscape of federal power and national memory rather than leaving him in the desert landscape that had shaped him.<\/p>\n
It was the right of his family to decide where he was buried, and the records suggest they accepted the Arlington burial, which was offered and arranged by the government and the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n
Whether they had full freedom to choose otherwise, given the public pressure and institutional expectations surrounding a figure of Hayes’s public significance, is harder to say.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What is clear is that his physical remains are at Arlington, and that the land that made him is in Arizona, and that the distance between those two facts is part of the story of how the country used him.<\/p>\n
Why The Simplified Version Matters Less Than The Real One<\/p>\n
The simplified version of Ira Hayes’s story \u2014 the Native Marine in the famous photograph who came home a hero and destroyed himself \u2014 has its uses.<\/p>\n
It is emotionally accessible.<\/p>\n
It can be told quickly.<\/p>\n
It points to real things: the burden of fame, the cost of war, the inadequacy of the country’s treatment of its veterans.<\/p>\n
But the simplified version also loses something essential, and what it loses is the most important part.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It loses the specificity of who Hayes was \u2014 Akimel O’odham, from the Gila River, from a community whose history of dispossession was both the context and the background for his life.<\/p>\n
It loses the water, which is the key to the whole story of his community.<\/p>\n
It loses the particular quality of what it meant to be a Native man being asked to represent national unity in 1945, when the country’s relationship with its Native peoples was still structured by policies of dispossession and assimilation.<\/p>\n
It loses the specific men he raised the flag with and the specific deaths he carried afterward.<\/p>\n
The simplified version turns Hayes into a symbol of something \u2014 of American ambivalence about heroism, or of the costs of fame, or of the tragedy of Native American life in the twentieth century \u2014 and in doing so, it repeats the same move that damaged him in the first place: it reduces him to what he represents rather than attending to who he was.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The real version is harder to hold.<\/p>\n
It requires knowing more history \u2014 the history of the Akimel O’odham, the history of federal Indian policy, the specific story of the Gila River water.<\/p>\n
It requires sitting with ambiguity \u2014 the fact that Hayes was a patriot who served his country and also someone who had reason to know that his country had not kept its promises to his people.<\/p>\n
It requires seeing him as a full human being rather than as a figure in a photograph.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the real version is also the one that actually honors him.<\/p>\n
Because honoring Ira Hayes means seeing him whole \u2014 not just at the moment of the flag raising, not just as the tragedy after the triumph, but as a specific person with a specific history, living in a specific community, carrying specific things that the photograph never captured and the bond tour never acknowledged and the bronze memorial never contained.<\/p>\n
He was Ira Hamilton Hayes.<\/p>\n
He was twenty-two years old on February 23, 1945, on top of Mount Suribachi.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was thirty-two years old on January 24, 1955, on the Gila River reservation.<\/p>\n
Everything between those two dates was a life \u2014 complicated, struggling, insisting on things that mattered, connected to people and places and history that the famous image of him never quite managed to show.<\/p>\n
That life deserves to be seen for what it was.<\/p>\n
Not the symbol.<\/p>\n
The man.<\/p>\n
The man who raised the flag, who named the dead, who corrected the record for Harlon Block, who kept going home to the desert, who died young on the land where he was born, and who deserves, at this distance and in this telling, to finally be seen whole.<\/p>\n
The Country He Came Back To<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When Ira Hayes was discharged from the Marine Corps in December 1945 and returned to the Gila River reservation, the United States was entering a period that history has often described as a time of prosperity and optimism \u2014 the post-war boom, the expanding middle class, the housing developments and the baby boom and the television sets and the sense that the country had won the most important war in its history and had earned the right to celebrate.<\/p>\n
That version of 1945 and 1946 and the years immediately following was not the version available to Ira Hayes or to the Akimel O’odham community he returned to.<\/p>\n
The reservation economy in 1945 was constrained in ways that the reservation’s location in the Sonoran Desert made unusually visible.<\/p>\n
Without adequate water, the land that had once supported a thriving agricultural civilization could support only limited farming.<\/p>\n
The federal government’s management of the reservation was still conducted through a model that provided minimal resources and maximum control \u2014 the Bureau of Indian Affairs made decisions affecting reservation life that the community had limited ability to challenge.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Employment options were constrained by geography, by education, by the absence of the kind of industrial infrastructure that was generating the post-war economic expansion in American cities and suburbs.<\/p>\n
Native Americans, including Hayes and his family, also faced continuing legal inequalities.<\/p>\n
The right of Native people to vote was complicated in some states by state-level restrictions that federal law had not yet cleared away.<\/p>\n
Some Arizona statutes continued to deny or restrict Native American voting rights for years after World War II ended.<\/p>\n
The men who fought and died at Iwo Jima came home to a country that was, in certain formal legal senses, not yet prepared to treat them as full citizens.<\/p>\n
This is not a minor footnote to Hayes’s story.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is the essential context for understanding why the gap between the symbol and the reality was so wide.<\/p>\n
The symbol said: an American man from an American community, fighting for American values, winning the Pacific war alongside his fellow Marines.<\/p>\n
The reality said: a man returning to a community that had been dispossessed of its water, that was managed by a federal bureaucracy rather than allowed to govern itself, and that in some respects remained legally outside the full protections of citizenship.<\/p>\n
He was expected to carry the symbol without requiring the country to confront the reality.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That is an enormous thing to ask of anyone, and it is particularly enormous when the symbol and the reality are as far apart as they were for Hayes and his community.<\/p>\n