Frozen in bronze as part of one of the most famous monuments in the world, Ira Hayes spent his short post-war life trying to escape the image that made him famous. This episode goes back to Sacaton, Arizona, where a silent Pima boy who could read by age four grew up on a subsistence cotton farm with a World War I veteran father. Hayes volunteered for the elite Paramarines in 1942, became the first Pima to earn jump wings, carried the Browning Automatic Rifle at Bougainville, and landed on Iwo Jima in February 1945 with a 45-man platoon of which only five would walk away.

We separate the flag raising from its myth: Hayes and his squad were sent up Mount Suribachi to haul communication wire, grabbed a heavy pipe to replace a smaller flag, and were caught by Joe Rosenthal’s camera in a moment of manual labor. Pulled from combat for a 33-city bond tour that raised 26 billion dollars, Hayes was told by a Marine officer that correcting the misidentification of his dead friend Harlan Block did not matter. In 1946 he hitchhiked 1,300 miles to Texas to tell Block’s parents the truth himself.

• Why the anonymity of the photograph let every American family project their own son onto it
• The 1947 investigation that finally credited Harlan Block and the visit to Jack Thurman in South Dakota
• Hayes’s cameo handing a flag to John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima
• Fifty-two arrests for public intoxication and his death from exposure at age 32 in January 1955
• How his legacy has been repurposed by governments, from a 1993 Marine Corps speech to a 2025 web page removal