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Who is Ira Hayes? He is one of the Marines that helped hoist the flag at Iwo Jima. He was born and died on an Indian Reservation.

He was sent to a goverment boarding school for Native Americans, and after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor he joined the Marines. He trained as a paratrooper and was nicknamed “Chief Falling Cloud.”

On February 19, 1945, Hayes took part in the landing on Iwo Jima. After a small American flag was planted on the top of Mount Suribachi, a Marine Commander sent up a group of men to put up a bigger flag. Ira was one of those men. When Ira returned home, he found that the photo of the flag raising had made him a hero.

Ira was never comfortable with the attention and turned to drink to cope with the loneliness he felt after leaving the company of his Marine comrades. He has some 50 drunken arrests. He later told the story how people would approach him and ask him if he was the Indian that rose the flag. For him it was all about belonging to that group of Marines. And he never survived without the Marine Corp.

He died about ten years later and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.