Anchor Struck

Ira Hamilton Hayes, a Pima Native American, was born in 1923.  His father Joseph was a

World War I veteran who supported the family with subsistence farming.  His mother Nancy

Hamilton Hayes was a devout Presbyterian and Sunday school teacher.

Ira was an exceptionally quiet child, although precocious.  He learned to read and write

by age four, and had an impressive command of English, which many Pimas did not speak.

He graduated from Phoenix Indian School in June 1942 and joined the Marine Corps two

months later.

He trained as a paratrooper.  His code name was “Chief Falling Cloud”.  After the Marine

parachute units were disbanded, Hayes agreed to a second tour of duty.  In February of

1945, his division fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima.  When the Marines took Mount Suribachi,

Hayes — along with fellow Leathernecks Harlon Block, Rene Gagnon, Franklin Sousley, Mike

Strank and Navy corpsman John Bradley — raised a large U.S. flag.

The photo of this by Joe Rosenthal is one of the most iconic in American history.  When

President Franklin Roosevelt saw it, he ordered Hayes, Bradley and Gagnon home to sell

war bonds as heroes.  Block, Sousley and Strank died on Iwo Jima.

Hayes didn’t want any of the limelight.  He told Gagnon, whom he hated, not to identify him

in the shot or he’d kill him.  Gagnon initially refused to name him, but relented under direct

orders of FDR.  Gagnon and Bradley misidentified Block.  When Hayes tried to correct this,

he was told to keep quiet about it.

He rarely spoke about the flag raising after the war, although he was proud of his service

in the Marines.  Bothered that his friend Harlon Block did not receive credit for being in the

famous photo, he hitchhiked 1300 miles to tell Block’s family about the mistake.  Block’s

mother Belle wrote her congressman and the controversy was eventually rectified.

Hayes, Gagnon and Bradley appeared as themselves in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima,

which starred John Wayne.  Hayes was portrayed in the 1960 telefilm The American by Lee

Marvin and in the 1961 theatrical film The Outsider by Tony Curtis.  In the 2006 film Flags

of Our Fathers, Adam Beach of the Saulteaux First Nati0n played him.

After his brief fame, Hayes sank into obscurity and alcoholism.  He was arrested 52 times for

public drunkeness.  “I was sick,” he once said, “I guess I was about to crack up thinking about

all my good buddies.  They were better men than me and they’re not coming back.  Much less

back to the White House like me.”

Flags of Our Fathers implies that Hayes suffered from PTSD.

On January 24, 1955, he was found dead in his own blood and vomit near an abandoned adobe

hut in his hometown of Sacaton, Arizona.  He had died of exposure and alcohol poisoning.  He

did not freeze on a montain top, as shown in The Outsider.

Hayes was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.  At his funeral, Rene Gagnon eulogized “let’s

say he had a little dream in his heart that someday the Indian would be like the white man — be

able to walk all over the United States.”