IRA HAYES

Searching study of the psychically scarred Native American Marine Corps hero made famous for raising the American flag on Iwo Jima.

“He received more press than Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Cochise, and Tecumseh combined.” So writes Holm, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam and retired professor of American Indian studies, of Ira Hayes (1923-1955), caught both in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph and its replication in the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Hayes was also caught in the maze depicted in the iconography of his Akimel O’odham people, its middle-way ideals disrupted by war; that maze found him suffering horribly from PTSD and the self-medication of alcohol. Although the Akimel O’odham were considered “a peaceful people,” largely because they did not rise up against the American conquerors of their homeland, they had a tradition of warfare. However, writes the author “the Akimel O’odham way of war was a complex amalgamation of preparatory rituals, limited aggression, the ceremonial expungement of the pollution of death, healing, and the celebration of the return of the relatives who took part in the conflict.” Thrust instead into boot camp, jungle warfare, the horrific battle for Iwo Jima, and unwonted fame for anchoring the six-man chain that raised the American flag over Mount Suribachi, Hayes returned to poverty on a reservation just a generation away from a horrible famine wrought by water-greedy white farmers in the Arizona desert. Hayes would say “that he wished the picture had never been taken,” and after the war, adrift, he was at home nowhere. Holm argues that the “drunken Indian” image so often presented in popular culture is both false and demeaning. Some of his assertions are obvious—e.g., war is formative, scarring, and hellish—but he convincingly depicts Hayes as a gentle, unwilling “victim of circumstance” who coped with his troubled life the best he could.

A strong contribution to the literature of World War II, Native American warriors, and the unseen wounds of war.