Then There Were Two

It was luck of a sort that brought Pfc. Ira Hayes to the summit of Mt. Suribachi on the southern edge of battle-torn Iwo Jima as Associated Press Photographer Joe Rosenthal was setting up the dramatic photograph of Hayes, four fellow Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the U.S. flag. Everyone who saw it was stirred by the picture; it brought Rosenthai a Pulitzer Prize, was made into a postage stamp, finally became the model for a monument in Washington to the Marine dead of all wars. For Ira, the picture was a prelude to tragedy.

Three of the six flag-raisers were killed in the battle for Iwo Jima. After the battle ended, Hayes and the other two survivors were ordered back to the U.S. by President Roosevelt. They were lionized from coast to coast. Rene Gagnon and John Bradley took it in stride, but Ira Hayes, a shy and bewildered Pima Indian, found the hero's role hard to play. Increasingly, he sought escape in drinking, drifted from job to job. Fifteen months ago he was picked up in Chicago, shoeless, shaking and incoherent, and jailed for drunkenness. In 13 years he was arrested 51 times for being drunk; efforts of friends, doctors, clergymen and Alcoholics Anonymous could do nothing to help him.

Last week Ira Hayes, flabby and sad-eyed at 32, was back on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, where he was born. He had not had a drink for two weeks, and was working as a cotton picker. His mother and father noticed that he seemed restless, but. Ira assured them that he was not going into Phoenix, not going to take a drink again. But when one of his brothers and a friend came by to invite him to a card and drinking party, Ira's resolution melted away. His mother waited up for him all night.

At The Place, an abandoned adobe hut, Ira and his friends played cards for a while, but the cheap muscatel wine they were drinking soon got the better of the young men. Sometime after midnight Hayes became ill and went outside. Early the next morning he was found frozen on the sand.

This week Ira Hayes will be buried, with full military honors, among his comrades in arms at Arlington National Cemetery. Not far away, his bronze likeness, in the Marine Memorial, reaches with outstretched arms towards the flag. Said a Phoenix policeman, who had arrested Hayes many times: "He was a hero to everyone but himself." Said Ira's grieving mother: "He was a pretty little boy."

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