Ira Hamilton Hayes was born January 12, 1923, on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona — a Pima Indian who enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in August 1942. He completed recruit training at Marine Corps Base San Diego — at MCRD, the depot on the northwest shore of this bay with the red-tiled roofs visible from the water.
That was his first San Diego chapter.
In October 1942, he volunteered for something harder: Marine parachute training at Camp Gillespie, a small airfield east of San Diego near El Cajon. He became one of the first Pima Indians to earn paratrooper wings, assigned the radio call sign "Chief Falling Cloud." He fought at Bougainville as a Paramarine. When the Paramarines were disbanded in 1944, he was transferred to the 5th Marine Division at Camp Pendleton and went to Iwo Jima.
On February 23, 1945, Hayes was one of the six men who raised a large American flag near the summit of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. Joe Rosenthal photographed the raising. The image became one of the most reproduced photographs in American history, used on a postage stamp in an edition of 137 million copies, and modeled for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
Hayes survived Iwo Jima. Three of the six men in the photograph did not. Hayes and the two other survivors were brought home early from the Pacific, against Hayes's own wishes, to tour the country selling war bonds. He found the attention and the celebrity unbearable and said so repeatedly. He was a Marine who had done what Marines did, with men who were dead, and he was being asked to perform his presence in front of crowds who had not been there.
Hayes returned to the Gila River Reservation after the war. He struggled with alcohol and died on January 24, 1955, at age 32, from exposure on the reservation after a night outdoors in January. He had been a Marine for less than three years. He spent the next ten years of his life carrying a photograph of himself.
He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Section 34, near the memorial for which his image was the model. His name is on the Marine Corps War Memorial. His training is part of the history of the depot you can see from this deck, on the northwest shore of San Diego Bay, where the red tiles catch the light in the morning.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Ira Hayes"; Marine Corps Historical Division; Arlington National Cemetery records.
Hear this story where it happened. JADA sails past this very spot. Join the San Diego Bay History Sail →