“The Ballad of Ira Hayes”: Who was the Native American war hero immortalised by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan?
“Gather ’round me people, there’s a story I would tell, about a brave young Indian you should remember well” – Peter La Farge, ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’.
As part of the Donald Trump administration’s continuing efforts to attack, undermine, dehumanise and endanger the lives of American citizens born without white skin, the regime has recently turned its attention to the country’s long-celebrated veterans. In an ongoing purge of government records and online memorials highlighting non-white military personnel, the Arlington National Cemetery has since removed dozens of pages of information about notable Black, Hispanic and female veterans from its website in order to comply with Trump’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive order.
The purge followed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s proclamation that “DEI is dead” and continues apace as the Pentagon and Department of Defense recently removed profiles of numerous Native Americans who had served in World War II from their websites, including some related to the Pima-Akimel O’odham Marine Ira Hayes, Hopi Army Specialist Lori Piestewa and many others. Where before the website hosted biographies, stories and tributes to the Native soldiers, the site now redirects to an ‘error page’, and searches for names such as ‘Ira Hayes’ or ‘Navajo Code Talkers’ throw up zero results as well in some cases. Some pages which were removed were later restored, however, in the meantime, they had been heavily edited to remove references to the Natives’ ethnicity. Not all pages have been reinstated.
But while the Trump administration may no longer want to remember these Native heroes, one such soldier was famously immortalised in the 1962 Peter La Farge song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’. The best-known recording of the song is by Johnny Cash, and it was later also performed and recorded by artists like Pete Seeger, Townes Van Zandt, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and countless others.
Born in early 1923 to a family of farmers in Sacaton, Arizona, in the Gila River Indian Community reservation, Hayes was remembered by his niece as a very quiet man who would go days without saying a word. “The other Hayes children would play and tease me, but not Ira,” she said. “He was quiet and somewhat distant. Ira didn’t speak unless spoken to. He was just like his father.”
And, just like his father before him, he would go on enrol with the United States military services. Though he later supported his wife and young children through subsistence farming and cotton harvesting, Joseph Hayes was a veteran of World War I who had served with the Royal Engineers for three years from 1914 to 1917.
As well as working the land with his father, the young Ira Hayes was training to become a carpenter in his teenage years. When war broke out on the world stage again, the surprise Japanese attack of Pearl Harbour in 1941 instilled in him a determination to follow in his father’s footsteps and enlist and fight for his country. Less than a year later, in August 1942, Hayes joined the Marine Corps Reserve and, in October, went on to volunteer for the short-lived Paramarines, the paramilitary unit of the Marines. In doing so, Hayes became the first Pima in history to receive his paratrooper wings, for which he was given the code-name ‘Chief Falling Cloud’. By December 1st, he had been promoted to private first class.
Hayes first saw action one year on during the Bougainville Campaign, where he fought against Japanese soldiers in the Solomon Islands, but he is best remembered for his part in the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945.
Designated ‘Operation Detachment’, the American invasion of Iwo Jima had the objective of capturing the Pacific Islands from the Japanese and claiming its two airfields, South Field and Central Field. The island, though, was heavily fortified and protected by over 21,000 Japanese soldiers who had the advantage of a network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and tunnels.
Despite the fact that retired Chief of Naval Operations William V Pratt had declared the place to be useless to the Army as a staging base and useless to the Navy as a fleet base, the Americans proceeded with their attempt to capture the land. They suffered heavy losses for their efforts as the battle went on to become one of the bloodiest episodes in the entire Pacific conflict. It has been estimated that for every Japanese soldier killed in the region, three Americans were laid low. Ira Hayes, though, was not one of them.
Towards the end of the battle, a battalion of Marines raised the United States flag atop Mount Suribachi, a volcano that dominates the island terrain. In a move typical of American imperialism, Colonel Chandler Johnson decided that the flag that had been planted was not big enough and so ordered a troupe of soldiers back up the hill with a much larger replacement flag.
Captured in the now iconic photograph shot by Joe Rosenthal, Ira Hayes was forever immortalised as one of six American soldiers in the ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’ image. Seen around the world, the photograph has been reproduced and reprinted countless times in newspapers and magazines on the global stage, and it went on to win the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for Photography, becoming the only photograph to win the award the same year it was captured. It has come to be regarded in the United States as one of the most recognisable images from World War II. The photograph featured as the centrepiece of a war bond poster, which helped raise a record $26 billion in sales in 1945 and has since been recreated as a statue at The Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va.
Raising the flag alongside Ira Hayes in the image were Harlon Block, Harold Keller, Harold Schultz, Franklin Sousley and Michael Strank. At first, the soldiers in the photograph were mistitled and misnamed, but Hayes returned from the war and went to great lengths to correctly identify the men in the image. Of the six men in the photograph, only three would return home as Sergeant Strank, Corporal Block and Private First Class Sousley were later killed in the continuing battle.
Hayes suffered from severe PTSD following his discharge from the Marines, and though he was proud of his efforts in the war, he couldn’t reconcile his experiences overseas with his reception at home. “I kept getting hundreds of letters,” he later said. “And people would drive through the reservation, walk up to me and ask, ‘Are you the Indian who raised the flag on Iwo Jima?'”
One of the letters even came with an invitation to the White House, where Hayes met President Dwight D Eisenhower. Lauded as a hero by the commander-in-chief, a reporter at the event asked Hayes how he liked all the “pomp and circumstance”, to which Hayes soberly replied that “I don’t.”
He turned to alcohol to escape the effects that the war had raged on him and to quiet the memories of his fallen friends and comrades, who never made it back home to enjoy the same notoriety and pageantry he was now receiving. With a deepening alcohol dependency, Hayes was unable to hold down a regular job and was even arrested over 50 times for public intoxication in various states. As much as on the surface, his country seemed to be honouring Hayes and his efforts during the war, many close to him and in similar positions felt that he had been abandoned by the state when he so clearly needed support, and that he was merely being used for his image and reputation, rather than being respected for his actions in during the war.
On January 24th, 1955—barely two weeks on from his 32nd birthday—Hayes was found dead outside an abandoned hut near where he lived in Sacaton, Arizona. The Pinal County coroner concluded that Hayes’s death had been caused by exposure to the cold and alcohol poisoning.
As he was in life, when immortalised in the famous Joe Rosenthal ‘Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima’, in his death he was similarly commemorated by songwriter Peter La Farge in the 1962 song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’. The lyrics tell the story of Hayes’ farming and Reservation roots, his heroic efforts in the war and his all-too-early and all-too-avoidable end; weaving the story of his life together with the tragic refrain, “Call him drunken Ira Hayes, he won’t answer anymore. Not the whiskey drinking Indian or the Marine who went to war”.
Two years after La Farge released the song, the legendary Johnny Cash included the ballad in his 1964 concept collection Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, in which he highlighted the stories of and issues facing the indigenous people of his land. Bob Dylan later recorded the song during the sessions for his 1970 album Self Portrait and went on to perform it at a Thanksgiving event when visiting the Tuscarora Reservation during his feted 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
Hayes was also included in the 2006 Academy Award-nominated Clint Eastwood movie Flags of Our Fathers, which was itself based on the bestselling 2000 book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers.
In an interview with LRI Media, Comanche Nation Chairman Forrest Tahdooahnippah recently called the efforts of Native veterans “an example of what truly makes America great”.
He added that “despite prior prejudice against Native Americans and shameful attempts to eradicate Native American languages, the United States called upon young Native American men to serve as code talkers in both World War I and World War II. Despite the discrimination they experienced, these young men rose to the occasion to fight for the land they loved. They are examples of true patriots.”
Donald Trump and his government may well want to remove the name Ira Hayes from their white-washed and state-sanctioned depictions of the nation, but thanks to artists such as Peter La Farge, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Clint Eastwood, the real history of this Native American hero will live on regardless.
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