Today is the 70th anniversary of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi on the fourth day of the battle for Iwo Jima in WWII. The battle would last for another month and three of the six men in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the second flag raising would be killed within a matter of days of the picture.

The great Johnny Cash immortalized one of the surviving flag raisers, Ira Hayes. Despite the post-war fame, including Hollywood and the White House, Ira never really ever left Iwo Jima and his friends who died on that awful island. Only a couple of weeks after his 32nd birthday Ira would drink himself to death, dying of exposure, in two inches of water in a lonely ditch, as Johnny Cash forever reminds us.

Semper Fidelis Ira.