Charles Lindberg, one of the U.S. Marines who raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima during World War II, died Sunday in Richfield, Minn. He was 86.

Lindberg spent decades explaining that it was his patrol, not the one captured in the famous Associated Press photograph by Joe Rosenthal, that raised the first flag as American forces fought to take the Japanese island.

In the late morning of February 23, 1945, Lindberg joined five other Marines fighting their way to the top of Mount Suribachi.

“Two of our men found this big, long pipe there,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press in 2003. “We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.”

“Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship’s whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget,” he said. “It didn’t last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves.”

The moment was captured by Sgt. Lou Lowery, a photographer from the Marine Corps’ Leatherneck magazine. It was the first time a foreign flag flew on Japanese soil, according to the book “Flags of Our Fathers,” by James Bradley with Ron Powers.

By Lindberg’s account, his commander ordered the first flag replaced and safeguarded because he worried someone would take it as a souvenir. Lindberg was back in combat when six men raised the second, larger flag four hours later.

Rosenthal’s photo of the second flag-raising became one of the most enduring images of the war and the model for the U.S. Marine Corps memorial in Washington.

No one, Lindberg said, believed him when he said he raised the first flag at Iwo Jima. “I was called a liar,” he said.

In 1954, Lindberg was invited to Washington for the dedication of the Marine memorial.

It carries the names of the second group of flag-raisers, but not the first.