The Medic Who Refused to Carry a Gun
He walked onto the bloodiest cliff of the Pacific War carrying no weapon at all — and carried dozens of men off it instead.
On a scorched Okinawan escarpment in 1945, American soldiers called it Hacksaw Ridge — a 400-foot wall of rock raked by machine-gun and mortar fire. Among the men who climbed it was Desmond T. Doss, a private first class who had refused, on religious grounds, to carry a rifle into battle. He was there to save lives, not take them.
Doss was born on February 7, 1919, in Lynchburg, Virginia, to William Doss, a carpenter, and Bertha Doss, a homemaker and shoe factory worker. Raised a devout Seventh-day Adventist, he grew up keeping the Sabbath, practicing nonviolence, and eating no meat, alongside his sister Audrey and brother Harold in the Fairview Heights neighborhood. He left school after the eighth grade to work at the Lynchburg Lumber Company during the Great Depression, later becoming a joiner at a Newport News shipyard.
When the war came, Doss could have claimed a draft deferment because of his shipyard job. He turned it down out of patriotic conviction and was inducted into the Army on April 1, 1942, training with the reactivated 77th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Because he would not bear arms, he became a medic with 2nd Platoon, Company B, 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry — a conscientious objector serving in the heart of combat.
In 1944, fighting alongside his platoon on Guam and in the Philippines, Doss repeatedly ran into gunfire to reach wounded men, earning two Bronze Star Medals with 'V' devices for valor. It was a preview of what awaited him on Okinawa the following spring.
At the Maeda Escarpment, as the 1st Battalion assaulted the ridge, artillery and machine-gun fire tore into the advancing troops, inflicting roughly 75 casualties and forcing a retreat. Doss refused to seek cover. Alone, he carried wounded men one by one to the cliff's edge and lowered each on a rope-supported litter to safety below — saving an estimated 75 to 100 men. Days later he crawled 200 yards forward of the lines under rifle and mortar fire to rescue another wounded soldier.
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