Desmond Doss Refused to Carry a Rifle and Saved About 75 Men on Okinawa

Imagine telling your sergeant that you will go to war, you will go where the fighting is worst, and you will not carry a gun. Now imagine telling a platoon of young men from every corner of the country that you intend to do it while they are the ones depending on you. Most of us would expect the next scene to be a fistfight, and in Desmond Doss's case it very nearly was.

Doss went on to earn the Medal of Honor. He did it without firing a shot, and without a weapon of any kind, on one of the ugliest ridges of the Pacific war. His story is one of the great American stories about conscience, and I want to tell it carefully, with his citation read as the government wrote it, because it shows two things that people like to keep apart: that a free country can make room for a man's conscience, and that a man's conscience can make him more useful to his country than anyone expected.

A definition, before the story

A fair account starts with terms. A conscientious objector is a person who refuses military service, or part of it, on grounds of deeply held moral or religious conviction. The American law of the time recognized two kinds. One was the objector who refused all military service and could be assigned to civilian work. The other was the objector who would serve in uniform but refused to bear arms, and was classed for noncombatant duty. Doss belonged to the second group, and he used a phrase for himself that I think is exact: he said he was a conscientious cooperator, not a conscientious objector. He wanted to serve. He would not kill.

Hold that distinction, because the whole story turns on it. He did not object to the war, he did not object to the country, and he did not ask anyone else to share his scruples. He asked to be allowed to follow them himself, and to be of use.

Who he was

Desmond Thomas Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1919. He was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, a Protestant denomination that observes the Sabbath on Saturday and takes the commandment against killing in a way that many other Christians do not. As a young man he worked in a shipyard, and when the draft came he was deferred for the shipyard work, a deferment he gave up to enlist, because he thought it wrong to sit out the war.

He was inducted in 1942, and he was assigned to the 77th Infantry Division. In training he declared that he would not carry a rifle. The Army had a place for a man who would serve as a medic and carry no weapon. The Army also had a good many officers and men who did not believe such a thing could be done.

The ridicule

The abuse was real, and the record of it is well established in the accounts of the men who served with him and in his own later testimony. Some of his fellow soldiers made fun of him. They thought him a coward, or a crank, or a man who would get others killed. Objects were thrown at him as he knelt to pray at night. His commanders tried to have him discharged on grounds of mental unfitness, which he refused, because he was not mentally unfit. He had a plain, firm view of the matter. He was fit for duty. He wanted to go.

I would like you to sit with the two ways of reading that. One reading says the Army was unfair to him. The other, and I think fairer, says that the Army was doing what armies do, which is to worry that a man who will not carry a weapon will be a liability to the men beside him. They were wrong about him, but they were not stupid to worry. An officer responsible for forty lives in a firefight has a right to ask what each man brings. The point of the story is that Doss answered the question with his conduct, and the answer was decisive.

It is a good test of any institution, public or private. The question is not whether it ever doubts a man. The question is whether it changes its mind when the evidence arrives.

Guam and Leyte

The evidence began to arrive in 1944. The 77th Infantry Division fought in the recapture of Guam in the summer of that year, and Doss served there as a medic, under fire, treating the wounded in the line. He received a Bronze Star for his service on Guam. In the fall he went with the division to Leyte, in the Philippines, where he earned a second Bronze Star for the same kind of work. Those are not small awards, and they matter to the story. Before Okinawa, he had already established what kind of medic he was.

The fellow soldiers who had mocked him began to see what he did. A medic in infantry combat goes where the wounded are, and the wounded are where the fire is worst. Doss went. By the time the division reached Okinawa, the men of his company no longer questioned him.

The Maeda Escarpment

Okinawa was the last great battle of the Pacific war, fought from April into June 1945. The 77th Division was in the line there, and its 307th Infantry Regiment attacked the Maeda Escarpment, a steep limestone ridge of some four hundred feet, called the Hacksaw by the men who fought on it, which the Japanese defenders had turned into a fortress of caves and fire positions. The first attack came in late April. In the first days of May, the fighting there was savage, and the regiment's battalions were thrown back more than once.

On May 5, 1945, the Americans climbed the escarpment again, and when they were driven off the top, the wounded were left behind. The citation tells the next part in the dry style of the military, and I will quote the key passage as it was written, because I do not want to improve on it. By the citation, Doss "remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them one by one to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands." Check the full text in the Medal of Honor records, since I am quoting a part of it.

The numbers matter here, and I will give them with care. The citation says the enemy barrage inflicted approximately seventy-five casualties on the troops who reached the summit, and Doss is popularly credited with about seventy-five men saved. Other accounts put the number anywhere from about fifty to a hundred, and the exact count is not known. Take the figure as an honest approximation.

Consider the arithmetic of the labor. A wounded man in a litter is a heavy weight, and the rope has to be handled with care to keep the litter from striking the rock. Doss lowered the men one at a time, and by many accounts he prayed as he worked. I will not put words in his mouth that I cannot source.

The wounds, and the Medal

Doss was not unhurt. On May 21, in a night attack near Shuri, a grenade seriously wounded his legs while he was aiding the wounded. The citation says he treated himself and waited some five hours for litter bearers to reach him. While he was being carried off the field a sniper's bullet struck him again and broke his arm, and he bound a rifle stock to the arm as a splint and crawled three hundred yards over rough ground to the aid station. That is the account the citation gives, and you will find it in the government's record of the award.

He was recommended for the Medal of Honor, and the Army approved. On October 12, 1945, in a ceremony at the White House, President Truman placed the medal around his neck. Doss was the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, a distinction widely recorded. What he proved was that a conscientious cooperator could serve at the standard that the medal requires.

That standard is "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty." It is not an award for a perfect record, and it is not an award for the biggest body count. It is for a man who looks at a hill and decides, in the face of almost certain death, that someone has to go up, and goes. Doss met it, with a Bible in his pocket and no rifle.

He spent a long time recovering from his wounds and from tuberculosis he had contracted in service, and he lived until 2006. He died in Piedmont, Alabama, at the age of eighty-seven.

The strongest objection

There is a serious argument against holding up Doss as an example, and I will state it as its supporters would.

It runs like this. A military cannot run on every soldier's private scruples. If one man may refuse a weapon, another may refuse an order, and a third may refuse a mission, and a force that accommodates all of them cannot fight. Doss was lucky that he turned out to be a hero. A thousand objectors who did not are the ones whose cases would have cost lives. To praise the exception, the argument concludes, is to weaken the rule.

I take that seriously, and I think the answer has four parts.

1. The rule was not weakened, because the accommodation was narrow. Doss was not excused from duty. He was assigned to a duty that his conscience allowed, and it was the most dangerous duty on the field. The Army did not suspend its standards for him. It applied them, and he exceeded them.
2. A free country can afford a conscience clause. The tradition that runs from the colonial Quakers through the Founders' own debates treats liberty of conscience as a right that government has no business taking without the gravest cause. Madison argued that conscience is the most sacred of all property. It is worth reading Madison's 1792 Essay Says Your Conscience Is Your Property Too for that idea in his own words, and The conscience clause Madison wrote for the Bill of Rights and lost for the history of how close the Bill of Rights came to protecting it more explicitly.
3. The limit matters as much as the liberty. Accommodation of conscience in wartime has always been bounded. The objector who will serve as a medic, a clerk or a stretcher bearer gives the country something. The objector who gives nothing is a different case, and the law has treated the two differently. Doss was the model of the first.
4. It is a bad reason to deny a man a chance. The officers who wanted Doss gone were not wrong to be cautious. They would have been wrong to prevent a test, and the Army, to its credit, let the test go forward.

What it says about conscience and courage

Many Americans think of courage and conscience as two different things, and that a man must choose between the soldier's virtue and the saint's. Doss is the answer. His courage and his conscience were the same thing. He would not take a life, and so he spent a battle saving them, and the discipline that kept the rifle out of his hands is what kept his hands steady on the rope.

For the believer, the story says that a conviction held under pressure can make a man more useful, not less. It is a Christian story at root, of a man who took seriously the instruction to love his neighbor and found out what it cost. The faith that made him hold the Sabbath and refuse the rifle is the same faith that sent him up that cliff. The Four Chaplains Gave Away Their Life Jackets When the Dorchester Went Down tells a story with the same moral shape.

For the country, the story says that liberty and strength are not enemies. A republic that makes room for a few such men can, on the right day, discover that it is stronger than the sternest drill sergeant knew. That is a point against the idea, so popular in some quarters, that freedom is a luxury of peacetime. Doss was a free man who served in a free army. The freedom was part of what made him.

For a fuller picture of the war he fought in, read Iwo Jima in Thirty-Six Days and the Two Flag Raisings on Mount Suribachi, which covers the other great island battle of 1945.

Why we should tell his story

We should tell it because it is true, and because it complicates the lazy stories we tell about both soldiers and pacifists. Soldiers are not all warriors by temperament, and a man who refuses to kill is not always a man who refuses to serve. A country with a rich enough moral tradition can hold both, and on one hill in May 1945 it did.

We should tell it because it is a story about being doubted. If you have ever been the one in a room who held an unpopular principle while others rolled their eyes, you know what Doss knew. The thing to do is neither to bluster nor to quit. It is to do the work, to keep doing it, and to let the evidence speak.

And we should tell it because it honors the ones who were saved. Seventy-five men, or fifty, or some number between, went home to be fathers, farmers, teachers and electricians, because a medic with no rifle would not leave them on the ridge. Their descendants are among us. Every one of them is a result.

The case in brief

1. Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist from Virginia, enlisted in 1942 as a medic who would serve but would not bear arms, and he endured ridicule and attempts to remove him from his unit.
2. He earned Bronze Stars on Guam and Leyte before Okinawa, where on the Maeda Escarpment in May 1945 he stayed under fire and lowered the wounded down a cliff one at a time, an act credited with saving about seventy-five men, though estimates of the number vary.
3. On May 21 he was wounded by a grenade and then a sniper's bullet, and he splinted his own broken arm with a rifle stock and crawled to the aid station.
4. President Truman presented him the Medal of Honor on October 12, 1945, the first awarded to a conscientious objector.
5. His story shows that a free country can make room for conscience without weakening its army, and that courage and conviction can be one thing.

What you can do: read the full text of Doss's citation on the official Medal of Honor records, then read it aloud to someone younger than you.