Desmond Doss

Desmond Thomas Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg who would not carry a rifle and would not leave the infantry. The army called him a conscientious objector and then a medic. On Okinawa, in May 1945, on the escarpment later nicknamed Hacksaw Ridge, he brought wounded men down a cliff under fire. The Medal of Honor citation counts dozens. He was himself wounded. He never fired a shot.

He was born February 7, 1919. He died in Piedmont, Alabama, on March 23, 2006. A later film found the ridge. This page is the medic who treated the war as a series of bodies that still belonged to the living, and who did the work without a weapon the regulations finally let him refuse.