One More: Desmond Doss and the Courage That Needed No Rifle

The men who served alongside Desmond Doss did not make his early months in the Army easy. They hid his boots. They threatened him. Some tried to have him discharged as mentally unfit. His offense was simple and, to many of his fellow soldiers, incomprehensible: he would not touch a rifle. A Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, Doss believed the Fourth Commandment prohibited both Sabbath labor and the taking of human life. He had enlisted willingly — he wanted to serve — but he intended to do it without a weapon in his hands.

The Army did not know what to do with him. His commanding officers sought, more than once, to push him out through courts-martial proceedings. None of it worked, partly because Doss was a meticulous soldier in every other respect, and partly because the regulations were on his side. He was eventually assigned as a combat medic to the 77th Infantry Division, a man trained to run toward the wounded in the middle of firefights, carrying nothing more lethal than a first-aid kit.

The Maeda Escarpment, May 1945

By May of 1945, the Battle of Okinawa had been grinding for weeks. The Maeda Escarpment, a jagged coral ridge the Americans called Hacksaw Ridge, rose about 400 feet from the valley floor and changed hands with terrible regularity. Japanese defenders had fortified the high ground with a network of caves and tunnels. Getting up the ridge required climbing cargo nets rigged to the cliff face. Getting down, for the wounded, was considerably harder.

On the night of May 5, 1945, Doss's unit was driven back from the top of the escarpment by a ferocious Japanese counterattack. The order came to pull off the ridge. Doss did not go. He remained alone on the plateau, moving through smoke and intermittent fire, finding wounded men one by one. He would get a man to the edge, rig a lowering rope using a special knot he had taught himself, and ease the soldier down to the soldiers waiting below. Then he would go back.

By his own account, Doss kept returning to the same prayer as he worked through the night: that God would let him save just one more man.

He did this for hours. The number of men he brought to the edge and lowered to safety that night has been documented, in accounts compiled by military historians and summarized in sources including the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Hacksaw Ridge, at approximately 75. He was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman in October 1945. Truman, by one account, told Doss he was more afraid of him than of any general he had ever met.

Fortitude Is Not the Absence of Fear

Catholic moral tradition distinguishes fortitude from recklessness. The reckless man charges into danger without counting the cost. The courageous man counts the cost clearly, feels the weight of it, and acts anyway because something more important than his own safety is at stake. Aquinas placed fortitude among the four cardinal virtues precisely because he understood that even a person who grasps what is true and good will fail to act on it without the interior strength to bear the consequences.

Doss had counted the cost before he ever reached Okinawa. He had endured the barracks harassment, the legal threats, the daily friction of serving inside an institution that wanted him to be someone he was not. That long patience was its own form of fortitude, quieter than what happened on the ridge but no less demanding. By the time he was lowering wounded men off a cliff in the dark, the habit was already formed.

What Catholic Anthropology Sees in This

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person holds that every human being is simultaneously created in the image of God, wounded by the Fall, and capable of redemption. The doctrine does not promise that grace will make things easy. It promises that a person can be made whole enough to act well even in broken circumstances. The ridge on the night of May 5 was about as broken as circumstances get: darkness, bodies, enemy soldiers within earshot, and a single unarmed man working by feel.

The image of God in Doss showed up not as superhuman fearlessness but as a steady refusal to let the worst of the situation determine who he was. The wound of the Fall was everywhere around him, written in what artillery and ideology had done to human flesh on that plateau. And the possibility of redemption, if that word can be used carefully here, was embodied in the simple, physical act of getting one more man off the ridge and down to where someone could help him.

He was not trying to make a theological argument. He was tying a knot and pulling a man to the edge and praying the same six words over again. Lord, let me get just one more.