Religion: God & the Other Fellow

Like his Master, he was a carpenter. He was also a Seventh-Day Adventist, and a pacifist. Desmond T. Doss, of Lynchburg, Va., refused to bear arms in World War II. He explained simply: “It is right there in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill.” But Doss did not object to serving as an Army Medical Corpsman. When he was sent overseas he asked for assignments in the front lines. He felt that God would not let him perish by the sword if he did not live by the sword, and he had a deep sense of duty to his fellowman.

Like most other soldiers, he knew terrible fear. He conquered it with prayer. During the fighting on Guam and Leyte he became famous among the hardbitten men of the 77th Division for his serene recklessness in the face of death. In the nerve-racking weeks of the Okinawa campaign, his fame grew.

One day last April he climbed a 400-foot escarpment with an assaulting infantry battalion. At the top the attack faltered under a storm of artillery, mortar and rifle fire. But Doss stayed at the exposed summit for hours, lowered 75 wounded men down the rock walls to safety before descending himself, haggard, dirty, miraculously alive. For weeks, after that, he was in and ahead of the front lines. Twice he was wounded. Grenade fragments ripped his legs, knocked him down and out of action. But when other corpsmen tried to carry him back, he crawled off the litter, sent them to another wounded man. Then a shellburst shattered his arm. He lashed a rifle stock to the arm, managed to crawl hundreds of yards to safety.

One sunny day last week 26-year-old Corporal Desmond T. Doss stood at attention on the White House lawn. President Harry Truman placed a pale blue ribbon around his neck, shook his hand warmly. As he stepped back—the first conscientious objector in U.S. history to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor—generals, admirals, Cabinet members, his proud parents and his pretty wife applauded enthusiastically.

As a Seventh-Day Adventist, a conscientious objector, and a veteran, Desmond Doss had something to say about war: “Everybody has got to get back to believing in God and the other fellow and his rights.”

That might have sounded irrelevant to some, but Desmond Doss knew better.