![]() ![]() For his repeated bravery dragging wounded and dying men out of ultra-deadly killzones and giving them life-saving first aid, Doss earned his first of two Bronze Stars.Īfter a brief stopover in New Caldeonia, Doss was next shipped out to the Philippine island of Leyte in December '44, this time as a stretcher-bearer rather than a field medic. ![]() With his Medic insignia prominently displayed on his helmet and sleeve – an emblem that made him a big, meaty target for Japanese snipers eager to crush the American morale by capping their doctors – Doss accompanied hundreds of missions through the dense jungles of the small Pacific island over the course of several months of intense combat, routinely going out with search-and-destroy patrols even when he hadn't actually even been assigned as the Medic for the unit. ![]() Because sure, anyone can stare at the enemy down the iron sights of a trusty rifle, but only a truly fearless badass would sprint towards them with a bulls-eye painted on his helmet and armed with nothing more than a box of Band-Aids and tube of Neosporin.ĭoss's first chance to prove himself came during the American assault on the Japanese-controlled island of Guam in 1944, when he courageously charged through knee-deep mud in driving rain on multiple occasions to reach wounded men anywhere on the battlefield, any time of the day or night, seemingly utterly oblivious to any bullets or mortars that happened to be choking the battlefield at the time. Another officer tried to transfer him out of the unit, then, when that failed, attempted to have him discharged as a mental case.ĭoss sat there, took the abuse, completed his Medic training, and then when the bullets started flying he showed them all that he had the biggest, brassiest balls in the entire Division. One Sergeant tried to get him court-martialed for disobeying a direct order to carry a rifle. ![]() a little uneasy when the guy who's supposed to be watching his back would be severely outgunned by a gang of third-graders armed with slingshots and water balloons. It's also not a classification that makes you a hell of a lot of friends when you're sitting in a foxhole with a bunch of guys who are fighting and dying for the flag.ĭesmond Doss's refusal to carry even so much as a combat knife on his person at any time meant that he took a lot of crap from his comrades early on in his career, because, as you can guess, it makes your typical G.I. Since that's not a real thing, the Army stamped him "Conscientious Objector" instead – a classification that allowed Doss to get away with not carrying a rifle into combat, but one that also kind of lumped him in with that all-too-popular notion of flag-burning, America-hating hippies who would much rather quietly cry themselves to sleep listening to indie folk music than hack someone's arms off with a machete and drink their blood out of a melted combat boot. He was, however, still unwilling to compromise his principles re: inflicting ridiculous amounts of violent brutal death on the enemy, so when he got there Doss requested "non-combatant" status on his enlistment paperwork. When Doss's number came up in 1942 and he was ordered to report to the Army recruiting office, he didn't try to defer or punk out or cry or any stupid nonsense like that. He registered for the draft on his 18th birthday like every patriotic red-blooded football-watching American man was supposed to do, and he took a decent civvie job working on Navy ships at the Newport News docks, but then just to be safe he went out and took a little bit of medical training as well so that in case his number actually got called he could be sure he wouldn't have to be packing heat when he was deployed into a hellacious overseas war zone. A firm believer in the Sixth Commandment (that's the one about not murdering other people), Doss had a marginally difficult time reconciling his desire to serve his country in World War the Second with his disinclination to shoot other human beings in the face at close range with a thirty-aught-six slug delivered from the piping-hot barrel of a bayonet-equipped M1 Garand. Desmond Doss was born in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1919 to a super-religious family of hardcore Bible-thumping Seventh-Day Adventists. ![]()
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