Please God, Let Me Get One More

The Man Who Refused a Rifle

In 1942, as America mobilized for total war, Desmond Doss walked into his draft board in Lynchburg, Virginia and requested classification as a conscientious objector. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, and his faith was absolute: he would not kill another human being, period. No exceptions for wartime. No exceptions for survival. He believed in the Sixth Commandment the way most men believed in breathing.

The Army didn’t quite know what to do with him. Other conscientious objectors often requested non-combat status or refused service entirely. Doss was different. He wanted to serve. He wanted to go into combat. He just wouldn’t carry a weapon. He would go as a medic — running into fire without so much as a pistol, treating wounded men with his bare hands and his medical bag.

His fellow soldiers in the 307th Infantry Regiment, 77th Infantry Division, thought he was insane. They mocked him for reading his Bible every night, for refusing to handle weapons during training, for declining to work on Saturdays — the Adventist Sabbath — even when ordered. Some tried to get him discharged as unfit. His commanding officer, Captain Jack Glover, openly told Doss he didn’t want him in his company. A sergeant attempted to have him court-martialed for insubordination when he refused a direct order to handle a rifle.

Doss survived all of it. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry. He deployed to the Pacific. And on a 400-foot cliff on the island of Okinawa in May 1945, the unarmed man became the most extraordinary soldier in the entire battle.

The Maeda Escarpment

Okinawa, April–June 1945. The last major land battle of the Pacific War. The Japanese had turned the island into a fortress, with 100,000 troops dug into a network of caves, tunnels, and fortified ridgelines. One of the most formidable positions was the Maeda Escarpment — a jagged coral ridge rising nearly 400 feet straight up from the surrounding flatlands. American soldiers called it Hacksaw Ridge.

The ridge dominated the surrounding terrain. Whoever held it controlled the battlefield below. The problem was taking it. The Japanese had turned the top into an interlocking network of machine gun positions, mortar pits, and spider holes, all connected by tunnels so defenders could shift position without exposing themselves. Every approach to the top was covered by fire.

To reach the top, American soldiers had to climb a cargo net hung from the cliff face — a vertical ascent while under fire, completely exposed. Then they had to fight across the plateau, which the Japanese defended with suicidal ferocity.

On May 2, 1945, the 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry went up the net and attacked. Doss went with them, unarmed, his medical bag slung over his shoulder.

For two weeks they fought across the top of the ridge, taking ground by day and often losing it at night. The Japanese counterattacked in human-wave assaults, and the fighting was brutal and intimate — grenades at arm’s length, bayonets, pistols fired at point-blank range.

May 5, 1945: The Night on the Ridge

On May 5, the Japanese launched a massive counterattack. Wave after wave of soldiers came out of their tunnels in the dark, screaming, firing, throwing grenades. The American position collapsed. Company commanders ordered a retreat — get off the top of the ridge, back down the net, regroup below.

But the retreat left behind a problem: dozens of wounded men who couldn’t move under their own power. Men who’d been shot, men with shrapnel wounds, men with their legs blown off. They were lying on top of a ridge with the Japanese closing in from every direction.

Everyone else went down. Desmond Doss stayed up.

What followed was five hours of one man doing the impossible. The Japanese were all around him in the dark. He could hear them. Doss crawled from man to man, dragging them to the edge of the cliff, tying a modified double bowline knot — what he called a “Doss hitch” — around each man and lowering him hand-over-hand down the 400-foot cliff face while bullets cracked overhead and grenades went off nearby.

After each man, he prayed the same prayer: “Lord, please help me get one more.”

He lowered 75 men that night. The official Army count was 100, but Doss himself later said 75. Either number is staggering for a single unarmed man working alone in the dark, surrounded by the enemy, for hours.

The Days That Followed

Doss’s actions on May 5 were extraordinary, but they weren’t his only act of valor on Hacksaw Ridge. The fighting continued for days, and Doss went back up — voluntarily — every time his unit went up.

On May 21, under fire, he ran through an exposed area to reach a wounded man. As he was treating the soldier, a grenade rolled into their position. Rather than run, Doss kicked the grenade away. It exploded as it left his boot, riddling his legs with shrapnel — seventeen fragments in both legs. Doss treated his own wounds with what he had, refused a litter (he’d rather be carried on someone’s back so the litter could be used for a more seriously wounded man), and waited five hours for evacuation so that others could be treated first.

While being carried out, he noticed another soldier who had been wounded more severely. Doss rolled off his litter, handed it over to the other soldier, and told the stretcher bearers to take the other man first. He was shot through the arm while waiting. He fashioned a makeshift splint from a rifle stock he found lying on the ground and crawled 300 yards to the aid station under his own power rather than wait for help.

When President Truman awarded Doss the Medal of Honor on October 12, 1945, Truman told him: “I consider this a greater honor than being President.” Doss was the first conscientious objector in American history to receive the Medal of Honor. He remains the only one.

Faith as a Weapon

The men who mocked Doss before the battle — the ones who had thrown his Bible out of windows, who had tried to get him discharged, who had told him he’d get them all killed — those same men later said they would not go up the ridge without Doss. His captain, Jack Glover — who had once tried to force Doss out of his company — said that by the end of Okinawa, Doss was the finest soldier in his command.

There’s a strange calculus that happens in combat, where the thing that seems like weakness in peacetime turns out to be exactly what’s needed in war. Doss’s faith made him, in some ways, unsuited for the military. He wouldn’t kill. He’d refuse orders he considered contrary to his beliefs. He’d prioritize another man’s life over his own even when the other man was a stranger and his own life was the one in immediate danger.

But in the meat grinder of Hacksaw Ridge, those exact qualities made him irreplaceable. Because he had no weapon to fight with, all he could do was save people. And he did it with a totality of focus that no one who carried a rifle could match. Every man he served alongside knew he would never leave them. The Japanese never got Doss, despite everything they threw at the ridge. He survived Okinawa with shrapnel wounds and a broken arm, carrying exactly as much firepower as when he’d started: zero.

He went home. He lived to 87. He read his Bible every night until the end.

The Rope and the Prayer

What makes Doss’s story different from every other Medal of Honor story is what he didn’t do. He didn’t charge a machine gun. He didn’t throw himself on a grenade. He didn’t outfight the enemy. He simply refused to leave men behind, repeatedly, night after night, under conditions that would have broken anyone who wasn’t absolutely certain that the right thing to do was exactly what he was doing.

The double bowline knot he used — the “Doss hitch” — was a knot he’d learned in his civilian life. He tied it around each wounded man’s chest, lowered him down 400 feet of cliff, and climbed back up. Seventy-five times. Alone. In the dark. With the Japanese hunting him.

The prayer is the part that stays with you. Most people in that situation would pray to survive. Doss prayed to do more. “Lord, please help me get one more.” Not: get me out of here. Not: let me live. One more man. Just one more. Then he’d go back and look for another one.

That’s the thing about Desmond Doss. He was, by every military standard, the wrong man for the job — unarmed, a religious objector, not even supposed to be in combat. He turned out to be exactly the right man. The only man, on that night, who could have done what needed to be done.