The Medic Who Carried No Weapon

When Desmond Doss enlisted in the United States Army in 1942, his commanding officers wanted him gone. A Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, Doss refused to carry a rifle or work on Saturdays. Fellow soldiers called him a coward. They threw boots at him in the barracks. His captain tried to have him discharged for psychiatric reasons.

The Pharisees of Doss's world — men who measured righteousness by outward conformity — could not fathom a soldier who obeyed a deeper law. But Doss understood something Jesus taught on that Galilean hillside: true faithfulness is not the absence of duty but the fullness of it.

At the Battle of Okinawa in May 1945, atop a jagged escarpment the soldiers called Hacksaw Ridge, Doss's company was shredded by Japanese fire. As his unit retreated, Doss stayed. Alone on that blood-soaked cliff, he dragged wounded men to the edge and lowered them one by one on a rope litter. Seventy-five men. All night and into the morning. Each time he reached another broken body, he prayed the same words: "Lord, help me get one more."

Jesus said a city on a hill cannot be hidden. Doss never fired a shot, yet his light blazed so fiercely that an entire battalion saw it. His righteousness did not abolish the law — it fulfilled it, exceeding anything mere rule-keeping could ever produce.