The Unarmed Soldier on Hacksaw Ridge

On May 5, 1945, Private First Class Desmond Doss crawled across the blood-soaked escarpment of Hacksaw Ridge in Okinawa with nothing but a Bible and a prayer. While bullets shredded the air around him, the young Seventh-day Adventist medic — who had refused to carry a weapon — dragged wounded Marines one by one to the cliff's edge and lowered them to safety on a rope. Seventy-five men survived that night because Doss kept repeating a single whispered petition: "Lord, help me get one more."

His commanding officers had once tried to discharge him as unfit for combat. Fellow soldiers had mocked his faith, thrown boots at him during evening prayers, and called him a coward. Yet on that ridge, when seasoned warriors fell all around him, the man who carried no rifle stood untouched.

Doss did not claim invincibility. He was later wounded four times before leaving Okinawa. But he had made the Most High his dwelling place, and in the deadliest battle of the Pacific, he discovered what the psalmist already knew — that the shelter of the Almighty is not the absence of danger but the presence of God within it.

"Because he loves Me," says the Lord, "I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges My name." Doss acknowledged that Name on a ridge where no earthly shield could save him, and El Shaddai proved sufficient.