He later said that as he worked, he prayed a version of the same prayer repeatedly: “Lord, help me get one more.” The specific words are attributed to Doss in his own accounts.
The Army’s initial estimate was that he had saved 100 men. Doss himself believed the number was closer to 50 — that in the confusion of a combat situation, he had lost track of the actual count, and that 50 was closer to what he could actually account for. His regimental commander wanted the citation to credit him with 100. They settled on 75 — a figure that reflected neither the Army’s higher estimate nor Doss’s own more conservative one, but the number that appeared in the official Medal of Honor citation.
The precision matters because the prompt for this article is specific about it: the 75 figure is the official credited number, it comes from the citation, and it represents a negotiated estimate rather than an independently verified count of individually documented rescues. This is not a criticism of the number; it is an accurate account of how such tallies work in the chaos of combat documentation.
## What the Rope System Was
A detail that often gets flattened in the popular telling is how, exactly, Doss lowered the wounded men down the escarpment.
He had learned a particular rope knot in West Virginia, prior to his military service. When he found himself on the escarpment with wounded men and not enough standard rope to rig a proper lowering system, he improvised with what he had — using his knowledge of that knot and whatever materials were available, including a litter, to create a system that allowed him to lower a man without dropping him.