He took a rifle stock — borrowed from another soldier, not a weapon he had ever intended to carry — and used it as a splint for the fractured arm. He then crawled approximately 300 yards to the aid station under his own power, with a compound arm fracture and shrapnel wounds in both legs.
Mel Gibson, who directed the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, reportedly decided to cut the sniper sequence from the film because it seemed too implausible. The judgment of what audiences would find credible left out one of the most documented aspects of Doss’s injuries.
He was evacuated to the hospital ship USS Mercy (AH-8) on May 21, 1945. He had 17 pieces of shrapnel from the grenade wound, plus the sniper fracture, plus prior wounds sustained at other points in the Okinawa campaign. He was wounded four times in total during the Okinawa fighting.
## The Bible Found
Among the things that happened in the aftermath of May 21 is a detail that Doss spoke about in later interviews with what seemed like particular feeling.
The small New Testament that Dorothy had given him as a wedding gift, which he had carried through Guam and Leyte and all of Okinawa, was lost on the escarpment during the confusion around his wounding. He did not know where it was or whether it had survived.
The men of Company B found it. They searched the position where he had been wounded, located the Bible, and mailed it home to Dorothy.
For Doss, whose faith was not a position he defended but a practice he lived daily, the Bible represented something beyond sentimental value. It was his connection to the daily reading practice that had defined his discipline throughout the war, including on the morning of May 5. That his comrades — some of whom had mocked him, some of whom had thrown shoes at him, some of whom had been saved by him on the escarpment — searched for it and mailed it home is a specific human gesture that the larger story of battle tends to obscure.