Seventh-day Adventists observe the Sabbath on Saturday rather than Sunday, a practice that would create specific practical conflicts throughout Doss’s military service. The denomination holds a strong ethical commitment to nonviolence — not a pacifist position in the sense of refusing to engage with the world’s conflicts, but a conviction that killing violates the Sixth Commandment in a way that cannot be reconciled with genuine Christian faith. Doss absorbed this conviction from his mother, and it was deepened by something specific he saw as a boy.
On the wall of his childhood home hung a picture of the Ten Commandments illustrated with scenes from the Bible. One of them showed Cain standing over the body of his brother Abel. Doss has said in interviews that he studied that image and made a personal resolution: he would never take a human life. The picture made the commandment concrete for him. Murder was not an abstraction; it was one man killing another, and he would not be the man doing it.
His father sometimes drank during the difficult Depression years, and Doss witnessed at least one incident in which his father pulled a gun on his uncle during an argument. That experience sharpened his conviction about weapons. He decided, as a child, that he would never touch a gun — not in play, not in anger, not in war.
## Newport News and the Draft
By the time the United States entered World War II, Desmond Doss was working as a joiner at a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. Shipyard work was classified as defense-essential employment, and Doss was offered a deferment from the draft that would have kept him in his civilian job and out of uniform.