## Postwar: The Body’s Account
The war that Desmond Doss survived left significant marks on his body. The documentation of his postwar medical history is part of the record of what the fighting at Leyte and Okinawa actually cost him.
In 1946, shortly after his return to civilian life, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had contracted it on Leyte, likely during the wet and exhausting months of that campaign, and it had been quietly progressing through the five and a half years of intensive treatment that the tuberculosis required. The treatment included the loss of one lung and five ribs. He was hospitalized for five and a half years in total and was finally discharged in August 1951 with a 90% disability rating. He was thirty-two years old.
His arm, fractured by the sniper’s bullet on May 21, 1945, did not heal in a way that allowed him to return to carpentry — the trade his father had practiced and that he had been trained in. The injury that had been splinted with a borrowed rifle stock in a combat zone, that had been crawled through 300 yards of Okinawan terrain, did not leave him with the arm function that precise manual work requires.
Dorothy, who had married him in August 1942 and watched him go through multiple combat deployments and years of postwar treatment, earned her nursing degree during this period and worked full-time to support the family. The Medal of Honor did not come with a salary. The monthly stipend that Congress eventually authorized for Medal of Honor recipients — $100 per month — was not authorized until 1965. The family lived on Dorothy’s income and Doss’s limited disability payments while he was in treatment.