They had one son, Desmond Thomas Doss Jr., born in 1946, who grew up to serve as an Army medic himself and later became a firefighter and paramedic — carrying forward, in a different context, the professional commitment to emergency care that his father had demonstrated in combat.
## Rising Fawn
When Doss was finally well enough to leave treatment in 1951, he and Dorothy settled on a small farm in Rising Fawn, Georgia — a community in Walker County in the northwest corner of the state, where the terrain echoes the Blue Ridge Mountains across the Georgia-Tennessee border. He built a log cabin on four acres he had purchased. He farmed. He worked as a cabinetmaker and at other jobs when his health permitted.
He was not wealthy. The war hero’s postwar life was not one of speaking fees and television appearances, though he made occasional public appearances and was featured on the television program This Is Your Life on February 18, 1959. Mostly he built things, farmed, and lived a life of relative quiet.
One significant contribution he made to his community was organizing the Civilian Defense Rescue Service for Walker County, Georgia, funding it partly through his Medal of Honor stipend. The service performed its most notable action in 1966, when seven Boy Scouts and their adult leader became trapped in a gas-filled cavern. Doss worked in the cave rescue, spending more consecutive hours underground than anyone else on the rescue team. The man who had spent five hours lowering wounded men down a cliff in 1945 spent more time in a gas-filled cave than anyone else in 1966.