Doss was driving. He survived the accident that killed his wife of forty-nine years.
He married Frances May Duman on July 1, 1993. Frances later wrote a book about his life: Desmond Doss, A Conscientious Objector: The Story of an Unlikely Hero, published in 1998.
## The Film and the Record
The 2016 Mel Gibson film Hacksaw Ridge brought Desmond Doss’s story to an audience that, for the most part, had not known it. Andrew Garfield played Doss in a performance that earned an Academy Award nomination. The film was a mainstream commercial success and introduced millions of people to a story that had been relatively obscure outside of Seventh-day Adventist communities and WWII history circles.
The film is an adaptation, not a documentary, and it makes the changes that films typically make to historical material: compressing the timeline, combining characters, dramatizing scenes that the documentary record doesn’t capture in detail, and omitting material that doesn’t fit the film’s structure.
Several differences between the film and the historical record are documented and worth understanding, not as criticisms of the film but as clarifications of the actual history.
The film portrays Doss’s father as an abusive figure. The historical record describes William Doss as a carpenter who sometimes drank during the Depression years — a man who had a frightening confrontation with his brother during a drunken episode, an event that shaped young Desmond’s feelings about weapons. The film’s portrayal is dramatically heightened beyond what the record supports.
The film implies that Doss met Dorothy through her nursing work. In reality, she was selling Adventist books at his church when they met, and she did not become a nurse until after the war.