He appeared on This Is Your Life on February 18, 1959 — one of the television program’s most popular episodes. He received a PETA Hero to Animals award posthumously in 2017, recognizing his lifelong vegetarianism.
The 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector, directed by Terry Benedict, told his story for a general audience a dozen years before the Mel Gibson film. Doss was alive for the documentary and appears in it in his own voice, which is the most direct available record of his manner and his memory of the events.
He resisted efforts to tell his story commercially for many years. He was not particularly interested in being famous. He was interested in his farm and his community and his faith and, when his health allowed, the Civilian Defense Rescue Service in Walker County.
## Last Surviving WWII Medic Medal of Honor Recipient
When Desmond Doss died on March 23, 2006, at his home in Piedmont, Alabama, at the age of 87, he was the last surviving World War II combat medic to have received the Medal of Honor. He was buried April 3, 2006, at Chattanooga National Cemetery in Tennessee, in Section P, Site 6399-A.
The last weeks of his life involved breathing difficulties severe enough to require hospitalization. The lungs that had survived tuberculosis, the loss of one lobe of lung tissue, five and a half years of treatment, decades of the reduced pulmonary function that follows such damage — they finally gave out. He died of a respiratory ailment.
Frances, his second wife, died on February 3, 2009, at the Piedmont Health Care Center.