His son, Desmond Thomas Doss Jr., had become an Army medic, then a firefighter and paramedic — a professional trajectory that traces the same line of care under pressure that his father had demonstrated on the Maeda Escarpment.
## The First Conscientious Objector
The Medal of Honor citation for Desmond Doss makes him the first conscientious objector to receive the honor. Two subsequent recipients — Thomas W. Bennett and Joseph G. LaPointe Jr., both during the Vietnam War — also held conscientious objector status. Both Bennett and LaPointe received their Medals of Honor posthumously.
The precision here matters, as the prompt notes: Doss was the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, not the first unarmed soldier in all of history to perform acts of battlefield heroism. The specific legal and administrative designation “conscientious objector” is what makes the record precise.
Within that precise frame, the significance is considerable. The Medal of Honor was established during the Civil War as the country’s highest military decoration for valor in combat. Its history includes thousands of recipients across more than 160 years of American military service. Doss was the first person classified as a conscientious objector to receive it — awarded to a man the Army had previously tried to discharge as unfit for service on grounds related to his religious beliefs.
The institution that tried to discharge him in 1942 decorated him in 1945. The men who threw shoes at him in training later searched the battlefield for his lost Bible. The commanding officers who sought his discharge later credited him with saving their lives.