## An Ordinary Young Man
It would be a mistake to conclude that Desmond Doss was constitutionally incapable of fear or pain, or that his faith made him invulnerable to what combat actually is. He was wounded four times. He treated his own wounds in the dark and waited five hours for help. He survived the death of his wife of forty-nine years in an accident while he was driving. He lived twelve and a half years of complete deafness. He spent five and a half years losing a lung to a disease he had contracted in the Pacific.
He was a young man from Lynchburg, Virginia, who built things with his hands and attended church on Saturdays and married a woman who sold religious books at his congregation and turned down a draft deferment because he thought he should serve. He took the Ten Commandments personally, which was not a complicated position — it was simply the position he held. When the Army tried to discharge him for it, he refused to be discharged. When the men of his unit mocked him for it, he continued to pray beside his bunk. When the battle reached the top of a cliff on Okinawa and the rest of the unit retreated, he stayed and worked until there was no one left to lower.
He was credited with saving 75 lives. He believed it was closer to 50. The actual number was whatever it was — somewhere in that range, in one of history’s most violent campaigns, accomplished by a man who had promised himself as a child that he would never take a life, and who kept that promise.