## The Medical Toolkit
Desmond Doss carried what a combat medic in the 77th Infantry Division would have carried in 1945 — a unit-standardized medical kit that was designed to provide immediate treatment in the field pending evacuation to more advanced care.
The standard World War II combat medic kit included morphine syrettes for pain management, sulfa powder and sulfa tablets to fight infection, bandages and field dressings, a tourniquet, plasma and plasma-administration equipment, and basic airway management tools. The medic was trained to provide triage — assessing wounds, controlling bleeding, treating for shock, preparing patients for evacuation — rather than the surgical or intensive care that could only happen at a field hospital or further back.
Plasma administration was a critical part of the medic’s work at Okinawa. Dried plasma, which could be reconstituted in the field, was used to treat shock — the circulatory collapse that kills wounded men even when their specific wounds might otherwise be survivable. The Medal of Honor citation references Doss administering plasma to an artillery officer on May 5, in a shelling zone. Setting up a plasma line under shellfire requires a degree of focused calm under conditions designed to produce the opposite.
The litter — the stretcher — was the primary evacuation tool at the unit level. A litter required two men to carry it efficiently, though one man could drag it. The rope-and-litter system Doss improvised on the escarpment was his adaptation of standard evacuation equipment to a non-standard situation: there were no two-man teams available, there was a cliff face below the patients, and there was enemy pressure from above and to the sides.