The fact that Doss’s father sometimes drank and had a frightening confrontation with his brother during those years made Bertha’s consistent religious teaching more significant, not less. In a household that experienced adult male volatility, the children were being formed by their mother’s example of sustained faith and consistent practice.
Doss has spoken in interviews about his mother’s influence in terms that are specific: she taught him the commandments, she took them seriously, and she expected her children to take them seriously as well. The Sixth Commandment — the prohibition against killing — was not an abstraction but a concrete moral requirement that Doss internalized as a child and never abandoned.
When the Army attempted to discharge him as mentally unfit because of his religious beliefs, the conviction he was defending was not a recently adopted position or a convenient excuse for avoiding combat. It was something he had understood as part of who he was since childhood, something his mother had taught him and that his own reflection on the picture of Cain and Abel had deepened into a personal resolution. He was not going to pick up a rifle. He had decided that as a boy, looking at the picture on the wall, and he had not changed his mind in the intervening two decades.
Bertha Doss lived to see her son receive the Medal of Honor in October 1945. The specific record of what she thought or said about it is not preserved in the publicly available accounts, but the general record is clear enough: the faith she had passed on to him, and that the Army had tried to discharge him for, was what the President of the United States was recognizing.