What it illustrates, if accurate, is the specific nature of Doss’s commitment. He was not performing courage for an audience; he was applying a moral framework consistently. If a wounded person was in front of him and he could help, he helped. The uniform was beside the point. He had decided, as a boy looking at a picture of Cain and Abel, that he would not be the person who killed another human being. The corollary of that position, followed consistently, was that a wounded human being — whoever he was — was someone to be helped.
## The Walk to Give Blood
Before she became his wife, Dorothy Schutte demonstrated something about her own character in a detail that Doss included in later accounts of their courtship.
When a blood drive was organized in connection with the war effort, Dorothy walked six miles to donate blood. She did not make this trip to see Desmond Doss or because she had any particular connection to the drive’s organizers. She made it because it was something she could do to help, and the distance did not change that calculation.
Doss has mentioned this detail in interviews as part of explaining why Dorothy was the right person for him. Two people who walked toward what needed to be done, regardless of the cost to themselves, had found each other at a church where one of them was selling religious books.
Dorothy’s role in the postwar years was as demanding in its own way as Doss’s wartime service. She married him in 1942, watched him deploy to the Pacific, waited through three years of absence and combat news, worked as a nurse to support the family financially during his five and a half years of tuberculosis treatment, raised their son, and served as his primary support and companion through the deafness years. The 2016 film gives her a larger role in the narrative than many historical accounts do, though it also changes some of the factual details of her life.