Captain Jack Glover, one of his commanding officers during training, initially pushed for Doss’s discharge. He would later credit Doss with saving his life on Okinawa. The transformation from antagonist to advocate is one of the documented patterns in how the military system eventually came to terms with Desmond Doss.
## Dorothy and the Wedding Bible
On August 17, 1942, before he had deployed anywhere, Desmond Doss married Dorothy Pauline Schutte at a ceremony in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had met her at his church, where she had been selling Adventist literature. She was not yet a nurse when they married; she earned her nursing degree during and after the war, in part to support the family financially while Doss was recovering from his wartime injuries.
Dorothy gave him a small Bible as a wedding gift — a pocket-sized New Testament that Doss carried with him throughout his Pacific service. He kept it with him on Guam, on Leyte, and on Okinawa. He read from it daily. His faith was not something he kept in reserve for difficult moments; it was a daily practice that structured his time and his thinking.
The Bible would eventually be lost on the Maeda Escarpment on the day he was most severely wounded. The men of Company B found it afterward and mailed it home to Dorothy. Doss has spoken about how much that gesture from his comrades meant to him.
## The 77th Infantry Division
The 77th Infantry Division was reactivated at Fort Jackson in 1942 after having served in World War I. It was a New York-based division known as the “Statue of Liberty Division,” named for the patch its soldiers wore. By the time Doss was training with it, the division was being rebuilt and prepared for Pacific operations.