The United States had entered the war in December 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Public sentiment in the following months was overwhelmingly in support of the war effort. Men who could serve were expected to serve; men who could not were expected to demonstrate their limitation clearly. A man who was inducted into the Army and then refused to touch a rifle was not merely an administrative inconvenience — he was, in the eyes of many of the men around him, a coward using religion as a shield.
This is the context for the shoe-throwing and the threats and the ‘Holy Joe’ and ‘Holy Jesus’ taunts. The men doing these things did not think they were persecuting a person of genuine faith; they thought they were expressing legitimate contempt for a man who was not pulling his weight. Their understanding of the situation was that every man in the Army was there to fight, that fighting required a weapon, and that a man who refused the weapon was refusing to fight.
From Doss’s perspective, this was simply wrong. He was not refusing to fight; he was insisting on fighting in the way his faith permitted. The distinction that was crystal clear to him was invisible to the men around him, because the category ‘soldier who goes into combat without a weapon’ was not part of their frame of reference. Soldiers carried weapons. That was what soldiers were.
The friction was not, in other words, merely about religion. It was about what kind of man he was understood to be. The judgment his fellow soldiers had formed of him by late 1942 — a coward hiding behind his Bible — was the judgment he had to disprove through action. He could not argue his way out of it; he could only demonstrate, through sustained performance under conditions where cowardice would have been visible, that the judgment was wrong.