## The Resolution
The headline of this article asks, implicitly, how a man who refused to carry a weapon could be credited with saving 75 lives in combat. The answer is not mysterious, but it requires accepting a premise that Desmond Doss held from childhood and that the Army of 1942 could not quite accommodate.
The premise is that saving lives and taking lives are both forms of participation in war, that they serve the same purpose of supporting the people fighting on your side, and that there is no intrinsic reason why the second must accompany the first. Doss believed he could serve his country, his unit, and the purposes of the war without ever pulling a trigger, because the specific service he was prepared to render — running toward wounded men in dangerous circumstances and bringing them back — did not require a weapon to perform.
He was right. His service record established this beyond any reasonable doubt. The Bronze Stars with ‘V’ on Guam and Leyte, the Medal of Honor citation for Okinawa, the testimony of Captain Glover and the men who searched the escarpment for his Bible and prayed with him before the April 29 assault — all of this is evidence that Doss’s premise was correct. A man could serve in combat without a weapon. Not every man could do it Doss’s way; the specific courage required is not common. But it was possible, and he proved it.
The related question — whether what he did on the escarpment constitutes ‘saving’ lives in a meaningful sense — is even more straightforwardly answered. Men who cannot move themselves are immobile in a combat zone. Immobile men in active combat zones die. Doss moved them. That is saving lives. The mechanism was a rope and a litter and an improvised knot from West Virginia. The result was approximately 75 men who were alive at the bottom of the cliff rather than dead at the top.