One More Down the Ridge

On the morning of May 5, 1945, Private First Class Desmond Doss stood atop the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a sheer four-hundred-foot cliff the soldiers called Hacksaw Ridge. His battalion had been driven back by withering Japanese fire, leaving dozens of wounded men scattered across the plateau above. Most would have counted them lost. Doss didn't. The young medic from Lynchburg, Virginia — a Seventh-day Adventist who refused to carry a weapon — crawled back into the killing field alone.…