One More on Hacksaw Ridge

On May 5, 1945, Private First Class Desmond Doss lay flat on the edge of a thirty-five-foot cliff on Okinawa — a jagged escarpment the soldiers called Hacksaw Ridge. Japanese forces had driven his entire company back over the edge. Seventy-five wounded men remained stranded on the plateau above, exposed to enemy fire.

Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist who had refused to carry a rifle, had only one weapon: prayer. Crouched against the rock, he repeated the same five words over and over: "Lord, help me get one more."

Then he crawled back into the carnage. One by one, he dragged wounded soldiers to the cliff's edge, lowered them on a makeshift rope litter, and whispered his prayer again. For hours — through gunfire, mortar blasts, and sheer exhaustion — Doss ran not to a bunker or a foxhole, but to the name of the Lord.

By morning, seventy-five men were alive because one unarmed medic treated the name of God as his fortress.