The Soldier They Called a Coward

During basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the men of Company B, 77th Infantry Division, wanted Private Desmond Doss gone. They harassed him relentlessly and mocked him while he knelt to pray. Officers attempted to have him discharged. His offense: as a Seventh-day Adventist, he refused to carry a rifle — yet volunteered to serve as a combat medic on the front lines.

On May 5, 1945, that so-called coward faced the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a sheer cliff face the Americans called Hacksaw Ridge. After a fierce Japanese counterattack drove his company back over the edge, Doss stayed alone on top. With gunfire and grenades all around him, he dragged wounded men to the cliff's edge, tied a rope into a double bowline loop, and lowered them one by one to safety below. He worked for hours, whispering prayers between each rescue.

By morning, seventy-five men were alive because of a soldier who carried no weapon — only compassion and a length of rope. President Truman later awarded him the Medal of Honor, the first ever given to a conscientious objector.

Paul wrote to Timothy that God gives us not a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of a sound mind. Doss embodied all three. His power was not the power of a rifle. It was the power of love refusing to abandon the broken, and the disciplined resolve to keep going when every instinct screamed to flee.

Compassion is never cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing a believer can do is stay when everyone else has retreated — armed with nothing but the love of Christ and the refusal to give up on one more person who needs help.