The Unarmed Man on the Ridge

On May 5, 1945, Japanese machine gun fire swept across the Maeda Escarpment on Okinawa — a jagged thirty-five-foot cliff face the Americans had nicknamed Hacksaw Ridge. When the counterattack came, soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division scrambled back down the cliff in retreat, leaving dozens of wounded men bleeding on the plateau above. But one soldier refused to leave.

Private First Class Desmond Doss, a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, carried no rifle, no sidearm, no bayonet. He had enlisted as a combat medic and conscientious objector, enduring the ridicule of men who called him a coward. Now, with enemy fire raking the ground around him, Doss crawled from one wounded man to the next, dragging them to the cliff's edge and lowering them down on a rope tied in a double bowline knot. One by one. For hours. Each time he knotted the rope he prayed the same whispered prayer: "Lord, please let me get just one more."

By nightfall, seventy-five men had been saved. Doss received the Medal of Honor from President Truman — the first conscientious objector so honored in World War II.

Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13). Doss never took a life, yet he was willing to give his own for men who had mocked him. That is the shape of Christlike courage — not the power to destroy, but the love that stays when everyone else has fled.