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| The poster for the new Mel Gibson film. |
If you have been to the movies lately, you may have noticed a trailer for Hacksaw Ridge, an unusual
World War II based-in-fact flick
with a more unusual hero—a Conscientious
Objector medic who adamantly refused
to carry arms. The film was screened earlier this year at the Venice Film Festival to audience cheers and nearly ecstatic reviews. It would probably be generating more buzz over here except that it director
is Mel Gibson.
Yes the Mel Gibson, the once action movie mega star and Academy Award winning Director who
nearly destroyed his career and popularity after being caught on tape in a drunken anti-Semitic rage. His previous directorial efforts included the chest thumping, revenge driven patriotic epics Braveheart (his Oscar
turn), and the products of his peculiar hyper-conservative Catholicism—the
blood soaked Passion of Christ and Apocilypto, an equally brutal vision of the pre-Columbian Maya of Central America which oddly seemed to
suggest with the appearance of Spanish
ships with crosses on their
sails would save the Natives from
their brutal paganism.
Whether you liked the messages or ignored
them, it was hard to deny Gibson’s
cinematic eye and gift for gripping story telling. But who would have guessed that he would make
a sensitive and respectful film about a pacifist at war? Some critics
have suggested that Gibson’s new mover is a rebuttal to another actor/producer/director, Clint Eastwood, whose American
Sniper two years ago was a paean
to hyper masculinity and the glory of killing for your country. But Gibson became obsessed with his
source material ten years ago—just about the time of his 2006 disgrace—and has
worked against skeptics and odds to bring it to the screen ever since. He could not get it produced in the USA, but
managed to mount an Australian
production without any big name
stars.
Whatever I think of Gibson as a
human being—he seems a damaged and somewhat tortured genius at war with himself over totally conflicting impulses, I plan to
see the film. It’s inspiration has long struck a resonate chord with me because of the experiences of my Father.
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| Private Desmond Doss, Medic. |
Desmond
T. Doss was a private in B Company of the 1st Battalion, 307th Infantry Regiment 77th Division on Okinawa serving as a medic in May of 1945 when over the
course of several days he performed serial
action of stupefying bravery under fire personally saving the lives of as many as 75 men. And he did so totally unarmed. He became the first
Conscientious Objector (CO) ever to be awarded the Medal of Honor and the only one ever to
survive to accept it. Two Vietnam
medic COs died saving lives.
My Dad Willard Maurice (W.M.) Murfin was a Medical Corps officer in the 77th Divisions serving as commanding officer of forward battalion aid stations and like Doss participated in campaigns on Guam, Leyte in the Philippines,
and finally on bloody Okinawa. Did they
know one another? I don’t know it was a big war, but in some ways surprisingly intimate. Soldiers knew the members of their squads, companies, and details with
which they served but not
necessarily those under the same command
fighting a few hundred yards away. Still
they experienced much of the same horror. And each acted bravely under fire to save doomed men.
In other ways their stories were very different.
Doss was born on February 19, 1919
in Lynchburg, Virginia into an intensely devout
Seventh Day Adventist family. As I child he was deeply impressed by a large poster his father had on the wall
of their home of Cain holding a club
with the slain Abel beneath him with the text of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s
Prayer. He internalized the Sixth
Commandment—“Thou Shalt Not Kill” personally beyond even the customary
Adventist commitment to pacifism.
When war came, the young man knew he
would be called in the Draft. Like others of his faith he was determined not to take up arms. Adventists were the largest single group of religious objectors in World War II, surpassing the Quakers
and Mennonite peace churches. And they tended to be, you should pardon
the expression, militant about it. Many refused not only to bear arms, but to any uniform service that could be seen
as abetting war. Others refused
to cooperate in any way with the Selective
Service System or the government. As a result they were largest group of COs sentenced to prison for Draft Resistance.
Doss to a less adamant position. He
decided in advance that when drafted he would be willing to serve as a medic
under the strict condition he must never
be armed. He was willing to save lives, not to take them. He also knew that Draft Boards were taking a dim
view of religious objection and often rejected
claims and that even if approved the Army might assign him to other duty it considered non-combatant but did not meet his strict conditions. In either of those cases he was quite prepared to go to prison.
Waiting out the inevitable Draft call,
Doss went to work in a Navy Shipyard
and took First Aid and basic medical courses at night hoping
that would help get him the assignment he hoped for.
My father was six years older and a married
man when the war broke out. Still of
draft age, but in the early going at
least, not likely to be called for
combat service. He had grown up in Missouri and had been an Eagle Scout. He continued as an adult Scout leader through most of the ‘30’s. He was an expert outdoorsman, woodsman,
and hunter. Despite a good job at long last after the lean years of the Depression
and his own home in Hardin, Montana he enlisted in the Army weeks after Pearl Harbor.
He hoped that his experience would
get him a place as a scout or in a Ranger unit. Instead, to his initial disappointment, he was assigned to the Army Medical Corp. After
training at Fort Douglas in Illinois and in the California desert, his Field Hospital unit found itself
onboard ship headed to North Africa. He was Top
Sergeant of the unit which was attached to British and Commonwealth troops
in Egypt. He was with Field Marshal Montgomery’s army as it pushed west across the desert breaking out at El Alamein and chasing Rommel
across Libya. After that service he was tapped for Officer Candidate School and sent stateside for training.
When he was called in the Draft in
the spring of 1942, Doss was granted
CO status and accepted for medical service.
The requirement that he be on
duty on the Sabbath gave him pause.
Adventists, who celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday, require strict avoidance of all work on
that day to devote it to worship and
prayer. Finally he concluded that
since Jesus performed healings on
the Sabbath, it was safe for him to do so.
Doss had a hard time in the Army. COs
were not popular. Those who adamantly refused to carry arms
even less so. Although forbidden by the Geneva Convention many commanders
pressured their CO to arm themselves and the men didn’t trust those who they thought
might “not have their back” in a tight situation. He was subject to intense hazing, ridicule,
and even assault. His commanding officer tried to get rid of him as a mental case. But Adventists were trained from childhood to withstand
scorn and abuse, to wear it as a
personal badge of honor for fidelity to God’s commandments.
Doss persisted and shipped out with
his Division for service in the Pacific. He proved himself first on Guam in 1944. It was a grueling four month campaign in dense
rain forest and rugged terrain. Unlike most Medics, Doss refused to remove or obscure
the Red Cross on his helmet and
other Medical Corps insignia. He later described the risks:
The Japanese were out to get the
medics. To them, the most hated men in our army were the medics and the BAR
men… they would let anybody get by just to pick us off. They were taught to
kill the medics for the reason it broke down the morale of the men, because if
the medic was gone they had no one to take care of them. All the medics were
armed, except me.
He went beyond the customary dangers to any front-line medic however. He
volunteered over and over to accompany dangerous long-range patrols
that seldom went out with Medics. He routinely rescued or treated men under fire for which he was
awarded the first of two Bronze
Stars. And the former pariah finally won the respect and admiration of the men
with whom he served. My bet is they were
all calling him Doc by the time it
was over.
After a rest Doss was off to Leyte
in December 1944 and another intense jungle campaign. This time, for some reason, he was assigned
as a stretcher bearer rather than a
Medic. The designation did not faze
him. He carried a full medic’s kit anyway supplemented by bandages and supplies he
scrounged where he could. He earned his
second Bronze Star by sprinting 200 yards under intense machine gun fire to
rescue two injured men. One was dead.
The other he carried to the
relative safety of a tree line
where he fashioned a make-shift
stretcher out of bamboo and a blanket then dragged him under sniper fire to friendly lines. Although
cited for this action, it was typical of
almost any day under fire.
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| Medical Corps Lt. W.M. Murfin on Leyte. |
After completing OCS and a brief stateside assignment at Ft. Lewis in Washington state, Dad was assigned duty with the 77th
Division. Like Doss he saw intense
action on Guam and Leyte. Unlike Doss,
he quickly learned to take the Red Cross off his helmet and ditch his identifying shoulder patches, pins, and officer’s insignia. He also
was not shy of carrying—and
apparently using—a gun. I have a picture of him on Leyte with a .45 Colt Automatic in a shoulder holster. He also brought home from the war an M-1 Carbine and a mean looking Bolo Knife,
both of which I assume he used.
And like Doss he earned a Bronze
Star for a similar rescue of wounded men under intense machine gun fire. Like I said before, almost routine for front
line medical personnel.
Then after a short rest the
Division and both men were bound to Okinawa, the last stepping stone to the Japanese Home Islands. Resistance was
long and fierce as the Japanese retreated
into caves that honeycombed the
rugged mountains of the island.
Whatever happened to my Dad, it was so traumatic that he would not
speak of it. Except once. Watching a documentary on TV footage of Japanese civilians jumping to their deaths from cliffs rather than surrender came on the screen Dad got agitated like I had never seen
him. He had to leave the room. Later he
explained only that he had “seen that.”
Things were even tougher for Private Doss. On April 29, 1944 his company was part of an assault on Maeda Escarpment, a 400-foot-high
ridge overlooking the entire south side of the island infested with machine gun nests, booby traps, concrete
pillboxes, and winding caves. The
initial assault had Doss and his company scaled
ropes up the sheer cliff face. Always under intense fire from hidden positions, the men tried to dig the enemy out cave-by-cave, hole-by-hole using
flame throwers and grenades.
Early in the morning of April 30
a five man squad from the company charging a machine gun nest was mowed down just 15 feet from their
objective. Doss crawled forward under
that same fire four different times to drag survivors to safety. It was just the first of a string of extraordinary acts of bravery that stretched
over the next several days.
Most Medal of Honor winners are cited for a single action. Doss’s citation
was epic citing six actions over
almost a month. Let it speak for itself.
… He was a
company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet
(120 m) high. As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of
artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting
approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to
seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying
all 75 casualties one-by-one to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering
them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On
May 2, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded
man 200 yards (180 m) forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2
days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly
defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards
(7.3 m) of enemy forces in a cave's mouth, where he dressed his comrades'
wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On
May 5, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an
artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that
offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells
fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an
American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him
where he had fallen 25 feet (7.6 m) from the enemy position, rendered aid,
and carried him 100 yards (91 m) to safety while continually exposed to
enemy fire. On May 21, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained
in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly
risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and
giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by
the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he
cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him
and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack
and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the
litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other
man. Awaiting the litter bearers’ return, he was again struck, by a sniper
bullet while being carried off the field by a comrade, this time suffering a
compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock
to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards (270 m) over
rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and
unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc.
Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the
77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call
of duty.
Whew! It is exhausting just
to read. Doss’s wounds were
grievous, life threatening. But he seemed most concerned with the loss
of a pocket Bible his wife had
given him. After action in front of the
caves subsided the whole company combed
the ground until they found the Bible
and returned it to the injured man as he was awaiting evacuation to a Hospital
Ship. Before he left his commanding
officer informed him that he was submitting
his name for the Medal of Honor.
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| Cpl. Doss receiving his Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman. |
The Medal was officially approved in November as Doss
was recovering from his wounds. Promoted
to corporal, Doss received his medal personally from President Harry Truman when he was well enough to stand through the brief ceremony.
After a spell in the Philippines
after the end of the war, my father returned to Montana and his wife Ruby a changed and restless man. The first two years home were difficult. He couldn’t sleep well and often woke up
screaming. He could not settle into his old life as a bank teller. Instead he concocted a scheme to purchase a bunch
of surplus 1903 Springfield Rifles, mount
them with scopes, and make them the prizes
for the punch boards he peddled to saloons across the
state. It kept him moving and drinking. He also disappeared
into the mountains for long periods on fishing and hunting trips.
Slowly he got a grip on himself and opened a sporting goods store and hunting
guide service in West Yellowstone that
led unexpectedly to a career as a Chamber of Commerce manager.
By 1949 he and Ruby could adopt the twin boys they would raise as their own. He became part of the so-called Greatest Generation which came home and started remaking America.
Doss’s injuries were so severe
that he spent the next five years
mostly convalescing in Veterans’ Hospitals. When he finally came home to his family he could not work at a steady job. His wife and child lived on his slim disability payments. He lived in Georgia and later Alabama using
his abundant free time as a church volunteer and youth leader. His first wife died in 1991, and he remarried.
When interviewed from time to time he would tell his story plainly without embellishment. But he was evidently more comfortable talking about his experiences than my Dad.
Doss died March 27, 2006 at the
age of 86 at his home in Piedmont,
Alabama. He was buried in the National Cemetery at Chattanooga, Tennessee.
My father was long gone by
then. He died of brain cancer in a Missoula,
Montana hospital on December 17, 1989 at the age of 76. He was given both American Legion and Masonic funeral
services. His ashes were scattered by surviving brother Masons and hunting
buddies from Hardin on “the sunny side of the mountain overlooking his favorite
trout stream.
Doss was interviewed for the 2001
TV series Medal of Honor and profiled
in Conscientious
Objector, a 2004 documentary. .
My father lives on in fading
photographs on the wall of my study.
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