Fellow soldiers resented him for getting out of duties for the Sabbath and felt they couldn’t trust him to protect them on the battlefield.įact: Doss went on to save between 50 and 100 of his comrades during the Battle of Okinawa.ĭoss went overseas with the 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division, in the summer of 1944. As in the film, he took both physical abuse and attempts, made by his superiors, to have him discharged from the military on the grounds of mental instability. But when he arrived for basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., he quickly became alienated from his fellow soldiers, and his small stature and soft-spoken demeanor didn’t do him any favors. Unlike objectors, he was eager to wear the uniform, salute the American flag and serve his country. Doss would later marry Frances Duman, with whom he remained until his death.įact: While in training, Doss became a target of both his comrades and military superiors, who saw him as a liability.ĭoss viewed himself not as a conscientious objector, but a conscientious cooperator. They would remain married until her death in 1991, raising one son, Desmond, Jr. Doss and his future wife actually met at church in Lynchburg, and the two were married in August of 1942. Partly Fiction: Doss met his future wife, a nurse named Dorothy Schutte, while donating blood for an accident victim at a nearby hospital.ĭoss did fall for a nurse named Dorothy Schutte, and he did walk several miles from his home to the hospital to donate blood after hearing a call for volunteers on the radio, but the events are fictitiously merged in the film. He figured that as a medic, he could, as he put it, “be like Christ: saving life instead of taking life.” He also believed serving as a medic would prevent him from having to break the Fourth Commandment (to honor the Sabbath, observed by Seventh-Day Adventists on Saturdays) because, as he argued, “Christ healed on the Sabbath.” Though taking it might have been an easier means of staying true to his convictions, Doss felt a moral obligation to serve, especially because the fight was not just for freedom but for religious liberty. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Doss was working at a shipyard in Newport News, a position which made him eligible for deferment. In reality, it was a fight between Doss’ father and uncle that prompted the boy to vow never to touch a gun again.įact: Doss could have deferred his military service but felt a moral obligation to join up. A scene in the movie in which Desmond takes a gun from his father during a fight between his parents is a variation on a similar event in Doss’ life. Though his father, a World War I veteran, was often drunk and depressed, his mother was a woman of strong faith who regularly took her children to church. From a young age, he was captivated by a framed poster of the Ten Commandments, and in particular the illustration that accompanied the Sixth Commandment: a drawing of Cain killing his brother Abel. Mostly Fact: Doss’ vow to practice nonviolence was inspired by an illustrated Ten Commandments hanging in his childhood home and a violent fight between his parents.ĭoss grew up in Lynchburg, Va., the middle child of William Doss, a carpenter, and Bertha Doss. The result is not for the faint of heart-one reviewer called the movie’s close-ups of spilled-out entrails and flesh-eating rats “sadistic,” “outlandish savagery”-and its depiction of World War II may be the hardest to shake from memory since Saving Private Ryan nearly two decades ago. Instead, it focuses on the upbringing that shaped Doss’ convictions and the gruesome battle that compelled him to put them in action. The number of lives Doss risked his own to save is under debate-he estimated it at 50, the military insisted it was closer to 100, so they settled on 75-but Gibson’s movie doesn’t concern itself with those details. (He died at 87 in 2006.) Screenwriter Robert Schenkkan, who wrote the first draft (co-writers include Randall Wallace and Andrew Knight), based the story on military records and footage of interviews with Doss, though finding ample material proved challenging because his subject’s modesty made him averse to the limelight. The words that emerge from Garfield’s mouth are, in fact, the same words the real Doss uttered on the Japanese island more than 70 years ago-and, indeed, much of the plot is faithfully drawn from Doss’ life.
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