Editor’s note: This is the last in a three-part series featuring honorees at the Sept. 23 Texas Veterans Military Show in Bullard.
He sipped coffee from a cardboard cup in the lobby of a Holiday Inn in Tyler. It was a Friday morning, Sept. 22, and Desmond Doss Jr. soon would speak with a group of high school students about his father, a World War II U.S. Army medic who saved the lives of 75 soldiers in the Battle of Okinawa.
His father’s story has been told countless times, most famously in the 2016 Mel Gibson-directed film “Hacksaw Ridge.” But many of those who’ve heralded his father’s heroism in news articles and interviews often have overlooked the other main character in the story.
“They never ask about my mother!” Doss Jr. exclaimed.
It was his mother, Dorothy, who raised Doss Jr. while his father was in a hospital fighting tuberculosis. And it was his mother who, as a nurse and teacher, helped people within her sphere of influence like her husband did on a battlefield half a world away.
“I know that she took care of my dad,” Doss Jr. said. “He was deaf and pretty much blind. He couldn’t help himself, so she took care of him. In my mind, she was a true hero.”
He paused.
“When we think about war heroes, usually there’s some event that they did that marked a moment in time,” Doss Jr. said. “People go, ‘Oh, wow, did you see that?’ My mother did her whole life that way.”
A mother’s life
Doss Jr., 77, also trained as a medic in the U.S. Army, worked as a firefighter and paramedic and happened to be born the son of one of World War II’s most famous soldiers.
He recently made an appearance in East Texas for the annual Texas Veterans Military Show, an event honoring those who’ve served. He also spoke at Brook Hill School in Bullard.
His father, a Medal of Honor recipient, was born in 1919 in Virginia and was raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. He earned a place in history as a service member who saved lives and never carried a gun in battle.
Desmond Doss received the Medal of Honor for his actions as a U.S. Army medic during World War II.
During the Battle of Okinawa, he used a rope to lower wounded troops on top of an escarpment down to safety, and through it all, he prayed: “Lord, please help me get one more!”
The number of men whose lives Doss saved may be higher than official military records state, though no one may ever know how many.
Dorothy Schutte was born in 1920 in Pennsylvania and also was a Seventh-Day Adventist Church member. She and Desmond met at church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and they were married in 1942.
Some of their story is told in “Hacksaw Ridge.” The young couple wrote each other letters, and wherever he went in battle, Desmond was carrying something Dorothy gave him: a small Bible with a photo of her tucked inside the pages.
“He treasured that and her picture, and yeah, it sustained him,” Doss Jr. said.
Dorothy was a nurse, and after World War II, she became a mother. Doss Jr., the couple’s only son, was born in 1946. But for about five years after World War II, Desmond was confined to a hospital as he battled tuberculosis. Dorothy had a young son to take care of and a job to work.
“It was extremely hard on her, but she hung in there,” Doss Jr. said. “She hung in there until my dad came home, and then she collapsed. She actually just had what they called in those days a nervous breakdown. She was pretty well laid up for about five years as well, and she did recover from all of that, and they finally got something close to a normal life.”
Dorothy also was a school teacher. When she died in 1991, countless people, especially women, came to the funeral home. They hugged Doss Jr. and told him how his mother had helped them through challenging times in their lives. She gave something to many of them — often guidance and emotional support.
“I knew she loved me, but I had no idea at of all these other people that she had touched,” he said. “To hear these people talk about how, ‘Your mother saved my life and changed my life, was there for me,’ all this kind of stuff — that’s what love looks like. It’s some of the manifestation of that.”
A soldier’s heart
Similarly, his father saved lives out of love, too — and not just during the Battle of Okinawa. Doss also saw action in Guam and Leyte, and he was already a decorated soldier before the Battle of Okinawa in spring 1945.
Army Cpl. Desmond Doss receives the Medal of Honor from President Harry S. Truman on Oct. 12, 1945
“My dad’s story is a lot bigger than this ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ thing,” Doss Jr. said. “He’d been doing that stuff a long time.”
He continued to do that as well. Doss gave God the credit for saving soldiers’ lives, and he stipulated that any books written or movies made about his life must do the same, Doss Jr. said.
“Hacksaw Ridge” accomplished that. The movie was highly accurate, Doss Jr. said, though it focuses mostly on what happened during war. The man the movie depicted never changed.
The family settled in Georgia after World War II, and Doss got involved in various community service organizations. He helped start a local Civil Defense program, a formerly nationwide organization that brought together volunteers to prepare bomb shelters during World War II and the Cold War. Those volunteers often worked in conjunction with local fire departments and took on search-and-rescue missions.
Sometime in the early ‘80s, Doss and other Civil Defense workers were called to search for Boy Scouts who went missing in Nickajack Cave near the Tennessee-Georgia line, Doss Jr. said. Crews called off the unsuccessful search after three days. But Doss — who lost a lung and five ribs during his fight with tuberculosis, nonetheless — stayed on the hunt by himself. He brought the Scouts out alive.
Saving lives still was no easy task. During World War II, he had to quit looking at the faces of the soldiers he was treating because some of them were his friends, Doss Jr. said. He surely had memories of those painful moments.
“But he processed it differently because of his own perception of what he thought he was doing,” Doss Jr. said. “I think that healed him, shielded him. … I think he came through it in a very unique and different way because of what he was doing and how he thought of himself while he was doing it. He thought he was out there doing God’s work.”
One man, two views
Doss Jr. was 5 years old the first time he saw his dad. Until Doss was released from the hospital, Doss Jr. knew him only as “a voice in a window, many windows on the side of a huge VA hospital.”
“When he came home, I was actually frightened of him because I didn’t know who this person was,” Doss Jr. said.
In another sense, Doss Jr. didn’t fully know his father until fairly recently.
“The world saw this hero guy over here, right?” he said. “What I saw was a man sitting on the couch. That was the man I knew.”
During the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, Desmond Doss (seen here at the top of Hacksaw Ridge) dragged severely injured men to the edge of the ridge and lowered them down to other medics below.
That changed in 2019 on the 74th anniversary of the night his father risked his life, dodged enemy fire and trudged through a war-torn, bullet-ridden field to bring troops to safety.
Doss Jr. visited the escarpment known as Hacksaw Ridge incognito. No one knew whose son he was.
He stuck around after the tourists were gone. In fact, he spent the night alone on the escarpment, recreating the long, dark hours his father endured there. He imagined the smell of the battlefield and the sound of gunfire erupting. He walked back and forth across the ground, acting as if he was carrying troops to the side of the cliff, lowering them to their comrades — quite literally following in his father’s footsteps.
“I wanted to see what it was like for him,” Doss Jr. said. “And so what happened was, I had the dad that I knew over here, and then I had the dad that was the one all you guys know. And they were two separate people. In that place, on that night, they became one person. And I came to just love my father in this incredible way.”
As Doss Jr. told students at Brook Hill School in Bullard, Medal of Honor recipients like his father share a commonality: selflessly laying their lives down for others out of love.
“I love him now for being my dad, but also for the incredible human that he is,” he said. “He did some pretty amazing things.”
Despite their amazing deeds, though, Desmond and Dorothy Doss breathed the same air anyone else did and lived simply. So simply, in fact, that the log cabin they called home at their Georgia farm didn’t have electricity, running water or a road leading to it for several years.
Doss Jr. kept up the family legacy of working in the medical field. He taught first aid classes as a teenager and said becoming an Army medic “was kind of just going to happen.” He recently retired from his career as a firefighter and paramedic; as proof of his freedom, his salt-and-pepper hair has grown into a ponytail.
Now, he spends some of his time at places like Brook Hill School, recounting the story of not one heroic parent, but two. He said his parents’ shared life was, and is, a love story.
“Sometimes, when I go to the schools and stuff, I like to talk about, ‘You don’t have to go to war to be a hero,’” Doss Jr. said. “See, my mom was a hero to a bunch of girls, right? She never went to war. But she was a hero to a bunch of these girls.
“All of us can be that hero to somebody. That’s what I hope people take away from my dad’s story. Yes, he went to Okinawa and did something over there, got some notoriety in that, but he was just a regular, ordinary human being. … That’s what people don’t get.”