Desmond Doss

Desmond Thomas Doss was born February 7, 1919, and enlisted as a combat medic with a U.S. Army infantry company in World War II. His convictions kept him from touching a gun, which made him an oddity and a target for suspicion. He earned two Bronze Stars for actions on Guam and in the Philippines, then came Okinawa: working alone under fire, he pulled an estimated 75 wounded men to safety in the Battle of Okinawa, an act that earned him the Medal of Honor in 1945 - the first ever awarded to a conscientious objector. Two others, Thomas W. Bennett and Joseph G. LaPointe Jr., would receive it posthumously during Vietnam. Doss died March 23, 2006, but his story found a second life in the 2004 documentary The Conscientious Objector and the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, where Andrew Garfield played him to an Oscar-winning production.