"Desmond T. Doss "
1.
Cousin, I’ve never met you, and wouldn’t even know you if we were standing side by side. I never dropped any words in casual conversation with you at a family reunion as we both reached for the fried chicken, or tried to grab the potato salad spoon at the same. I never saw you sitting on the other end of a church pew listening to the sermon, or heard the family speak of you and what you did over Sunday dinner. It was just their self-effacing way to downplay the family’s achievements, undersell their abilities, their country-shyness. But I know the house where you were raised, one street over from where my Grandparents’ lived. I know the environment, strict and righteous. I understand your unwavering determination, how the quiet commitment to your beliefs grew inside like a tree that couldn’t be uprooted. I know the kind of simple, self-assured man you became who doesn’t need to look in the mirror or ask someone else’s opinion to know who you are.
2.
I first learned your story from the hometown newspaper, surprised to see my last name in headlines. An edition honoring WWII vets, “the greatest generation,” carried a three-page spread with pictures of the parade, you shaking hands with the mayor, riding in the Cadillac beside the local beauty queen, and making a short speech before the microphones at the city stadium.
3.
Conscientious objector
does not mean a man
has to wait the war out
sitting on his living room couch;
or peeling potatoes in the kitchen
listening to the news broadcast
across the same airwaves
that carry bombs and bullets
toward their targets;
or meditating behind the steel bars
of Leavenworth
that won’t be melted down
to make ammunition.
4.
Nowhere in the army manuals of 1942 does it instruct how to discipline a soldier who refuses to fire a rifle for religious reasons.
5.
They can see it in your eyes, this call
to service, the glory-be-to-God
as you kneel on the barracks floor
to pray for this world filled with sinners,
to bless everyone who hurls a shoe or catcall
at you through the sweat-scented air of Fort Jackson.
Like hairless Samsons, these young Pfc.’s strain to topple
your resolve, but you will wear them down,
change their lives forever, beginning now
as you slog through basic training, where your Saturdays
are given to God, the rest of the week to country.
6.
Even with the sergeant’s bad breath inches away,
saliva at the corners of his mouth kneading into
a white paste that freckles your face as he calls
you every name in the book, you won’t back down.
Even after scrubbing the latrines with a horsehair brush
for weeks at a time, polishing every set of boots
in the entire company, or digging one pointless
ditch after another, you will win them over.
Even after declining to pick up a rifle
and aim it at the distant paper bull’s-eye
or jab the bayonet into stuffed figures
swinging from ropes you will save them.
7.
The transport ship steams into the Pacific theater
where you low-crawl through the jungles
of Guam making house-calls on the wounded
to tow them back to safety.
In the rice paddies of the Philippines,
with monsoon rains needling your back,
you crab-walk through muck
to retrieve a wounded mate
as a sniper fixes you in the crosshairs
but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
8.
On Okinawa with its honeycombs of caves, crisscrossed ridges and cliffs, and death thick in the air, you lead the pre-battle prayers as the Captain kneels by your side, head bowed, hand resting on the shoulder of your cotton uniform that is brown and stiff with dried blood. Later, you crawl across a sheer bluff where your company is pinned down by relentless enemy fire to drag the wounded back to the cliff’s edge where you lower them to safety in a rope sling tied with your trademark double bowline. One by one you bring them back, as the rocks slice open your hands like rusty knives, and the bullets ricochet all around like the fiery voice of God urging you on.
9.
When the grenade lands in the foxhole, you cover it with a boot letting the other three soldiers scramble to safety, feel it detonate, hurl your body into the darkness. You wait for five hours until dawn, give up your spot in the litter to a more seriously wounded man, and walk, arm draped over the shoulder of another injured soldier. Then the sniper’s bullet enters your wrist, exits through the elbow, lodging itself in the upper arm. You splint the compound fracture with a borrowed rifle, and keep walking.
10.
Courage (kûr-ij), n 1. the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc. with firmness and without fear; bravery. 2. have the courage of one’s convictions, to act in accordance with one’s beliefs, esp. in spite of criticism.
11.
You’re quoted as saying there is no nobler task than saving a human life.
12.
Your medic’s bag,
stiff with the blood of those
you saved and couldn’t save,
is filled with gauze and bandages,
with quinine pills, sutures,
tourniquets, morphine, ether,
and a bone saw.
But it’s what’s not in the bag
that matters most.
13.
When Truman pins the medal on you, it’s a flawless autumn day. In the rose garden, new buds are still opening. Honeybees dance on the last of the warm breezes, spreading life from one flower to another. The traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue grows quite enough to hear the birds singing in the trees. Crowds of observers watch as cameras flash when the man of peace and the man of war shake hands, not like adversaries, but as victors in this terrible war, each shouldering the burdens of their decisions—one to save lives by frightening the world with visions of the apocalypse, the other by showing his compatriots faith in action.
14.
Truman told you: “I’d rather have your medal any day of the week than be President of the United States.”
15.
At the entrance to the shopping mall, I’m handed a religious pamphlet with colorful illustrations—“Do the Fires of Hell Await You?” A gentleman in black wants to engage me in conversation about my soul, but I slip through the glass door into the sanctity of shopping, to the food court where I glance through the pamphlet. For me, the question remains open. But for you, Desmond, who walked like an angel through the living hell of war, never fearing for yourself, always believing in your vision of God and His design for you on this earth, the answer is not in doubt. And I call upon you now in the name of our grandfathers to retrieve this lost soul where it lies injured on the rocks, bandage the wounds, and bring me back home, alive and humbled.
© 2005 Jim Doss
Follow this link to comment
|
|
