Director: Mel Gibson.
Starring: Andre Garfield, Teresa Palmer, Vince Vaughn.
Here is an unusual true story—an American soldier who won a Medal of Honor without firing a shot. The American Film Institute chose it as one of the ten best films of 2016. It was nominated for many awards, and won several—Best Film, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor.
It is the story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who refused to take up a gun, although he volunteered to serve in the army to defend his country during World War II. His fellow soldiers despise him as a coward, punch him, hit him, throw their boots on him as he kneels near his bunk to pray. His commanding officer wants him dismissed, since he cannot understand how someone can join the army, but refuse to carry weapon.
What Doss want is to save lives, not kill.
Doss was not always a pacifist. As a boy, in a fight with his younger brother Hal, he nearly killed him. So, too, seeing his drunken father threatening his mother with a gun, he almost shot him. These experiences, as well as his Seventh Day Adventist Beliefs, made him a convinced conscientious objector. Once, when he took a wounded man to the hospital, he met a nurse there, called Dorothy Schutte, and told her of his desire to become a doctor. They fell in love, and married before Doss left for the battlefield.
He is posted to Okinawa, and more precisely to “Hacksaw Ridge,” an unusually difficult post, which is held by the Japanese. Against all expectations, Doss proves to be hero, carrying wounded soldiers to safety under heavy enemy fire. In fact, the Japanese were on the look out precisely to gun down medical personnel.
He carried, dragged, or saved in other ways seventy-five wounded comrades, some of whom were the ones who had ridiculed and punched him for his beliefs. Each time he prayed, not for his own survival, but to be able to save one more comrade. He went again and again into the mortar fire to bring wounded soldiers to safety. The army unit was surprised to see wounded men being brought in who had been given up as dead.
True to Mel Gibson’s style (remember his movie on the Passion of Christ?), the movie shows the war in all its gory atrocity, but it brings out this unusually courageous man’s heroism precisely in the midst of all the mayhem.
Doss was given the Medal of Honor by the US President. He and Dorothy remained married until her death in 1991. He died in 2006, at the age of 87.
DISCCUSION POINTS:
Many movies contain much violence—generally showing violence by the villains first, and then violence by the hero who defeats the villains. Is this what we should call heroism? Is heroism made of violence or of quiet courage in the face of danger, as Desmond Doss showed?
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