A Sheep Among Wolves
November 4, 2016
Desmond
Doss was a real man but he seems more like the stuff of legend. Being a
bit of a loner, small in stature, and meek, he was probably the last
person anyone would ever peg for a potential war hero. He enlisted in
the Army during the second world war because he believed in the cause.
He only had one condition: He would not carry a gun. Make that two: He
would not work on Saturdays. Though he did not receive an extensive
formal education as a young man in West Virginia, he did receive
excellent spiritual formation as a member of the Seventh Day Adventist
Church: He took the Ten Commandments seriously, all of them, without
exception or qualification, including “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and “Keep
Holy the Sabbath.” He wanted to serve his country but in a way that was consistent with the
Way (the Truth and the Life). He wanted to be a medic. The military
assigned him to a rifle company, naturally, figuring the heat of peer
pressure would iron him out. Clearly, they did not know the depths of
character, courage, and conviction in Desmond Doss. They could not yet
imagine how a man who refused to touch a gun could put up such a fight!
The incredible Hacksaw Ridge,
the new film directed by Mel Gibson, tells the amazing story of Desmond
Doss, his decision to enlist, his difficult training and his
unbelievable feats on the battlefield, for which he was eventually
awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor. I attended an advanced screening
of the film and had dangerously high expectations. I’m a Gibson fan,
and I’d heard the film had received a 10-minute long standing ovation at
the Venice Film Festival. I had watched the 2006 documentary based on
Doss’s life, The Conscientious Objector, and enthusiastically assigned it to my honors students after we read The Iliad and The Aeneid this fall, thinking I had found the perfect thing with which they could compare-and-contrast the pagan idea of heroism.
With
a few small reservations, I thought the film was excellent, but I have a
few predictions as to how it will be received by the Catholic media,
which has disappointed me in the past.
My prediction is that the Catholic “Right” will promote this film under
the banner of “religious liberty”, the Catholic “Left” under the cause
of “conscientious objection,” but I believe both are reductive and
shortchange the complexity of the film and the person of Desmond Doss.
Physical Gold & Silver in your IRA. Get the Facts.
The
“religious liberty” camp thinks that the great postmodern struggle is
between Christians and secular society, but it was not the atheists,
socialists, humanists, or communists who put Desmond Doss through hell
in the military, who insulted him, persecuted him, and uttered every
kind of evil against him, falsely. It was his fellow God-fearing,
red-blooded Americans, whom we can assume were mostly Christians. While
the other men were flipping through nudie mags in the barracks, Doss was
studying Scripture. At first, they dismissed him as a hick, a prude, a
coward; grown men would throw shoes at his head while he was trying to
pray. He was eventually ostracized, humiliated, harassed, and even
beaten. His superiors tried to get him discharged for mental illness.
They court-martialed him. One soldier even threatened: “If you try to go
to war with me, I’ll shoot you myself!”
“I don’t think I could have taken
it,” said one man who knew Desmond Doss at boot camp. “I would have told
them all to go to hell! But Doss—he never got angry.” In the
documentary, his comrades recall Doss’ gentle demeanor, his lack of
interest in retaliation, and his unwavering commitment to personal
prayer. The actor who plays him, Andrew Garfield, should win an Oscar.
He portrayed perfectly the endearing earnestness, quiet strength, and
undeniable mystique of this most unusual man. Vince Vaughn adds a
perfect touch of humor in his role as a sergeant who doesn’t hate Doss
so much as find him incredibly exasperating. When Doss’ superiors would
snarl and ask who the hell he thought he was and why he thought he was
so special and why he wouldn’t just go home, Doss would respond, humbly,
by saying that in a world that was falling apart, he didn’t see
anything wrong with someone trying to put a small piece of it back
together. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to serve them.
And
this is where he doesn’t quite fit the profile of the typical
“conscientious objector.” When the military tried to send him to a
conscientious objector camp, he insisted on going to war! Doss believed
that the United States was fighting for freedom, including religious
freedom, and that it was an honor to serve his God and his country. He
wanted to serve–but in a way that was consistent with his beliefs. His
beliefs were very simple: He couldn’t picture Jesus killing people, but
he could picture Jesus with a first aid kit. He preferred to be called a
“conscientious cooperator.” He thought he could be just as good a
soldier as anyone else, only: “Where other people are going to be taking
life, I’m going to be saving it.”
This is what makes him a hero for our
times. So many folks try to say that going to war or not going to war,
which is always couched in terms of defending something or not defending
something, is a choice between “doing something” and “doing nothing.”
It’s the old false dichotomy of fight or flight. Either you fight, or
evil runs rampant in this world. Jesus did neither and Desmond Doss
shows us that a third way
is possible. One of my favorite anecdotes in the documentary is when
Doss says that his superiors tried to convince him of the errors of his
ways by posing an age-old question, a hypothetical akin to: “What if
someone was raping your grandmother and you had a gun?”
Desmond Doss replied simply: “I wouldn’t have a gun!”
And that’s the truth.
To the screening, they invited people
from the religious community as well as the military community. The
publicists who introduced the film explained, in warm, beige tones, that
it was a film about faith — and heroes. Polite applause. It is
understandable that marketing execs would want to cast as wide a net as
possible, but to say that this is about faith is to gloss over the
obvious challenge it presents to people of faith. Faith in what? In the
words of Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, the central question of all
religion is: What kind of god is God, and what does he expect of us, if anything? The
fact that Desmond Doss answers this question differently than his
fellow Christians is the very thing that creates the conflict at the
center of the story; it is the engine of the drama. We don’t watch Hacksaw Ridge,
rapt, in order to find out if our hero will successfully vanquish the
enemy because our hero for a change has absolutely no interest in that,
either the enemies he faces on the battlefield – the “Japs” – or the
enemies he creates in his own tribe. We watch to see if our hero will be
defeated and defeat seems likely: Either he will stand by his
convictions, run onto the battlefield, and lose his life (in this
world), thereby proving he is a fool, or he will pick up the sword, save
his life (in this world), and admit that his convictions were foolish.
What other outcome could we reasonably expect? What other outcome could
we possible imagine?
“Nobody can understand what he did on
that ridge,” said one of his comrades, “nobody.” I could talk to you
all day long and you could never understand it. You would never believe
it.”
In Guam, stories began to circulate
about a medic who would doggedly pursue the wounded and try to help
them– no matter what. (He was eventually allowed to go into battle as a
medic unarmed.) It didn’t matter who they were, how badly they were
wounded or how badly they had treated him. Doss would help them, often
ignoring the rules of triage. His motto was: “As long as there is life,
there is hope.” But the depths of bravery, compassion, and fortitude in
Desmond Doss weren’t fully comprehended until Okinawa, where his actions
on “Hacksaw Ridge,” a 400-foot cliff so named because of the Japanese
ability to chop up Allied forces and spit them out, became legendary,
maybe even miraculous.
After the screening, a man who was a
friend of Desmond Doss’ spoke to us and assured us of the film’s
accuracy. I trust it is accurate, but it didn’t strike me as complete.
Obviously, every screenplay has limitations. They can’t include everything,
but there are things in the documentary that were left out of the film,
or at least not highlighted in the film, and they are important to
understand the full picture.
In the film, Doss is shown being incredibly brave under fire, but the filmmakers do not convey just how impossible
it was for him to survive or to do what he did. He was one of three men
to hang the cargo net from the ledge of the Hacksaw Ridge. He
volunteered. (In the film, if I remember correctly, he arrives and the
net has already been secured.) You see: to hang the net was impossible
because you would have to get up on the ledge where the Japanese had
clear lines of sight from their fortified positions. To maximize your
chances of survival, you had to stay low to the ground, crawl, and even
then, your chances were scant. There is a photograph of Desmond Doss standing up — silhouetted — on the ridge. He didn’t get shot. The guns were silent while he was up there. Why? How? Nobody could explain it.
The net allowed the Americans to
scale the cliff, from which point they could try to take the ridge. They
climbed up and got driven back down twice before they succeeded. On
top, it was a bloodbath. Not only did Desmond Doss run out time and time
again into enemy fire, defying all odds of being shot and killed, or
captured and tortured, but as a man of slight stature, he did what
Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t do in his heyday: He singlehandedly
dragged and/or carried 75 men from up to 125 feet away to the cliff,
secured them with a special knot, and lowered them down – again,
singlehandedly — over the 400-foot cliff to safety. He saved 75 men in
twelve hours, which meant he saved one man every 10 minutes. Desmond
Doss’ friend who spoke at the screening said that Desmond once told him
that after he had carried and lowered the first three men, he had
absolutely no physical strength left. None. He just kept repeating the
prayer: “Please, Lord, help me get one more. Please, Lord, help me get
one more.”
The speaker at the screening also
told us that Andrew Garfield, who played Desmond Doss, who is a lanky
guy like Doss, was taught the “fireman’s carry,” which is the way Doss
would have been trained to carry big, heavy, injured, helpless men.
After the first few takes, they had to call in a stunt double. He wasn’t
strong enough to pull it off take after take after take. As one of
Doss’ comrades pointed out, many soldiers receive the Medal of Honor for
one act of extreme bravery in war; but in Doss’ case, the Medal was
awarded for things he did over and over and over again. There are
stories about a Japanese soldier who remembered having the American
medic in his crosshairs; when he went to shoot him, the gun jammed.
There are stories of Japanese soldiers being found with American
bandages on them.
What was happening on that ridge? How
were these things possible? Could it have something to do with what
Desmond Doss, as a conscientious cooperator, was cooperating with, rather than what he was objecting to?
Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy begins his book All Things Flee Thee for Thou Fleest Me* with a quote by Jacques Ellul:
“God intervenes radically only in
response to a radical attitude on the part of the believer – radical not
in regard to political means but in regard to faith; and the believer
who is radical in his faith has rejected all means other than those of
faith.”
The
question of violence is a question of means. Desmond Doss probably
shared many of the same ends as other soldiers of faith: to stop evil,
to stop evil from spreading, to save lives, to bring about peace, to
save his soul, to get to heaven. But the difference between Desmond Doss
and the other soldiers is that Desmond Doss rejected all means other
than those of faith, specifically faith in the God, God who is Love.
This is because the Seventh Day Adventist Church had taught Desmond Doss
that the means of violence were not available to him as a Christian and
were not compatible with Love. When mainstream Catholics understand
this about Desmond Doss, they understand at once that he is an “other”
kind of Christian, with a different faith. Is it a different faith?
This is another important question.
The epic heroes of ancient literature
are warriors and they are men of faith. Achilles, Hektor, Odysseus,
Aeneas: they believed in the supernatural, they had certain ideas about
the nature of the divine, they engaged in religious rituals and
practices meant to appease the gods and win their favor. Aeneas is
described by Virgil as being “patently pious,” pietas being Roman
virtue that meant a duty to man, God, and country. The faithful and
pious would be rewarded by the gods, often with military victories. The
gods could be violent, deceptive, and vengeful; to be godlike was to
partake of the awful power of the gods, to exercise might. When these
heroes succeeded in battle, they believed the gods were on their side;
when they lost, they assumed the gods had forsaken them. They had faith,
but a certain kind of faith in a certain kind of god. The pagan gods
could be drafted.
Desmond
Doss was a social pariah until he became a kind of mascot. In Okinawa,
his Bible, his personal prayer, and his faith were no longer things to
be laughed at but to be embraced and rallied behind. It is a fact that
the third big siege on Hacksaw Ridge happened on a Saturday, May 5,
1945. The men asked Desmond Doss if he would go with them. Doss said
maybe, but he would need time to pray about it first. The story goes
that the whole unit, or company, was held up on account of Desmond Doss
needing to pray. They waited and hoped. After praying Doss decided that
this was the kind of work he could do on a Saturday and he went with
them. Perhaps I was being overly defensive, but in the film they almost
made this decision look like a compromise. It wasn’t. Desmond Doss was
tempted on various occasions to kill in defense of self or others, but
he didn’t: He said that if he compromised once, he was likely to
compromise again. The closest he came was when enemy troops threw a
grenade into a ditch where he was trying to help some wounded men: He
did pick it up and throw it back out. His decision to go with his unit
on that Saturday was not a compromise: It was perfectly in line with the
story of Jesus healing on the Sabbath.
On that day they took the ridge. Many
people attribute this victory to “faith,” either the faith of Desmond
Doss or the faith he stirred in others after they began to believe that
he had something like the power of God behind him. What’s wrong with
this picture?
In the film, it appears that the very
same God whom Desmond Doss was praying to, whom Doss believed would
tell him, “If you love me, you won’t kill anybody,” who Doss believed he
was glorifying with his works of courage, compassion, strength, and
love, and who may have helped Desmond Doss to comfort, heal and save all
those people, is the very same god who then turned around and helped
Doss’ comrades to burn Japanese people’s faces off. If we are being
honest about it, these are two different gods, and two different faiths.
It is rare that they are seen in such stark relief as they are in Hacksaw Ridge.
Where one asks, “Please, Lord, help
me get one more,” and means save one more life, the other asks, “Please,
Lord, help me get one more,” and means take one more life.
Where one says, “Love your enemies,” the other says, “Protect your friends.”
One says “Put down thy sword,” the other says “Pick it up.”
Where one says, “Love the Lord your
God with your whole heart, whole soul, whole strength, and whole mind,”
the other says, “Hate your enemy with your whole heart, whole soul,
whole strength, and whole mind.”
One preaches against enmity, the other assumes it.
To help the enemy in one is considered love, to help the enemy in the other is considered treason.
Where one relies on the power of
prayer, trusting completely and totally in Jesus, and willing to love
nonviolently both friends and enemies until death, the other relies on
the power of violence, trusting in their government and is willing to
kill enemies even unto death.
To live in the spirit of one of these
gods is to bring about love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness; to live in the spirit of the other is to bring about what
we see happening on Hacksaw Ridge.
The
Catholic Church tries to tell us that these are the same faiths and the
same gods, two sides of the same coin if you will. What makes this film
so important is that it gives us a concrete portrayal of a larger
conflict that has been going on within Christianity for 1,700 years, not
only among different sects and churches but also within Catholicism
itself. In A Harvest of Justice is Sown in Peace (1993), the
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops tells us: “The Christian
tradition possesses two ways to address conflict: nonviolence and just
war.” Where the Church sees a “dual tradition,” more and more people are
beginning to see a house divided against itself. Insofar as the
Catholic Church “possesses” the tradition of nonviolence, we agree with
the Protestant denominations that have come to be known as the “peace
churches” (The Quakers, Mennonites, etc.), but insofar as we teach what –
frankly — Jesus never taught, by word or deed, namely, Just War Theory
(now called Just Defense Theory), we part with them. The Catholic Church
tries to tell us that there is no conflict between these two ways of
dealing with conflict, that these two ways are not opposed to one
another, nor is either way opposed to the Way of Jesus, in whom we
Christians live, move, and have our being, that they are separate but
equal, equally holy, equally good, equally acceptable. Yet, should one
dare to speak out in favor of nonviolence, one would be no more welcome
in the Catholic Church than Desmond Doss was in his rifle company. Trust
me, I know!
This
conflict is currently playing out at the highest levels of the Catholic
Church. In April of 2016, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
at the Vatican and the international Catholic peace organization Pax
Christi held a conference, called “Nonviolence and Just Peace:
Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to
Nonviolence” and included 80 participants from around the world who
represented a broad spectrum of experiences in peacebuilding and active
nonviolence in the face of violence and war. The participants called on
Pope Francis to consider writing an encyclical letter, or some other
“major teaching document,” reorienting the church’s teachings on
violence. The “Just War” Christians have been freaking out ever since in
fear that the Holy Catholic Church, under the “leftist” leadership of
Pope Francis, will abandon the teachings on Just Defense, which everyone
knows provides a crucial loophole in Jesus’ teachings, through which
the Christian can ensure the earthly protection of himself, his family,
his friends, his country. It would be a nightmare to deprive Christians
of recourse to violence, right? They would be sitting ducks, with
nothing but their “faith” to protect them in a hostile and violent
world. And I believe in this context the Just War camp would put “faith”
in quotation marks, because what kind of faith is that stupid and foolish?
Hacksaw Ridge is indeed a film about faith, but not in the way the publicists meant it. As Jacques Ellul puts it: The
appeal to and use of violence in Christian action increase in exact
proportion to the decrease in faith…Unbelief is the true root of the
Christian championship of violence.
Let’s hope that the film Hacksaw Ridge
can teach American kids what the Catholic Church has failed to teach
them. One of my students, after watching the documentary, exclaimed:
“And he wasn’t even a Catholic!” This sweet child imagined that someone
so good and so holy could only be the product of the one, true faith. It
took my whole heart, my whole strength, my whole mind to refrain from
replying sarcastically: “Thank God for that, because if Desmond Doss had
been raised Catholic, he would have had little to no chance of becoming
Desmond Doss.”
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