One More
I landed home in North Carolina at half past midnight on Friday after my fourth trip to California in six weeks. Three of those came in three consecutive weeks, and I’d started to lose track of where I’d been and why I’d been there.
This most recent trip was to ViVE, where I served as a judge for a startup competition. The winner was a company that built an autonomous robot designed to transport stretchers through hospital corridors, offering an immediate window into our AI-enabled robotic future at scale. I thought that was what I’d write about, and then over the weekend a new war erupted overseas.
As I sat down to write this newsletter, the world felt loud and fast and pulling in every direction. All cymbals and drums and no melody to hold onto. I genuinely did not know what to write about.
Then I read about Desmond Doss.
Knowing Who You Are
Doss was a Seventh-day Adventist from Lynchburg, Virginia, who enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. He believed the war was just and wanted to serve his country. He also refused to carry a weapon or take a human life.
He could have sought a deferment and few would have blamed him. A conscientious objector working in a defense shipyard had every reason to sit the war out. He made a different choice.
What followed was predictable. He was mocked, ostracized, and at times physically assaulted by fellow soldiers. His commanding officer, Captain Jack Glover, tried to have him transferred out. Many saw him as a liability, a weak link, a man who did not belong.
Doss did not argue. He did not protest. He did not lecture anyone about his beliefs. He simply knew who he was, knew who he was not, and refused to move off of it. He told Captain Glover directly:
“Don’t ever doubt my courage, because I will be right by your side saving life while you take life.”
On May 5, 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, his unit was ordered to retreat from the Maeda Escarpment, later known as Hacksaw Ridge. The fighting was so intense that the unit pulled back, leaving approximately seventy-five wounded men stranded at the top.
Doss stayed.
Alone, unarmed, under constant fire.
For roughly twelve hours, he moved from man to man, dressing wounds, dragging soldiers to the cliff’s edge, and lowering them down by rope one at a time using a bowline knot. One of those men was Captain Glover, the officer who had tried to transfer him out.
His prayer, repeated over and over:
“Lord, please help me get one more.”
He was wounded multiple times on Okinawa. A grenade blast left seventeen pieces of shrapnel in his body. A sniper’s bullet shattered his arm. When he was finally placed on a stretcher, he asked the bearers to put him down and carry another man first.
Desmond Doss became the first conscientious objector in American history to receive the Medal of Honor. The same men who had doubted him had nothing left but admiration.
Doss did not become who he was on that cliff. He arrived there already knowing. His clarity was not a product of the crisis, the crisis was just where his clarity was revealed.
That matters right now.
Playbook
We are living through a stretch of history that will test each of us, sometimes suddenly and directly, sometimes slowly and quietly.
For most of us, the test will not come on a battlefield. It will come in a boardroom. In a budget meeting. In a hiring decision. In a moment when expediency is easier than conviction, or silence feels safer than dissent.
In times like these, the pressure can break you… or it can bend you so slowly that you do not notice you have become someone else.
Private First Class Doss teaches us that the answer is not to fight harder in the moment. It is to know yourself so clearly, and to practice that clarity so consistently, that when the moment comes you simply cannot be moved.
He did not discover courage on the escarpment. He rehearsed it long before he climbed it. And so should we.
Your Turn
What is the line you will not cross?
Not the one in your bio. Not the one framed on your wall. The one that lives in the part of you that no title, no pressure, no exhaustion can reach.
Do you know what it is?
Because the test will come. And the people who pass are rarely the one’s improvising. They’re the one’s who decided long before anyone was watching.
Image Credit: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/private-first-class-desmond-thomas-doss-medal-of-honor
The Perseverance Playbook™ is a weekly newsletter about the middle miles, where purpose is forged and leadership is born. Written from airports, sidelines, and the spaces in between by Dr. Chris DeRienzo.
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