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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2016
Film: ‘This is much bigger than religious conviction’
Continued from Page 1A
Doss made the trip from
his home in Ilwaco, Washing-
ton, to the theaters of Tinsel-
town for an advance screening
of “Hacksaw Ridge,” the film
based on the life of his father, a
devout Seventh-day Adventist
who was awarded the Medal
of Honor in the wake of World
War II without ever picking up
a weapon.
As if watching his mother
and father’s life play out on
the big screen wasn’t crazy
enough, Doss also spoke can-
didly with actors Andrew Gar-
field, who played his father,
Teresa Palmer, who played his
mother, and many other stars
of the already acclaimed film
set to be released nationwide in
theaters Friday, but can be seen
tonight at 7 at the Astoria Gate-
way Cinema.
It would be easy to imag-
ine Doss — who served as a
medic like his father, and spent
much of his life as a firefighter
and who now relishes his part-
time job cleaning the Ilwaco
Post Office — overwhelmed
and out of place among Holly-
wood’s elite. But pictures from
his trip show the near 70-year-
old engaged and at ease with
the millionaire movie moguls.
He even talked privately with
Gibson about the filmmaker’s
fall from grace almost a decade
ago after a drunken-driving
arrest and other missteps.
“It was hard to avoid,” Doss
explained candidly. Unsurpris-
ingly, Doss did exactly what
he said he would do months
before, when asked what he
would say to Gibson if he ever
met him in person.
“I would tell him that I
admire what he has managed
to come back from,” Doss said.
“I relate to people that aren’t
perfect. I get that. Most of us
have to take detours and some
of us don’t ever come back. He
might not be all the way there,
but he’s certainly going in the
right direction.”
‘Incredible capacity
for love’
As the opening to “Hacksaw
Ridge” drew nearer, Doss, who
was never consulted about the
film, started getting calls from
journalists, museum directors,
and finally an employee from
Lionsgate that had just been
hired to promote the film. She
had heard of Doss, and was
a little surprised no one had
reached out to him before.
Soon after the Chinook
Observer’s September story
about Doss, the promoter
arranged to fly an advance
copy of the film to Astoria,
where Doss and some of his
closest friends viewed a private
screening.
Doss and his girlfriend
settled into seats in a near-
empty theater. His firefighter
“brothers,” including Ilwaco
Fire Chief Tom Williams and
Ilwaco city councilman and
firefighter Gary Forner, and
Doss’ friends surrounded them,
at a distance.
Doss’ family’s life played
out on screen — there was
his grandfather, his father, his
mother. How surreal it must
be for him. He seemed to lean
toward the screen with a scru-
tinizing intensity, pausing only
now and then to place a kernel
of popcorn into his mouth or
take a sip of soda.
There was his father, being
beaten. There was his father,
being scorned. Principle and
perseverance drove the man,
that much was clear, but Doss
was not depicted as some
kind of bulletproof GI Joe, but
rather as a man who personally
suffered gravely as he put the
lives of his “brothers” ahead of
his own.
Tears did not stream down
Doss’ cheeks, but rather his
misty eyes glowed as if staring
at an apparition.
“I know I saw a com-
pletely different movie than
what everyone else saw,” Doss
reflected later. “What I saw was
a love story. I saw a man that
loved his wife, loved his coun-
try, loved his principles, loved
his church, loved his God —
a man that had an incredible
capacity for love in the midst
of all that chaos.”
Mr. Doss goes
to Hollywood
It turns out no one from
Lionsgate had contacted Doss
earlier because they had been
told he didn’t want anything to
do with the film.
“As soon as they found out
that wasn’t true, everything
really lit up like a Christmas
tree,” Doss said.
He admits he may have said
needs to get into the conscious-
ness, that you can love, no mat-
ter what’s going on.”
The more time he spent with
the actors, traveling with them
to New Orleans for another
premiere, the more they loos-
ened up. He learned Garfield
had spent eight hours filming
one short scene that he just had
to get right. “Mel let him keep
going and going.”
‘Closer to my father’
Submitted Photo
Desmond Doss Jr. sits with
Australian actress Teresa
Palmer, who plays his moth-
er Dorothy Schutte Doss in
“Hacksaw Ridge,” which
opens in Astoria at the
Gateway Cinema tonight.
a few critical things on Face-
book and that he had grown
distant from the Seventh-day
Adventist Church, but Doss
had seen his father’s story
butchered before. Though he
had no control over how it
would be told, he had always
been protective. Doss, per-
haps more than anyone, knew
his father’s reticence about
turning earnest principles into
entertainment.
“I watched him turn down
an endless procession of peo-
ple that wanted to popularize
his story, and he said ‘No’ to
each and every one of them,”
he said.
But something told Doss
this would be different. His
father’s story needed an accom-
plished filmmaker. Warts and
all, Mel Gibson seemed to fit
the bill.
“You have no idea how long
I’ve wanted to get my father’s
story in front of the public in
a secular venue,” Doss said.
“This is so much bigger than a
religious conviction.”
After the screening in Asto-
ria, Doss was then invited to
Los Angeles for a glitzy pre-
miere. Gibson himself and all
the actors from the film would
also attend. It was the chance
of a lifetime. Doss dusted off
an old suit coat and donned a
plane for Hollywood.
After the premiere, Gib-
son, who Doss calls “Mel,”
asked him to say a few words.
“This is the right movie at the
right time,” Doss said. “It just
Doss called the perfor-
mances by Garfield and Palmer
“eerie.” Garfield had captured
his father’s mannerisms, his
way of speaking, and his quiet
confidence.
Doss told Garfield as much.
“He got tears in his eyes when
I told him he did a great job,”
Doss said. “He said if I thought
it, it must have made it so.”
And Palmer, he said, was
smart, like his mother.
“I felt like I was actually
seeing my mom there at times,
like when she was pissed off
at him for signing up, and she
said, ‘I love you, I just don’t
like you right now.’ She had
that duality, there was the emo-
tional side and the intellectual
side,” Doss said.
When the crush of the
crowds in LA got to be a bit
much, Doss found a place to
sneak away from the hustle.
He saw one of the actors from
the film doing the same. But he
looked different than he did in
the movie.
“Which one are you?” Doss
asked the man. “Luke,” he said.
“Oh, are you the guy that
beat the shit out of my dad?”
Doss retorted. The actor, Luke
Bracey, said “Yeah.”
Doss, ever personable and
unpretentious, shot back, “I
hope you know I’m not like
him. I’ll take you out back!”
The two shared a good
laugh.
But hobnobbing with the
Hollywood types didn’t seem
to be going to Doss’ head.
Asked if he was planning to
keep his job at the post office,
he said he was.
“Hey, I still gotta eat,” Doss
said with a laugh, calling the
tiny post office his “general
store.”
This chapter in Doss’ life is
still unfolding, and he’s taking
it in one day at a time.
“It’s the ultimate to see this
happening,” Doss said. “This
has brought me so much closer
to my father.”
Save one life and you’ve
saved the world
Doss’ own life has been
something of a miracle, and
like his father’s, filled with
hard-won lessons. The movie
depicts the time before and
during the war, before Doss
Jr. came along. However, for
those who fight and those who
know them, “The war is never
really over,” Doss Jr. said.
The hurt and heroism live on,
passed from father to son, and
so too the lessons.
Doss said he could never
be like his father. Truly, who
could? See this movie and you
will see a factual story of a
man who literally stayed with
the wounded, exposed and
unarmed, well after all others
had retreated.
While Doss will never win
a Medal of Honor for his life-
time of work as a firefighter, for
decades he picked the wounded
up off the streets, dragged them
from burning buildings, and
tended to them in mangled
cars. He has no doubt saved
dozens of lives with the tools
of his father — a tourniquet, an
IV drip, a calm presence. How
many has he saved?
Inspired by his father, by
age 16 Doss Jr. was teaching
instructors to teach first aid. But
when he enlisted as a conscien-
tious objector he didn’t face the
same abuse his father did. “All
the things my dad fought for —
it was just run-of-the-mill.”
After the Army, Doss found
his medical training had pre-
pared him to save lives in a
civilian role as a firefighter.
His expertise in first aid train-
ing led him to perform critical
work with a national commis-
sion dedicated to revamping
emergency response services.
Before those days, he remem-
bered, “if you had a medical
emergency, the last thing you
wanted was a bunch of firemen
showing up.”
Today, many firefighters
are also highly trained medical
responders because of the work
Doss did.
“I got to be involved in the
creation of what we now call a
paramedic,” he said in his typ-
ically understated way. “It was
kind of interesting.”
Overcoming the self
Being a firefighter has pro-
vided Doss with insight into
the struggles of others, and his
own.
“In my line of work, I see
the underbelly,” Doss said.
“People don’t ever call you
because they’re having a good
day. Drugs. Suicide. Domes-
tic problems. Ill health. They
don’t have much control over
their destiny. Actually they do,
but no one’s ever said — ‘You
can do what you want to do.’
I don’t know where I came by
the notion that I could do what-
ever I set my mind to, but that
came to me somewhere in life.”
But it turned out confi-
dence wasn’t always easy to
come by for this son of a war
hero. He looked for strength
in various religions, found his
father’s story at turns inspir-
ing and intimidating, but ulti-
mately credits his turnaround
to Joe Sabah, a man he calls his
“mentor.”
Sabah sent Doss to the Dale
Carnegie Institute. He remem-
bers being called to get up “in
front of everybody,” to talk
about something he had earned
the right to talk about. Doss
was terrified, of not being good
enough, of other people, of
what they might think of him.
“The only thing I remember
for sure,” Doss recalled, “was
the opening line, which was,
’I’ve been alone all of my life.’”
Doss had lost his faith in
religion, his marriage had bro-
ken up and he was spending
every night by himself, think-
ing, dwelling, sometimes drink-
ing too much, unable to reach
out. He may have recalled to
the others some or all of that.
All he clearly remembers was
when his two minutes were up.
“Everybody was there in
support of everybody else, so
when you got done talking there
would be applause, I don’t care
how bad you were,” Doss said.
But when Doss finished,
there was no applause, just dead
silence.
“And I thought, ‘Well, I
really blew that.’ I’ve still got
my head bowed, then I finally
kind of looked up and all these
people were crying, and that
was the day I joined the human
race,” Doss said. “These peo-
ple I had been totally petrified
of are human beings. They’re
like me.”
Governor: College ready to assist after tsunami
Continued from Page 1A
“The side benefit is that we
can put Oregonians to work
as well,” Brown said. “It’s a
win-win.”
Idea of preparedness
Brown’s visit came a day
after Andrew Phelps, head
of the state’s Office of Emer-
gency Management, said that
the state had earned a grade of
C after the four-day Cascadia
Rising earthquake prepared-
ness drill in June. Brown was
joined on her county tour by
Phelps and Tiffany Brown, the
county’s emergency planner.
Gov. Brown said she
assumed a higher percentage
of people on the Oregon Coast
are prepared for a disaster.
“It’s a relatively new sci-
ence for us,” Tiffany Brown
said. “I think we talk about
preparedness, but we talk
among my staff a lot about
changing the cultural mindset.
It really is a much bigger task
at hand than passing out bro-
chures to people.”
Tiffany Brown said global
events caught on video have
given people much greater
awareness of what they are in
store for in a disaster “because
we don’t really know. We
don’t have historical records
like they do in Japan that help
us better understand what to
expect.”
Phelps said the issue of pre-
paredness will not be solved
by the public or private sec-
tors alone, but by everyone
partnering.
A safe place
Christopher
Breitmeyer,
the college president, said
the college is seen as a place
to gather in a disaster, which
people did during the Great
Coastal Gale in 2007.
Greg Dorcheus, head of
the college’s maintenance
department and manager on
the Patriot Hall project, said
much of the college’s efforts
the last 20 years have been
focused on modernizing the
campus through the Jerome
Campus Redevelopment Proj-
ect. Over the last 10 years of
the project, the college has
replaced Fertig Hall with the
new Columbia Hall at the
center of campus, seismically
retrofitted Towler Hall and
is now modernizing Patriot
Hall.
“Three of our buildings
will be essentially new,” he
said. “One was substantially
upgraded and meets current
seismic codes. We only have
two left on this campus that
really need that full extent”
of seismic upgrades. “We’ve
really come a long way in the
last 20 years.”
In the event of a Cascadia
Subduction Zone earthquake,
Breitmeyer said, the col-
lege can take well over 1,000
people.
Dorcheus recounted a tsu-
nami warning at 4 a.m. several
years ago, immediately after
which the college opened and
started taking in people.
“We put folks in Colum-
bia Hall, primarily,” he said.
“And we took places and
made them for the children,
we took spaces for everybody
else. We were able to hand
down information to them,
and it worked out really well.”
Danny Miller/The Daily Astorian
Gov. Kate Brown, center, chats with Clatsop Community
College head of maintenance Greg Dorcheus, right, and
Clatsop Community College President Christopher Breit-
meyer while touring the construction of Patriot Hall.
w a t c h f o r i t
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