When he was working at Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center as a resident in orthopedic surgery, Dr. Eli Ziv, now a 42-year-old hand specialist, didn’t see many — or any — injuries caused by rocket-propelled grenades.
The streets of South Los Angeles may be notoriously bad, but they aren’t that bad. And they don’t quite compare to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and from where Ziv returned earlier this year after a four-month tour as a surgeon in the U.S. Army Reserve’s medical corps.
The Woodland Hills resident joined the service as a major in 2013, in part to scratch a lifelong itch to serve, and also as a way to carry on family tradition — his grandfather joined Israel’s pre-independence Haganah militia, and his father was part of the Israel Defense Forces in the ’60s.
Ziv left his practice and deployed to Forward Operating Base Shank (FOB Shank) in eastern Afghanistan last September. As the only orthopedic surgeon on base, he was responsible for mending a wide range of body parts, including feet, legs and knees, in addition to his normal area of focus — hands and wrists. He saw wounds that ranged from sprains and fractures to blown-off limbs, although he said intense operating room situations were uncommon.
Wrapped in tefillin, Orthodox doctor Eli Ziv davens during a break from medical duties in Afghanistan.
“An alarm goes off and you’ve got to find cover right away,” Ziv said. “The base used to be called ‘Rocket City’ because they were so [frequent].”
But when injuries were at a trickle, as they were on most days, Ziv’s biggest issue was boredom.
“We spent a lot of time just hanging out and talking,” Ziv said in his office in Van Nuys after his return to Los Angeles. “Sometimes we’d go to the shooting range, [do] maintenance things, [organize] medical supplies that need to be stocked.
“You train to do this and in a perverse way you kind of want to be busy,” Ziv said. “You don’t want guys to get hurt but, just like an ER doctor or an ER nurse, you want to have the patients to treat.”
An Orthodox Jew who regularly goes to Chabad of Woodland Hills, Ziv did his best to keep up his observance while in Afghanistan. The Army tried to help by providing him with kosher MREs (meals ready to eat) — about 1,000, actually.
“Enough for a couple years,” Ziv said, chuckling, “in typical Army fashion.”
But eating three MREs every day for four months (particulary kosher MREs) is beyond the pale, and Ziv said he also would eat at the base’s mess hall and stick to vegetarian options.
As for Shabbat, he often couldn’t do more than light candles and make Kiddush.
“I don’t try to make a big issue with everything that would be a violation of Shabbat because this is a temporary thing and we’re in a war zone,” Ziv said from Afghanistan.
As far as he was aware, there were no other Jews at FOB Shank during his deployment, although he did say he visited an Afghan bazaar and purchased some tiles with Hebrew inscriptions that apparently came from Herat’s now-departed Jewish community.
Ziv described his time in Afghanistan as a sort of “mental sabbatical,” a “break from the grind” and from the complexity of everyday life. For him, that includes raising four children at home and dealing with health insurance companies at the office.
“Things [back in Los Angeles] are a lot more complex in a way,” Ziv said. “[In Afghanistan], your mission is well-defined and you’re just there to do one thing and you don’t have a lot of extraneous noise to deal with.”
Upon his return to Los Angeles, Ziv joined an orthopaedics practice with Dr. Ben Lesin and Dr. George Balfour, with offices in Van Nuys, Thousand Oaks and Valencia. He’s back to focusing on hands and forearms and dealing with routine civilian injuries — sprains, strains, some fractures and fingers crushed in doors or under weights. But no more blast injuries.
Ziv aboard a C-130 aircraft on the way to FOB Shank in Afghanistan last September.
There are other differences, too: His patients here definitely have a lower tolerance for pain than the fighters he treated at Shank, which included American elite Special Forces and Afghan troops.
“You see people who say, ‘Oh, my elbow aches. I can’t work, give me a note for work,’ or people who want pain medication or people [who] complain about relatively minor things,” Ziv said.
His decision to deploy, while a great personal experience, as he described it, also was a “little bit disastrous” financially — a six-figure financial loss to be more specific.
Being away was hard on his family, too — “maybe a little harder than I thought,” he said. Back in his quiet, air-conditioned office, which is adorned with diplomas and awards and medals of commendation, both military and civilian, Ziv leaned back in his office chair and reflected on what were the craziest four months of his life (so far). He settled his mind on crediting one person in particular who made living out his dream possible— his wife, Rachel, who sits just six feet away from him and helps run the administrative side of the business.
“I got all the glory and she got all the work,” Ziv said. “[It was a] big sacrifice on her part so I could do this. I was very fortunate that she was supportive in that way.”
Going forward, Ziv’s commitment to the Army will consist of reporting for duty occasionally, which he said may consist of one weekend a month plus two weeks a year at a base, or an alternative arrangement where he does that service at a local Veterans Affairs hospital. He also said there’s a good chance he’ll deploy to Iraq in early 2017. The Army currently has a small troop presence there to fight ISIS.
“You go there and talk to these Special Forces guys, and they’ve been deployed eight times in the last decade,” Ziv said. “You feel like what you did is no big deal.”
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