By Amir Oren
Battalion 890 is probably Israel’s most celebrated combat unit. “Eight Hundred Ninety” – one needs not say more – has led the Army in fighting spirit and skill since 1954, when 26-year-old Major Ariel Sharon took over a small group of paratroopers and made them a raid-on-demand Commando tool always available to the IDF Chief, Moshe Dayan, and the political echelon which could only partly control Dayan (who could only partly control Sharon).
Over the last six-odd decades, 890 produced a Prime Minister (Sharon) who earlier held the Defense portfolio, two additional Defense Ministers who earlier served as Chiefs of Staff, including the current one, Benny Gantz, yet another retired Major-General who had Defense in the first Netanyahu government, an additional Chief of Staff who retired into politics and reached the cabinet, plus two Deputy Chiefs who became Knesset members. Having “Magad 890” – the Battalion’s CO – on one’s resume has been a seal of approval in Israel’s military-minded society.
The top of the spear needs the scalpel’s edge to take care of it. The IDF assigned its best physicians, volunteers all, to join the paratroopers on challenging jumps and marches behind enemy lines. The very idea of an Airborne unit is that it could get stuck far away, cut off from home, fighting to survive and dependent on the best medical care it can come up in the field. Several heroic tales of treatment under the most difficult circumstances became combat lore in both the Infantry (of which the paratroops are a leading part) and Medical Corps.
It takes a hardened, seasoned combat physician to be the 890 CO’s right-hand medicine man – or woman. There is no glass ceiling over a paratrooper. Lieutenant Dr. Nofit Shmuel of Beer Sheba is now the first female in the coveted position of 890’s doctor, jumping for joy and joining the G.I. Jews (and Druze) on exercises and operations. Her example stands out but is not singular – another sister-in-arms, Gal, an avid Triatlhlete, has the sane job in a Givati Infantry battalion. One of them will be soon up for promotion to Brigade Medical Officer. They were preceded by female doctors in Armor and Artillery battalions, only slightly further away from the most dangerous spots in combat.
Nofit’s selection to these positions of responsibility for saving the lives of wounded soldiers is typical to the innovative and progressive outlook of the Medical Corps, headed by a Surgeon General who is indeed both a surgeon and a Brigadier-General. The recently appointed Chief Medical Officer, BG Elon Glassberg, is a Professor at Bar-Ilan University in addition to his career commitment, a Critical Care expert whose published research reaches a world-wide professional community and is widely known to his colleagues in the US Armed Forces, especially those focusing on Special Forces, Infantry and Marine Corps operations.
Glassberg, whose uniform is adorned by paratrooper’s wings plus a rare Airborne Medical Officer wing from his years with Unit 669, Israel’s helicopter-borne national rescue and recovery detachment operating out of an Air Force base, was embedded with the most competitive front-line troops in the Egoz Commando unit established in the 1990’s to fight Hezbollah on its home ground in Lebanon. His service with elite special operations units was left out of his CV. On 2006, he was medical chief for an elite paratroop Division deep inside Lebanon. He later supervised the medical enterprize of Northern Command under Aviv Kochavi, current Chief of General Staff, when the Syrian Civil War pushed injured and sick civilians to seek treatment on the Israeli side of the Golan boundary. Israel provided these patients, citizens of its die-hard foe, the best possible care at clinics and hospitals. One of the papers written by Glassberg and his colleagues on this experience is titled “Helping Hands Across War-Torn Borders”. Doctors without borders, indeed.
In Israel’s unique geographical situation, the Army’s doctors and medics – also in charge of the Air Force, Navy and Home Front Command – can find themselves tasked simultaneously with treating and evacuating patients from three or four different groups. Soldiers wounded in battle in Gaza, Israeli civilians in the Negev hit by Palestinian rockets and Palestinian civilians caught in the cross-fire, perhaps along with their combatant compatriots, will all get the same medical care in the field or in Beer Sheba and Ashkelon hospitals.
The basic and most sacred mission is of course saving soldiers’s lives – tending to the severely wounded so that they would lose neither life nor limb. It is done for all the obvious reasons. Each life is precious. The military has an obligation to those serving it and their families to spare no effort to safeguard them, and failing that to lessen their injury, pain and long-range disability, physical and mental. It impacts unit performance and esprit-de-corps. And if the casualty count keeps climbing, civilan morale will go sharply down, impatiently putting pressure on decision-makers to halt operations before their culmination. This is still a factor, though Israel is no longer the close-knit society of wars past, as evidenced by the indifference of certain sectors to the general well-being of the public during the Covid-19 crisis.
Ancient ethos, modern methods – this is the hallmark of Israel’s military medicine. Four to six minutes after a soldier is hit by bomb or bullet, shock or shrapnel, he gets first aid and battlefield diagnosis by either a doctor or a paramedic and is immediately evecuated to the rear, bypassing outdated links in the chain. If too many physicians delay his arrival at hospital in order to give him another professional look, he may get there too late. Better to quickly sort out the badly but treatable wounded and speed them on their way. The NATO standard is double the Israeli one, 10 minutes – when every minute, sometimes every moment, counts.
The doctor is in the details – what sort of tourniquet to use and how tight, how to organize the military branch of the Blood Bank (and the preperation of “walking blood banks”, soldiers whose blood types match those needing infusion), whether technology such as cargo drones can be exploited to hasten medical supplies to a besieged force, how many medical professionals on of what training – trauma and more – should be positioned at company, battalion or brigade echelons.
The Medical Corps has come a long way since legendary Battalion 890 doctors such as Shlomo Shiboleth (still active at 93) and Maurice Agmon-Ankelevitz plied their trade on critically wounded paratroopers by flashlight across Egyptian and Jordanian borders. Tele-medicine, sophisticated research and ever fresh experience due to continuous friction with hostile neighbors put Elon Glassberg and his colleagues at the forefront of global military medical science.
BG Glassberg has had several opportunities to compare notes while on exchange at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and watching transatlantic medical evacuation out of Germany. He almost managed to sneak into a flight out to Bagram Air Field, before being discovered and bodily blocked by the base Commanding General, who had enough headaches without an Israeli officer in Afghanistan.
At Glassberg’s Bar-Ilan lab, where civilian as well as military medical research is conducted, a formula can easily be conjured: IDF+ER=QME, where the standard Emergency Room is transplanted to the harm’s way – for medical staff, too – and the M in Qualitative Edge stands for medical. After a period in which it lacked for a medical school pipeline of would-be combat doctors, Israel now has an eight-year supply of bright and committed prospects enrolled at the Tzameret (Treetop, or Crest) program, where they get hands-on experience and are encouraged to strive for leadership traits rather than narrow diagnostic skills. As is customary with mature managers praising the current crop – one usually hears it from fighter pilots speaking of Air Force Academy cadets – current Medical Corps seniors modestly say that they would not make it today if they had to compete for coveted program spots.
And then there is Corona. The IDF Surgeon General is a member of a Steering Committee trio also including the Director General of the Health Ministry and his counterpart from the country’s biggest health provider. When the Covid crisis struck, the Netanyahu government ignored this arrangement – and the Medical Corps’ standard operating procedures – due to political and personal prejudices. This has been partly corrected, with one of Glassberg’s predecessors and former supervisor in Lebanon, retired BG Hezi Levi, running the Health Ministry.
It was too late to make full use of the IDF’s capacity to help the nation at large (Glassberg, as a mid-career officer, specialized in Mass Casualty Events, including biological strikes and pandemics), but at least the IDF could and did take care of its own, safeguarding soldiers’ health for their own sake and their units’ operational effectiveness.
Compared to the general population, it is of course a feasible mission. Most servicemen – conscripts – may be described elsewhere as college-age, 18-22 healthy men and women, otherwise they would not have been inducted. Some 2000 of them came down with the virus, either in their units or while on home leave, but only less than 10 to a more severe and worrisome extent, with one death, of an elder civilian employee.
When the Pfizer vaccines started reaching Israel, the IDF received a special dispensation to inoculate 45-year-old servicemen, essentially senior officers, non-commissioned officers and civilian employees. Next came certain priority activities, followed by combat units. Rear headquarters will be last. There have also been unique challenges – submarine crews about to leave port on long and clandestine missions had to time their first dozes so that they would be able to get them early enough so that the second ones would be also given on shore before they submerge – or immediately prior to departure, so that the second batch await them some 21 or slightly more days upon their return.
According to the Medical Corps, its doctors, nurses and medics were the ones who found out that by using “low dead space” syringes, rather than the more common “high dead space” types – the reference is not to mortality, but rather to the amount of fluid between the needle and its casing – six dozes, and not the five suggested by the provider, can be squeezed out of one bottle. That translates into 20 percent more people vaccinated and faster. Now adopted by several countries, it is another – mute – claim for fame by the IDF Medical Corps, which on the march to, or jump into, combat encountered Covid.