Ray Wiss

Dr. Ray Wiss is a distinguished Canadian emergency-medicine specialist, author, and retired Major with the Canadian Armed Forces who is widely recognized as the longest-serving combat doctor in the history of the Canadian Army. Born in Sudbury, Ontario, Wiss built an extraordinarily diverse pre-medical background, serving as a military infantryman, working as a recreation director in a maximum-security prison, and operating as a paramedic in a third-world war zone before graduating with his medical degree from McMaster University. He achieved international medical renown for his pioneering work introducing emergency ultrasound technology into Canada’s standard emergency medical practice. Merging his medical expertise with his infantry background, Wiss re-enlisted in the Canadian Forces Reserves and deployed twice with Task Force Afghanistan, serving from November 2007 to February 2008 and returning from May to September 2009. Highly unusually for a physician, he spent virtually his entire deployments directly on the front lines at high-intensity Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) in Kandahar province. Wiss chronicled these harrowing experiences in two critically acclaimed, best-selling volumes, FOB Doc: A Doctor on the Front Lines in Afghanistan—which became the first full-length book published by a Canadian veteran of the conflict and hit Amazon’s Top 100 list—and its sequel, A Line in the Sand: Canadians at War in Kandahar, with all royalties donated to the Military Families Fund. Progressing through 2025 and 2026, the retired Major continues to dedicate his time to veterans' advocacy, public history education, and medical lecturing, delivering profound, unfiltered presentations to civic organizations and schools to foster rigorous, firsthand public knowledge of Canadian military history and frontline emergency trauma systems.