By John McPhaul
Maj. Gen. Dr. Lester Martínez has a message for the young people of Puerto Rico: If he did, so can they.
“People see me and say that they can do the same thing,” Martínez told the STAR in a telephone interview this week. “Not to celebrate me. But I do my best and I never forgot where I came from. I’m a product of public education on the island.”
The Maricao native, who is the second-highest-ranking Latino in the Pentagon, is a graduate of the Residential Center of Educational Opportunities of Mayagüez, the celebrated public school commonly known by its Spanish acronym CROEM, graduated from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez (RUM) and obtained his medical education at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine.
“The UPR system doesn’t have to envy anyone,” Martínez said.
After graduation, he went into the Army and worked his way up to commanding general of the military base Ft. Detrick before retiring with the rank of major general in 2005. In 2020, he got a call from the White House asking the 68-year-old career officer to head the U.S. military’s health system, which serves the 160,000 to 180,000 men and women in uniform.
As the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Martínez manages the five branches of the military, a job he said he performs with the support of talented professionals.
Among the institutions in his charge are Medical Logistics, Medical Research and public health systems.
“You need a village of great Americans,” he said.
Martínez noted that doing the job is a question of trust.
“It’s not about us. We ask mothers and fathers to entrust us with the health of their sons and daughters and we owe them the best health care in the world,” he said. “It’s a very humbling experience to be in charge of that.”
“We manage health care from Guam, to Germany, to Poland to Puerto Rico,” Martínez said, adding that it is especially gratifying “to be making a difference.”
“It’s a journey. You just keep marching in the right direction,” he said. “It’s what you make with the resources that you have. You work your butt off and wait to see the results.”
Martínez said he got a head start at CROEM, where he was in just the second class to graduate from the school.
“In my years it was an experimental school,” he said. “I was the guinea pig.”
Martínez gave the school credit for instilling the self-discipline necessary to succeed in a demanding military career.
It was a live-in coed school and the future general had 140 people in his class.
“We learned to live together. We became very close. To this day we keep track of each other on Facebook,” he said. “You develop very close friendships that won’t go away.”
The school’s campus is on an old U.S. Air Force satellite tracking base, which the Air Force gave to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. It now belongs to Puerto Rico’s Department of Education.
Martínez, who still sports a slight Spanish accent, said challenges still exist for Latinos moving up the ranks in the U.S. military.
“I’m not going to say that there aren’t still problems, but things are getting better,” he said.