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24
COM Outlook . Summer 2012
particular channel that is of interest to me,
would you do it?’ Again, I said no.”
Although becoming a physician had
been a dearly held dream for many years,
Dr. Potter didn’t commit herself to pursuing
the possibility until she had an epiphany in
her early 50s following the death of a loved
one. “When my grandmother passed away
at the age of 93, I suddenly realized I could
have 40 more years to live,” she stated. “I
decided I must live these years to fulfill my
dream of working in medicine and expand-
ing my horizons, perhaps by working in
psychiatry, internal medicine, and clinical
research all together.”
When it comes to Dr. Kretchmar, a wick-
edly witty and incredibly self-deprecating
individual, his journey to become a medical
student was something that occurred almost
in spite of himself, as he freely admitted.
The youngest of five children, Dr. Kretchmar
was a mischievous tyke who “ran pretty
much free through most of my teens and
did terribly in school when I bothered to go
at all,” he said. “I was so out of control that
by the time I was 15, my parents sent me to
live with the only person who hadn’t given
up on me—a sister in Israel—but there was
no magical transformation there either. I
was a rough kid, not someone one thinks
is headed to medical school. But I always
wanted to be a physician. After returning to
the United States, I was intent on going to
medical school and looked for the shortest
route in: I quit high school and took a GED
to start at the local college a year earlier. Of
course, I was too impatient, undisciplined,
and immature to complete any degree at
that point, least of all the rigorous premed
requirements, and did terribly.”
After devoting an inordinate amount of
time to the only things that kept his atten-
tion—girls, martial arts, and international
travel—Dr. Kretchmar rededicated himself to
his educational pursuits, earning a Bachelor
of Arts in English from the University of
Wisconsin in 1992 and a Master of Arts in
American Literature and Rhetoric from the
University of Texas at Arlington in 1996. That
was followed in 2002 by the attainment of his
Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Cultural Criticism from
the University of Texas at Arlington.
However, while he was pursuing his
master’s degree in Texas, a seminal event
occurred that changed the trajectory of his
life. “I ran out of money for grad school
halfway through my master’s degree,” he
explained. “This was before the Gulf Wars,
and so the U.S. Army Reserve seemed a
‘safe way’ to pay for graduate school. The
recruiter assured me that ‘One weekend a
month and two weeks in the summer and
you will never be deployed.’ Oops.
“My unit was deployed for a few months
to rebuild El Salvador, and I volunteered
to go to Guatemala to rebuild after multiple
devastating earthquakes took out much of its
infrastructure,” he continued. “Somewhere
along the line, the Army Reserve found out
I had gotten a Ph.D. and promoted me from
an enlisted soldier (sergeant) to a second
lieutenant. I was then sent to Fort Leonard
Wood, Missouri, where I was trained in civil
and combat engineer operations. I had a few
fun years after that, commanding a reserve
engineering detachment in East Texas, train-
ing other units, doing reserve duty in Japan
for two years, checking the logistics and
supply issues of various plans, and working
on my Japanese language skills.”
The next several years would prove to
be industrious ones for Dr. Kretchmar, who
balanced working as an adjunct professor
at the University of Texas, establishing and
overseeing a nonprofit organization that
benefits the people of Vietnam, and fulfilling
his military duties. Then, on December 7,
2005, he received a life-changing phone call
from the military.
“Seven days later, I was on a plane,” he
stated. “I was assigned to the Joint Special
Dr. Kretchmar with his wife, Mariana.