A Starfleet commander who runs the overwhelmed field hospital on the moon of J'Gal during the Klingon War, where Joseph M'Benga and Christine Chapel serve under him.
Commander Buck Martinez appears in the flashback scenes of the second-season Strange New Worlds episode Under the Cloak of War. He is played by Clint Howard, whose Star Trek roles go back to Balok in the original series.
Martinez is the senior doctor at a forward surgical post on J'Gal, a moon fought over at terrible cost during the war with the Klingons. He greets the newly arrived Chapel with weary humour and makes it plain that supplies are short, the wounded never stop coming and the staff must improvise.
Under his command M'Benga takes desperate measures, such as holding a dying patient in the transporter buffer until he can be treated. The episode uses the camp to show the experiences that still haunt M'Benga and Chapel when the Klingon defector Dak'Rah comes aboard the Enterprise.