Northport teacher talks military service

In June, a 29-year-old Northport High School teacher found himself face to face with a turbaned village elder in a lawless stretch of southern Afghanistan.

The teacher, Darryl St. George, described the village elder as a burly, bearded man who fingered a string of beads and interwove conversation with whispered prayers.

As they spoke in a field littered with the stubble of harvested opium poppies, the elder wondered aloud whether the drag of war would eventually cause America to falter, as war in Afghanistan had drained the Soviet empire before, and the British Empire before that.

"I was, as a history teacher, thinking that this guy's grasp of history and his view of what that suggested the future held was eerie," St. George said. "It was very disturbing."

St. George was in Afghanistan after he decided to leave a tenured faculty position at Northport and serve in the U.S. military.

In doing so, the 10th- and 12th-grade social studies teacher has come to observe up close a war that likely will become a significant chapter in American history.

Last week, while visiting Northport High School to take part in a 9/11 ceremony, St. George spoke of his decision to suspend his teaching career to join the military, and of some of the experiences as a teacher-turned-soldier.

He enlisted as a Navy medic in 2009, three years after starting at the high school where he graduated in 2000. He holds the rank of hospitalman.

In January, he was deployed with a Marine battalion to Helmand Province, a battle-scarred stretch of south central Afghanistan defined by heroin smugglers, Taliban warriors and AK-47s.

An easygoing man known among friends for comic impressions, St. George experienced his first battlefield firefight on a cloudless February morning that he remembers as being so cold his hands hurt.

"At about noon, the bullets started flying, and I wondered what have I gotten myself into," he said. "We were very, very lucky that day. The next day, we were getting fired at again."

It was the June 25 death of a fellow Camp Lejeune Marine that led to the poppy field meeting with the Afghan elder.

Sgt. Marlon E. Myrie, a 25-year-old Floridian with a wife and child, had been killed in an ambush that wounded another GI. St. George was with a group of Marines questioning villagers about who might have been involved in the attack.

"My gut told me this guy was bad, but we didn't have enough to keep him," St. George said. "A sergeant was dead and a corpsman was injured, but we had to let him go."

St. George said he began thinking of joining the military in the hours after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. As shocked pedestrians milled about in the streets of Manhattan, an older woman had approached him at random.

"She said 'I feel sorry for you -- your generation will inherit this,' " St. George said.

For a while, St. George pursued his other goal, teaching young people, a passion fanned as he worked at Camp Alvernia -- a Franciscan summer camp in Centerport -- during college.

Once on Northport's faculty, he earned a reputation as someone who worked easily with students. He volunteered as an adviser for the school's variety show and a number of other extracurricular activities.

But although he had been granted tenure and was earning almost $60,000 per year, he felt he could make a greater contribution to society by taking a leave for military service.

"I feel that teachers are some of our finest patriots," St. George said. "But I felt God was giving me a nudge and saying that I could be doing more."

"What the woman said to me kept coming back to me," he said. "I felt I had to enlist."

Many of St. George's colleagues initially challenged his decision to enlist.

"We were certainly caught off guard," said Andrew Manzo, the social studies chairman. "It's not something that someone in the state of his career, someone with job security, often does."

But Manzo said the battlefield experiences that St. George is accumulating will give him perspectives few social studies teachers develop. "I think when he comes back, he will have insights to share that others won't have," he said.