Long Island A High School Counts Its War Dead

By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY
Published: August 28, 2005
BRENTWOOD


CHRIS CHAMBERLIN is the war guy at Brentwood High School. He is the English teacher who once manned an M-60 machine gun as a corporal in the Marines, and now pastes Marine Corps stickers onto his hatchback truck and lectures about the literature of Vietnam and World War II.

For years, when Brentwood students considered enlisting, Mr. Chamberlin, 38, has been the man to see. He would talk about his loyalty to the Marines, and about how four years in the service could offer discipline and structure, a chance to travel, money for college and the seeds of a career for teenagers with few options.

But in the last two years, four Brentwood High School graduates have died in Iraq or Afghanistan, most recently Specialist Jose Ruiz, who was killed Aug. 15 during an Army security operation in Mosul. No other high school in America, apparently, has suffered so high a toll in the two conflicts, in which about 2,100 Americans have died.

And Mr. Chamberlin has been torn apart. He loves the military and still believes it can transform his students' lives. But he reviles the Iraq war and the mounting casualties. As the new school year approaches, Mr. Chamberlin struggles to articulate his feelings when students ask about the war and about enlisting.

"I know some of them are going to die," Mr. Chamberlin said. "But I can't say no to them when they come to me and say, 'I want to do this.' It tears me up."

First was Raheen Tyson Heighter, class of 2000, an Army private killed in an ambush in Iraq in July 2003. Then Michael J. Esposito, class of 1999, an Army sergeant, was killed in March 2004 while patrolling in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. Last September, Ramon Mateo, class of 2002, a lance corporal in the Marines on his second tour of duty in Iraq, was killed in an attack on a convoy west of Baghdad. Then Specialist Ruiz this month.

The Department of Defense lists war deaths by unit and hometown, but not by high school, so there is no definitive listing of the hardest-hit schools. A review of newspaper archives around the country found two, Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School in South Carolina and Simi Valley High School in California, that have each lost three graduates in the current conflicts. In Florida, five students who attended different high schools in the Hillsborough County school district have died. But no reports were found of any high school having lost as many as Brentwood has.

Administrators at the school, whose 3,600 students make it one of the largest on the Island, said the war deaths were both personal and collective losses. The four young men once strolled the same hallways, cheered the same teams and learned from some of the same teachers.

And now, Brentwood High School remembers them the same way, with a memorial service that has become painfully familiar for the principal, Thomas O'Brien. Family members and administrators praise the dead graduate. Politicians talk about patriotism and sacrifice. The choir sings.

"We're practiced at this," Mr. O'Brien said.

Later, a plaque with a laminated photograph is hung on the school's new Wall of Honor. Corporal Mateo, Sergeant Esposito and Private Heighter are there now; the school still needs to order a plaque for Specialist Ruiz.
Mr. Chamberlin walks by that wall every day, to and from the classroom where he teaches 11th- and 12th-grade English and an advanced-placement literature class.

"Those faces haunt me," Mr. Chamberlin said. "The sacrifices are immediate. They're right there in front of me. I couldn't stop thinking about it."

Mr. Chamberlin, who grew up in Stony Brook, said that when he turned 15, he asked his parents, who had often struggled financially, how much they had saved for his college tuition. They burst out laughing, he said, and told him to join the service.

So he enlisted in the Marines after high school, hungry for a macho life where he could play Clint Eastwood and John Wayne for a living. He served on an aircraft carrier during the Iran-Iraq war, guarding tankers full of Iraqi oil as they left the Persian Gulf.

He was ready to leave after four years, and in 1989 he took his $14,000 veteran's education stipend and enrolled at San Diego State University. He took the teaching job in Brentwood in 1996.
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