Insight: A mentor and a friend

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

On the night before Thanksgiving in 1977, I was more than 5,000 miles from home, it was raining all the time, and I didn’t know anyone there. I had just been sent to my first duty assignment in the U.S. Air Force at the age of 23, at a remote location near Frankfurt, Germany.

Daryl Green was a longtime friend
of Ed Pierce and they served
together in the Air Force
in Germany and in Washington,
D.C. during their military careers.
COURTESY PHOTO

It was not what I had hoped for. My unit’s barracks were at Drake Kaserne in a U.S. Army housing building surrounded by a tall stone wall. My third-story room contained a cot, a closet and a window looking out over the stone wall onto a city street below. It was a 7-minute walk to the mess hall for a meal and by the end of my second week there, I was wondering if I had made the right decision in wanting to see if things looked any different on the other side of the world.

For the Thanksgiving holiday, my unit had been given four days off. I wasn’t envisioning having a fun time eating my Thanksgiving dinner alone in the mess hall and without receiving my first paycheck yet, I was unable to afford to use a payphone to call my family back in America.

Then something unexpected happened. Another member of my unit who lived across the hall from me in the barracks invited me to listen to music in his room and that simple gesture renewed my spirit. His name was Sgt. Daryl Green and meeting him turned out to be one of the best things to ever happen to me.

He was originally from Brooklyn and had been in the Air Force for almost four years. He was single and had some of the most expensive stereo equipment I had ever seen. Although I did not share his love for jazz music, I discovered that sitting and listening to his jazz albums in his room was as close to attending a jazz concert as in person.

All his record albums were jazz greats such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane and he introduced me to more contemporary jazz musicians such as the Brecker Brothers, Idris Muhammad and Herbie Hancock.

Even more impressive was Daryl’s turntable. It was a $2,000 Jean Francois Le Tallec linear turntable that electronically sensed the album tracks, and the turntable’s tone arm was self-contained. Each record played on it sounded incredible.

As I got to know Daryl, I found that we both loved college basketball and were both writers. He was working in Aerospace Ground Equipment in Europe, but his next duty assignment was to be the editor of the base newspaper at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. When he was eventually transferred out of our unit, I shook his hand goodbye, thanked him for being my friend, and sensed that it wouldn’t be the last time I would see him.

About 13 months later, I was reassigned to a squadron at The Pentagon in Washington and soon thereafter reconnected with Daryl. He asked if I would write some articles about events at The Pentagon for the newspaper that he was editing called the “Bolling Beam.” Over the next two years, I produced more than 200 articles for Daryl’s newspaper, and we went to a few college basketball games at American University and at the University of Maryland. I was with him when we ate lunch at the first Wendy’s Restaurant to open in Oxon Hill, Maryland.

By August 1981, I was reassigned from The Pentagon to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona to work for the base newspaper there and Daryl learned that he was being transferred in January 1982 to Beale Air Force Base in California. Before leaving Washington, I had dinner with Daryl and his wife Taryn at their home in Maryland and we talked about what it was like to serve as an editor of an Air Force newspaper.

We spoke on the phone almost weekly for four years and he congratulated me when I was promoted to serve as the editor of the Luke Air Force Base newspaper in 1982. He called me several times in New Mexico in 1986 after I had gotten out of the military and was in the process of earning my degree in journalism at the University of New Mexico.

In 2009, Daryl and I became Facebook friends, and he mentioned that he was retired from the military and was seeking a job in Las Vegas, Nevada as a card dealer in a casino. Despite sending him several more messages, I didn’t hear from him again. But earlier this year I noticed that his brother Vinny was on Facebook and sent him a message asking about Daryl.

He told me Daryl had passed away in 2012 at the age of 56 in Maryland and I couldn’t believe it. He had retired as a Master Sergeant from the Air Force and had served in Vietnam and in the Gulf War and was one of the smartest people I have ever known.

It was more than mere coincidence that led Daryl Green to invite me to listen to music with him in 1977, and I will always remember his kindness and guidance in serving as one of my mentors and a great friend.