Ralph Clay was 30 years old — a first-grade teacher with a college degree, a wife and a son not yet 1 — when he walked down the jetway toward a plane bound for Afghanistan.

He didn’t look back.

“My wife always asks me why I didn’t look back,” Clay said. “I just didn’t want the last thing in my mind to be my wife crying and my son kind of not knowing what was going on.”

Clay, now 46, has spent 24 years teaching at Penn Kidder campus in the Jim Thorpe Area School District. But in April 2010, he left his classroom, and his family, to eventually land in Kabul assigned to the International Security Assistance Force headquarters.

He left the day before his son’s first birthday.

Military service runs deep in the Clay family. His father was a Navy CB in the 1960s. Both his grandparents served in World War II. His great-uncle — the man Clay, his father and now his son are all named after — was killed in World War II at age 19.

“I have that kind of background,” he said. “It’s been in the family.”

Clay graduated from Jim Thorpe Area High School in 1998 and went on to Penn State, where he was a student on Sept. 11, 2001. The attacks crystallized something he had long been turning over in his mind.

“I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to be in the military,” Clay said. “But I didn’t know I was definitely going to join until after I graduated.”

He was already working as a first-grade teacher in the Jim Thorpe School District when he made the calls. The Navy Reserve worked out best. He enlisted in 2004, completed boot camp at Great Lakes and was stationed at Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, as an intelligence specialist.

Six years later, he was called up for active duty.

The road to Kabul was long. After three and a half weeks of training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Clay spent several weeks in Kuwait and then several more at Bagram Airfield before arriving in the Afghan capital. A Navy reservist embedded with the Army, he wore Army uniforms and carried an M16.

“I’m an elementary teacher. I graduated college,” Clay said. “Sometimes I’d wonder to myself, how did I end up here?”

His assignment placed him in Kabul at the start of the U.S. troop surge into Afghanistan. Life in the city demanded constant vigilance.

“There was a lot of activity — suicide bombers, rocket attacks,” he said. “You had to be on guard at all times, and driving through the city was a little crazy.”

The days stretched from morning to night, seven days a week, with no days off. But he never questioned his decision to go.

“In the end, it’s what I signed up for,” Clay said. “Wherever it took me, it took me.”

One figure stood out during his year in country: Master Chief Dooley, who had served alongside Clay in his command back home before the two ended up deployed together.

“He always watched out for me, always asked how I was doing, always there if I needed anything,” Clay said. “I always thought he was just the greatest guy.”

Clay came home in April 2011 to a crowd of family and friends waiting at the airport. The school had held a going-away ceremony before he left and a celebration when he returned. His students’ families had sent packages throughout the deployment and kept him connected to life back home.

“They were constantly sending me packages and keeping me up to date on what was going on,” he said. “I really did have an overall great experience.”

The transition home brought its own adjustments. His son was nearly 2, and an entire year of his life had passed without his father present.

“When I got home, I wasn’t really sure how to be a dad,” Clay said. “I missed a whole year of his life.”

There was also a pull he hadn’t expected. After counting the days until he could return, he found that once he did, he would have gone back if called.

“The whole time I was there, all I wanted to do was come home,” he said. “And then I got home and I thought to myself, I would go back and do it again if asked. It was just really weird.”

Afghanistan reshaped the way Clay sees his classroom. He now tells his students about children he witnessed overseas — kids who would have given anything to sit in a well-equipped American school with lunch on the table, technology at their fingertips and teachers at the front of the room.

“We sometimes just take that for granted,” he said. “These other people would wish they could just do that.”

Clay is a member of the American Legion post in Jim Thorpe and helps with military funerals when he can. Serving his country, he said, stands among the greatest achievements of his life.

“Since I wanted to do it since I was a boy, and I did it, I have no regrets,” Clay said. “Knowing that I’m a veteran of this country is probably one of the greatest achievements of my life.”

His message to young people in Carbon County is straightforward.

“Freedom isn’t free,” he said. “Take every opportunity to support the country, support your town, support your neighbors and do good things.”