VALDOSTA — Charlie Stewart, 85, sits across from me in a plastic lawn chair. He is still recovering from a fall that left him with a bump on the head and a recurring dizziness that keeps him from standing up too quickly.

Under his white trucker’s cap emblazoned with the emblem of a coiled snake, his eyes seem permanently squinted from the South Georgia sun. But as he speaks in a slow, quiet voice, the eyes seem to turn away from the blueberry bushes and oak trees and toward the blue horizon he watched during his years spent at sea with the U.S. Navy.

Stewart, the owner of Blueberry Hill just inside the Dasher city limits, served in both World War II and the Korean War, feeling in his youth a patriotism that prompted him to join the armed forces as soon as his father was allowed to sign his paperwork.

“I tried to join when I was 16, but my daddy wouldn’t let me,” Stewart said. “So on Oct. 20, 1944, the day I turned 17, my daddy signed for me and I joined the Navy.”

Stewart was sent to boot camp in Illinois, where he trained in the Great Lakes area for two months before getting orders to report to Treasure Island in San Francisco. He was assigned to duty aboard an LCT (Landing Craft Tank), an amphibious vessel designed to land tanks on beachheads.

The ship was sent to the Philippine Islands, Stewart said, where its primary duty was to search for sunken mines floating beneath the water. This assignment was the most dangerous of his military career, due to both the risk of triggering a mine and the Japanese forces firing on the ship from the shore at any moment.

“One time we were fishing off the back of the ship and they shot at us,” Stewart said. “If that guy had been aiming one foot higher, he’d have hit us in the legs or the chest.”

Stewart was stationed on the small island of Manicani off the coast of the larger Samar Island in the Gulf of Leyte. He remembers taking the train from the southern tip of Samar north 100 miles to the city of Baguio for recreation, especially the time he came into contact with a strange local delicacy.

In 1951, on the train ride, Stewart and a friend were approached by a food vendor selling what appeared to be boiled eggs. The two men bought four of them, but when Stewart cracked his, he was in for a surprise.

The boiled egg turned out to be balut, a bird embryo that is allowed to grow until it is ready to hatch. Still inside the egg, it is then killed, set out to age, then boiled and eaten right out of the shell.

“You’ve never smelled anything worse, and I turned, and the lady next to us was grabbing them by the feet and eating them like this,” Stewart said, leaning back his head and lifting his hand above his mouth. “And she would suck out the juice.”

Stewart and his friend gave the rest of their balut to the woman who appeared to be enjoying them.

Coming back to Manicani from Baguio, Stewart was involved in an emergency landing. He and 10 other servicemen were riding in a small Cessna, when it experienced flight problems. The pilot managed to land the plane on a particularly bushy island.

“Before we left, we were joking about how we might crash, and then it happened,” Stewart said. “The pilot said it was probably the bushes that saved us.”

When Stewart was discharged from his first tour, he spent time in Valdosta working entry-level jobs at the lumber mill and the local theater, he said. Then, with advice from his father, he decided to take the test to become a postal worker.

“My dad told me, ‘Well, they aren’t going to come to your house and offer you a job,’” Stewart said.

To his surprise, out of 20 applicants, he was one of four who got hired. He was proud of his new job and continued the first years of his career until war broke out in Korea.

“They were asking for volunteers, and I went,” Stewart said. “I knew I could get my job back. I fly my flag, I’m proud of America and the United States, and I’d risk my life to help it.”

Stewart was assigned to the USS Liddle, a destroyer escort ship that toured the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean during the Korean War.

“The Mediterranean was mostly sight-seeing,” Stewart said. “We visited every city we could visit. We went in every place the ship stopped.”

While the ship was in port in Italy, Stewart traveled to the city of Aosta, where he learned of Valdosta’s namesake — valle d’aosta.

Stewart remembers participating in a nuclear bomb test at Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands. His ship hauled a two-inch-thick remote detonation cable 10 miles out to sea.

“The only time we stopped was to splice the cable to the next spool,” Stewart said.

The bomb was detonated early in the morning, and it lit up the sky, Stewart said. Following this mission, the ship went to port in Jacksonville, Fla., where Stewart was discharged.

Stewart was eager to start back at the post office because his position continued to elevate. Upon his return, Stewart was given a rural route, the position he wanted. He continued to work with the post office until he retired 30 years later.

Stewart is also locally known as an amateur herpetologist and snake-lover. He has caught wild snakes and volunteered his time to bring them to area schools and other venues to teach children and families about snakes and snake safety.

For a long time, he kept his snakes — including rattlesnakes — as pets in the trailer by his house, but his family asked him to turn them all loose out of concerns for his safety, he said. He has been bitten by many snakes, but never by a rattlesnake, he said.

He has owned Blueberry Hill for about 19 years. He stands by the price of $1 per quart to pick your own blueberries from the bush. Once, he raised the price to $3 per quart, but it drove his customers away, so he reduced it to the original rate, he said.

“I tell them it’s $1 if you pick them. It’s $25 if I pick them,” he said.