Sorry I misunderstood. I was getting a can't find symbol error when trying to compile. I thought you were referring to errors when I looked for the class with the env command.
Regardless I finally got it working last night. It was actually a stupid problem, one which was happening because Eclipse was not behaving the way I anticipated. It's actually kind of embarassing.
When creating a Java Project, the organize imports command was unable to find my servlet-api.jar. And I would get the common red underline on the offending classes. So I created a J2EE project and used the organize imports command. I didn't get the red underline and assumed all was well. Well because I wasn't getting any errors in Eclipse I assumed my imports were all taken care of, and never bothered to expand the import section. A stupid rookie mistake, I didn't actually have the servlet package imported. I didn't suspect that since Eclipse didn't complain in J2ee mode the way it did in java mode.
Bottom line is I got my problem fixed. Now I just need to work on why Eclipse doesn't behave the way I thought it should.
I'm sorry if I wasted your time, but thank you for your help and patience anyway.