I disabled noexec on tmp and vfar/tmp and also disabled the firewall. that seems to have fixed the issue. I can now start, stop and restart the elasticsearch service through systemctl.
I have however discovered another issue. The install documentation recommends disabling '--quite' option in the elasticsearch.service file to enable jornal logging. Doing this causes the elasticsearch service to become un-startable. I get the same error as above. I did multiple remove and re-installs to verify this issue. I am leaving this battle for someone else to fight.