The Trinity Read Online Free PDF Page B

to stay and a job to be had.
    Hinckley’s father was nonexistent; his mother was just eighteen when he was born. His father had been in the Navy and had gone off to Vietnam and died in a gunboat on a river in the Mekong Delta. He left Nebraska not knowing his young girlfriend was pregnant, and no one knew for sure if he ever knew. His parents ignored Brad’s mother. Pentecostals of the severest kind, they secretly felt their son died because of his sin, for lying with Brad’s mother out of wedlock, and they thought of her as a harlot, as that whore of Babylon responsible for the fall of their son.
    After struggling to finish high school in Omaha, Brad had thought of nothing except joining the Navy, a conscious decision to identify with his father. He flew with glee on a plane to Chicago for boot camp at Great Lakes. He was disappointed upon his arrival. He expected to be entering an all-Caucasian world but was almost frightened by the number of minorities: blacks, Mexicans from Texas and California, Puerto Ricans from New York and New Jersey, and even three Asians who really didn’t bother him, but he thought of the gooks in Vietnam that had killed his father. He recalled pictures of his father, thin, athletic and handsome, bearing little resemblance to himself.
    He didn’t excel the way he expected to; the sedentary life in front of the television and a propensity for constantly snacking made him overweight despite his tender years, and he couldn’t keep up with the demands of the physical training. He threw up during the first morning run. He struggled to complete twenty-five push-ups, and this weakness made him a target of the company commanders and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow recruits. He hated to be laughed at by anybody, especially by the blacks. So he sucked it up and ran through the pain and nausea, completed the required push-ups and sit-ups by sheer will, and by the end of boot camp he was a model recruit. No one would laugh at him again. He was still pudgy, and this disappointed him. After boot camp, he was sent to storekeeper school on the other side of Great Lakes. It was a short six-week course on how to be a naval supply clerk. He made sure to finish at the top of his class, and then it was on to RAF Lutherkirk, Scotland. There won’t be many niggers there , he thought.
    He made one friend shortly after his arrival in Scotland, Seaman Rodgers. Neither one worked in the communications buildings on the base, so they were sort of outcasts. Rodgers was a disbursing clerk and worked in the base personnel office, passing out and preparing paychecks. Rodgers had joined the Navy out of anger; his longtime girlfriend all the way from junior high school broke up with him at the senior prom, where it was revealed she was pregnant. He knew it wasn’t his because she told him she was saving herself for marriage. His outlook on life changed instantly. He stopped being the happy-go-lucky guy his friends and family had come to know. Rodgers had no specific plans upon leaving high school, just to work on his father’s farm and get married to his sweetheart Jane, but Jane broke his heart and he had to get away. So on the Monday after graduation, he drove the thirty miles into Cape Girardeau to find the Navy recruiter. “Sign me up,” he proclaimed upon walking into the recruiter’s office. No one tried to talk him out of anything. They quickly processed him and sent him the next day to St. Louis for a physical, and he was immediately put on a bus for Great Lakes. His parents didn’t know until he telephoned them from the bus station, telling him that his truck was in front of a parking meter in downtown Cape Girardeau and that he had left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition. His mother cried and his father called him a damn fool and asked who was going to work the farm with him this summer and said when he saw him again, he wouldn’t be too big for a belt. Rodgers apologized, but he couldn’t risk