A sergeant who had gone through life hating Jews and Negroes. In New Guinea his company was pinned down by Japanese machine-gun fire, flat on their faces, unable to move — if he raised his head he felt the bullets ricocheting off his steel helmet — and the man who got them out was the Jewish private he had given every dirty job in the world to do when he was his superior. After the war, in a work accident, the man who saved his life was a Negro. Neville reads it as method, not coincidence: a man’s purification comes by the death of his delusions, and God always uses the one you hate to be your good Samaritan. If he has another hate today, God will put him in the state that requires it, and he will be saved by that hate too. ADDED 2026-09-20 from 1832, which is the fullest telling and the only one that names him. He is BILL DONOVAN — you can’t get a more Irish name — born in Boston, the only child of Irish parents, raised to think that if he fought daily he was a man and came home with bloody noses and black eyes; his mother was as prejudiced as he was, because they were Irish and they were Catholic. The confession is his own words and Neville keeps the word: not dislikes, hates. The grenades are his — I detached three from my belt, and could get them to him without being detected — and the private jumped up and wiped out the entire nest of snipers, severely wounded but not mortally. The fire is an explosion in a factory, his overalls burning, and the detail that makes it: all of the Caucasians in the place didn’t rush to save me. The Negro rolled him on the floor and burned himself doing it. What he did with it afterwards is the part worth having. In his own masonry supply business in San Francisco, the Jew got the first chance at any job available, and after the fire, you want a job, you either must first be a Jew or a Negro. The reason he gives for the whole thing is the motif’s own argument in the mouth of the man it happened to: I could not have plotted that, I couldn’t have planned it. It just happened that it happened this way. 1832 also gives the rest of his life: he came West, went alcoholic and completely blind with it, and Neville reads that as the same search misdirected — he was searching for the Spirit and he saw the false spirit in the form of alcohol — spirit being the same word. He joined AA, met his wife there, and had not touched a drop in a dozen years at the time of telling. And the scripture he attaches to his own collapse is Mark 13 — you see these buildings? Not one stone will be left standing upon another — which he applies to his prejudices: all these ancient evils in me collapsed.