Time Magazine has its Person of the Year. And, now, I have mine.
Meet Trinie Jestine, who in 2009 accomplished what a lot of people couldn’t: He landed a job.
It’s not just any job; Trinie got one he wanted. Starting in January, the 28-year-old will be working as a nursing assistant at the James J. Peters VA Hospital in the Bronx.
Trinie is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, serving for nine months as a Navy medic. He came back pretty messed up, though he said he hasn’t experienced any flashbacks for months.
“One time, we were awake for 13 days in a row — gunfire, explosions,” Trinie told me the other day at my awards “ceremony,” held at a quiet restaurant called Home in the Village.
The restaurant’s name is ironic because it’s been a while since Trinie had anything resembling a real home. He’s been living in a shelter in Brooklyn run by the city and the feds on a floor filled with other war veterans in need of help.
Trinie left what had been masquerading as his home in the Bronx when he was 14. He’s only met his father once. His mother died when he was a child, leaving his grandmother to be his guardian.
But as she got older, his home life got worse. At the end, Trinie said, 16 people were living in the same four-bedroom apartment — with one bathroom — as he was. The final straw, Trinie said, came when a boyfriend of an aunt urinated on him while he was asleep.
Trinie bounced around to friends and family, and eventually he was mentored by a well-off Nantucket, Mass., family who showed him how to live his life. The father, a businessman named Joe, also suggested that the ninth-grade dropout join the military to get his life in order.
“That was the best brotherhood I ever had,” Trinie said of his fellow soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Soldiers from various ethnic groups would hang out, cover each other’s backs, drink out of the same canteen when necessary and never think twice about it. It was nothing like the area in the Bronx where Trinie grew up.
His fellow soldiers would also bleed right next to each other, though Trinie was reluctant to talk about the suffering he saw as a medic. Too many friends died. “Great friends, great guys,” he choked out.
When Trinie got back to the US, he had trouble finding a job. Despite the medical training he got in the military, no hospital would hire him because the wartime experience didn’t produce a certification.
“I went to almost every hospital in the city and they said the same thing, ‘You are not New York City certified,’ ” he said.
He ended up in a shelter, which Trinie said isn’t nearly as bad as the word “shelter” might convey.
Trinie said he worked a dozen hours a day, seven days a week, washing dishes at a famous New York restaurant. The hours really didn’t bother him, he said, because after coming back from the war, he can’t sleep any longer than three hours at a time.
Eventually, he landed a job at the Bronx VA hospital. But even then, it was menial work. When a nurses’ aide position opened up recently, however, Trinie was in the right place at the right time to land it.
Trinie soon will be moving into a subsidized apartment not far from where he grew up. And thanks to a state program, tuition will be waived when he begins attending City University of New York to become a full-fledged nurse.
How did I pick Trinie as my Man of the Year? I asked the city’s Department of Homeless Services to find a success story I could tell on Christmas Eve in this miserable year of layoffs and domestic anguish.
While I can’t really quibble with Time magazine’s choice of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as Man of the Year, 2009 hasn’t really been a year of important people like Bernanke. Indeed, it could reasonably be argued Bernanke was partly responsible for causing the financial crisis he is now being given credit for helping solve.
The real heroes of 2009 are ordinary folks — a woman who was a cashier at my local supermarket who can’t buy her grandkids gifts because her work hours were cut. But she’ll still join the family tonight anyway for Christmas Eve. Or the guy I met recently who was joking with me at a store checkout line even though he’s struggling to pay the bills. He’s learning to fix elevators because the mortgage indus try has dried up.
Millions of people have stories like these.
I think Trinie rep resents the true Men and Women of the Year better than Bernanke ever could. And Trinie’s story can offer hope to people who think their situation is hopeless. What else can I add, except, have a Merry Christmas. john.crudele@nypost.com