340: The Devil in Me

Ira Glass

My wife and I are standing at the door to our place, and we're arguing. A delivery guy has arrived with something, and it's early morning, and I hold the dog and I ask her to go to the door. And she doesn't want to go to the door because of the way that she's dressed. And I insist, no, no, no, no. It's fine. And we go around on this for a while, and the guy's at the door and I don't give in and she finally goes to the door.

And then the guy leaves, and she's mad, and she cannot understand why I made her do that. And finally, I look at her, and I see what it is that she's talking about. She's in an undershirt and pajama bottoms. And I see why she wouldn't want to go to the door. I see it. I see it. But what I say is, "That shirt's not so revealing." This just comes out of me, without thinking. A complete lie.

And she says, you know, this is that thing you do. This is that the thing right here. You can't admit when you did something wrong, which she is totally right about. She's so right, in fact, that I still don't admit it. Though, to describe it this way makes it seem like I'm actually doing a computation in my head and thinking things through and weighing things out. Should I admit it? Should I not admit it? And then I conclude, no. No, don't do it, don't admit it, don't give in.

But, in fact, all this happens in an instant in my head. It's like lightning. There's no thought at all. I say, no, no, no, the shirt's fine, I don't see a problem. And then she points out that it's crazy-making, living with me. That if I could just admit that I did something wrong at the beginning, her life would be so much better. This happens all the time.

Part of getting older, I think, is learning that you do these things, without thinking, that you are not proud of. I have a list. I interrupt people, I snap at people, I get a condescending, know-it-all tone sometimes without even knowing I'm doing it. I fake laugh at stuff I don't find funny, because I'm only half listening. And while I'm self-absorbed enough to do all that, unfortunately I am not so self-absorbed that I don't notice the look on other people's faces and realize what I've done.

This is a very bad middle ground to be in. You know, if I were more sensitive, I wouldn't be doing these things in the first place. And if I was less sensitive, I wouldn't notice what an ass I am, which would be less painful, for me.

Most of us have these things, these little devils inside of us that we're fighting against. And some of the devils aren't so little. You know? Sometimes you're spending your life fighting one of these devils and then you become president of the United States, and somehow end up messing around with an intern, which ruins your presidency and possibly, depending on how you see it, leads to the election of a guy who sends our nation into what becomes a very unpopular war.

Well, that's the subject of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Today we have stories of people for whom fighting the devils inside them, it became the biggest struggle of their lives.

In Act One, a guy goes to extraordinary lengths to rid himself of certain feelings, feelings of prejudice, feelings of bigotry, that he's having and finds he cannot control. In Act Two, we let the devils inside people's heads speak, en masse, here on the radio. In Act Three, a man starts off by battling certain doubts in his head, and ends up in a real biblical stand-off with a demon who shows up one day in his college classroom. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, And So We Meet Again. So let's say you find yourself bothered by some very extreme and unreasonable things knocking around in your head. Maybe you try to fix that by doing something extreme. Lisa Pollak has the story of one guy who did just that. We first broadcast her story a year ago.

Lisa Pollak

Last winter, if you happened to be watching the campus TV station at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, you might have seen this.

Lisa Pollak

A video montage of Season's Greetings from campus clubs and departments.

Lisa Pollak

And if you couldn't pull yourself away, you'd eventually get to this. Two guys, one slight and bearded, with dark skin speaking Arabic.

Lisa Pollak

And the other, a tall, broad shouldered white guy with the translation.

Lisa Pollak

The second guy, the one speaking English, that's Sam Slaven. And what he doesn't say in the video is that even though he's in the Muslim Student Association, he's not a Muslim. He doesn't want to be a Muslim. In fact, not so long ago, he couldn't stand to be in the same room with Muslims.

The idea of Sam joining the Muslim Student Association was so improbable that even some of the people who knew him best thought he was kidding when he first told them about it. It's not a choice anybody would expect from a guy who use words like this to describe Muslims--

Lisa Pollak

To understand home Sam went from being that guy to the guy extending Seasons Greetings on behalf of the Muslim Student Association, and then even becoming friends, real friends, with the bearded guy in that video, you have to go back a few years to the first place Sam ever really learned about Muslims. It wasn't Parkland College. It was Iraq.

Sam's from Indiana. After high school, he enrolled at Purdue. But college wasn't for him back then, so he dropped out and joined the Army. When he was sent to Baghdad in 2003, at the start of the war, he was Sergeant Sam Slaven, of the 2nd Armored Calvary. He didn't know much about the people in Iraq, or their religion, but he knew he wanted to help them. And, at first, it seemed like they wanted that, too.

In fact, listening to Sam describe the early days of the invasion, I realized I'd forgotten that scenes like this ever existed.

Lisa Pollak

After a few months of that treatment, it's no wonder that when Sam came under fire for the first time, outside a power station he was guarding, he was truly surprised.

Lisa Pollak

As the insurgency got going, so did Sam's piecemeal education in Islam. His unit was stationed in Sadr City, where the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was building his own militia. And translators told the soldiers, Iraqis were being urged to, quote, "Kill the infidels."

Lisa Pollak

Then came the day that changed things for a lot of guys in Sam's unit. On October 9, 2003, his platoon was out on patrol. On a nearby street, another platoon from the unit drove straight into an ambush. They were lured in by a woman and child pretending they needed help.

Lisa Pollak

Two guys from Sam's unit were killed that night. And the Americans felt betrayed. The ambush was so big that plenty of the locals must have known about it, but no one, not any of the people they'd been trying to help, had warned them. After that, Sam says, he could never really look at Iraqis the same way.

Lisa Pollak

It's not what he did do, Sam told me, and I want to be clear about that. I spoke to an officer who was one of Sam's superiors back then, and he vouched for Sam's conduct, his adherence to the rules of engagement, the real ones, not the Hollywood ones.

Sam's feelings didn't go away when he got back to the States. If anything, they festered. When his year in Iraq was up, he was assigned to an Army recruiting battalion, and stationed in Miami. Which sounds like a nice change of pace for a guy fresh from a war zone, but it wasn't.

Lisa Pollak

Sam began to have nightmares and trouble sleeping, and other symptoms of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We've all heard of PTSD, but we don't usually hear the details of what it actually feels like to have it. Falling apart isn't something soldiers brag about. But once, at the end of an interview, I asked Sam if he ever hit bottom, and he said yes.

Lisa Pollak

After that day, Sam got help. He started treatment for PTSD, retired from the Army, moved to Champaign, where he had family. And in May 2006, at age 28, started classes at Parkland, a community college. But Sam was still struggling. And to help me understand some of what he was going through, Sam gave me permission to talk to his VA therapist. His name is Tim Kohlbecker. He runs a PTSD clinic serving veterans in Illinois and parts of Indiana.

And he explained what can happen to soldiers in combat this way. Imagine you're in a room with 10 identical chairs. You're told to sit in one of them, and you get an electric shock. The next day, you're told to sit in the same chair again, and you get shocked again. The third day, you wise up. You're not sitting in that chair anymore.

Lisa Pollak

Sam's college campus wasn't exactly a hotbed of Arab and Muslim culture. But for Sam, it didn't take much. Just the site of an Arab man in a beard could trigger his anxiety.

Lisa Pollak

One day he almost did get too close. In the hallway of a campus building, he spotted this guy, Middle-Eastern looking, with a long beard.

Lisa Pollak

Now, before I tell you what happened at that meeting, some background on the Muslim Student Association at Parkland College. You've already met the founder and president, Yousif Radeef. He was the guy speaking Arabic on the holiday video. He also happens to be the bearded man who Sam wanted to jump in the hallway that day. And he's an Iraqi, though his family left Iraq when he was 10 and moved to Jordan, and then the United Arab Emirates before coming to Illinois three years ago.

Yousif was 17 when he got here. And other Muslims warned him to be careful what he said, that as a Muslim from the Arab world, anything he did might be viewed with suspicion.

Lisa Pollak

It got better mostly because Yousif made it better. He decided he didn't want to hide who he was or what he thought. So when he got to Parkland College, he threw himself into campus life. He joined clubs and got elected to student government, and wasn't afraid to say that he opposed the Iraq War. And he started the school's first official chapter of the Muslim Student Association.

Yousif wanted this particular chapter to be different than other Muslim student groups he had heard about. One of his main goals was to reach out to students who weren't Muslim, especially the ones who had a bad impression of his faith.

Lisa Pollak

For Yousif, having a guy like Sam, someone filled with negative feelings about Muslims, just walk into an MSA meeting was actually kind of a dream scenario. It was like he'd hit the jackpot. Though, Yousif, going above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to bridging the cultural divide, chose this analogy.

Lisa Pollak

There were about 10, maybe 12 students at the meeting, including Yousif, who Sam recognized instantly.

Lisa Pollak

That's [? Manal, ?] an MSA member from Morocco. Sam wasn't the only one in the room having a hard time that day. [? Manal ?], and her sister [? Lahmie ?], told me they were uncomfortable, too. Only for them, the reason was Sam.

Lisa Pollak

[? Lahmie, ?] [? Manal's ?] sister.

Lisa Pollak

[? Manal ?] told me about one young woman at the meeting who was from Iraq.

Lisa Pollak

The meeting ended. And sometime later, Sam and Yousif ended up running into each other on campus.

Lisa Pollak

What Sam had done was not the course of action his therapist had recommended. He'd basically cooked up for himself an extreme version of a pretty standard treatment for trauma, exposure therapy, where you re-experience a traumatic event as a way of recovering from it.

Lisa Pollak

The problem with what Sam did, and why Kohlbecker says he'd never counsel a patient to do it, is that it wasn't gradual. It was like he jumped into the deep end not knowing if he could swim. But his doctor thought he could handle it, so Sam kept going back.

Lisa Pollak

As the school year went on, some of the other students in the MSA started noticing something about Sam. The only non-Muslim in their group had become one of its most active members.

Lisa Pollak

[? Manal ?] had stopped wondering if Sam was a spy. His dedication had won her over.

Lisa Pollak

Did you catch that? Sam actually sat at a table on campus, representing Muslim students.

Lisa Pollak

The adviser to the MSA, Dennis Kaczor, noticed another change in Sam.

Lisa Pollak

And they weren't talking about the Iraq war, either.

Lisa Pollak

That's right, magic tricks. See, Sam's a magician, a detail that might not be relevant were it not for the fact that Yousif loves magic. And one day, in an MSA seeming, Sam took out a deck of cards.

Lisa Pollak

And soon they were spending time together.

[CARDS SHUFFLING] Practicing magic tricks.

Lisa Pollak

Taking their first car ride.

Lisa Pollak

Like any friends, they were there for each other. Yousif helped Sam fix his roof, and Sam gave Yousif advice on the best way to approach Americans when raising money for the MSA.

Lisa Pollak

And then, last April, came Sam and Yousif's most ambitious collaboration.

Lisa Pollak

The 5K run was the MSA's biggest project, and it never would have happened without Sam. He volunteered to organize the race, and spent months planning and publicizing it. And in the end, it was just what Yousif had hoped for, a positive event for the whole community that just happened to be sponsored by Muslims. It was a big day. And to top it off, after the race, Yousif invited Sam to play in a soccer game with a group of Muslim students from the state university.

A year earlier just the idea of being on a playing field, surrounded by Muslim men he didn't know, would have made Sam anxious.

Lisa Pollak

But just to show you how complicated their situation was, at the same time Sam was realizing how far he'd come, Yousif was having the opposite experience, getting a reminder of how far apart their two worlds still were. And I guess I should add that Sam wasn't with us when Yousif told me this part of the story.

Lisa Pollak

When I went to Champaign, I took Sam up on his offer to play me some of the videotape he'd shot in Iraq. After all the talking we'd done about the war, it was interesting to actually see him there. There were shots of Sam him driving his Humvee, and on guard duty, and a lot of funny scenes, off-duty soldiers just goofing around. Like these guys, amusing themselves during down time by shocking themselves with tasers.

Lisa Pollak

Yousif was in the room with us. He'd come to Sam's house to meet me that day, and he'd also been curious to see the video. I kept thinking how weird it must have been for him to be watching some of the footage, even just seeing Sam in Yousif's country, wearing camouflage and sunglasses and carrying a rifle was a little startling.

In one shot, Sam tells the camera that there isn't much to see in Iraq, besides trash and filth and the scum of the earth. And then there was this scene, a bunch of soldiers standing around telling jokes to a guy named Hamsa, their Iraqi translator.

Lisa Pollak

The next one was hard to hear, So Sam repeated it.

Lisa Pollak

And then came Sam's joke.

Lisa Pollak

I glanced over at Yousif to see how he was reacting. I was feeling incredibly uncomfortable. But when I asked Yousif how he was feeling, he said even though he knew some Iraqis would be offended by the jokes, he wasn't. He didn't blame Sam for talking this way.

Lisa Pollak

But more than anything, Yousif says, the Sam in the video just wasn't the Sam he knows. They are two different guys. And when I talk to Sam, that's basically the same thing he says. The war changed him.

Lisa Pollak

Sam told me later he was actually a little nervous showing Yousif the videos, but just a little. He trusted Yousif, trusted their friendship, which is a long way to come from wanting to take him down in a hallway. It was only by the sheer force of will that Sam even went to the Muslim Student Association in the first place. And to do it, he had to overlook every instinct he had telling him to run the other way.

And then he had to meet someone like Yousif, who welcomed him, ignoring anything Sam might have done in the past. When you consider what it took for Sam to overcome his hatred, it's no wonder it happens so rarely.

Ira Glass

Lisa Pollak. She is one of the producers of our show. Last fall, Yousif move to the University of Illinois where he's studying molecular and cell biology. He plans to be a dentist. Sam is at Eastern Illinois University, where he is studying geography.

Coming up, what to do if the very reasonable, very persuasive voice inside your head tells you to drink, to smoke, to stop ironing that skirt. That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, The Devil Inside Me. We have stories of people battling things inside themselves, impulses and thoughts they would rather not have. We have arrived at Act Two of our show.

Act two, Vox Diaboli. Of course, we all have things inside ourselves that we want to fight. 12-step programs and self-help books and organized religion would not do such a thriving business if this were not so common. But sometimes, the voice in one's head really does seem like a voice. Addicts talk about this a lot. This is the voice of having one drink, you know, just one drink. You deserve it, you can handle it. Just one drink.

Well, one of our producers, Nancy Updike, started asking around about whether people felt like they were under a spell of an inner voice like this. And it was like people had been waiting all their lives for somebody to ask them this question. She heard from serial cheaters, and road ragers, and move-aholics, a guy who obsessively buys too much food to the point where he goes into debt, people compulsive in ways that she had never heard of.

Here are some of them. A quick warning to listeners, there's nothing explicit in here, but one of the people in here does acknowledge the existence of sex.

Ira Glass

Thanks to everybody who talked with us. That story from Nancy Updike.

[MUSIC - "LEXICON DEVIL" BY THE GERMS]

Ira Glass

Act three, The Devil Wears Birkenstocks. Well, we've heard today from people who are battling all kinds of inner demons. David Dickerson has done that, and he's gone one step further.

David Dickerson

When I was 23 years old and wrestling with my faith, the last big battle for my soul came when I had to face down an actual demon who was a guest in one of my university classes. Or that's how I saw it at the time. But the battle had started long before, when I was a kid. I had been raised a fundamentalist Christian. Adam and Eve, the flood, David and Goliath, all of that really happened. Jesus walked on water and was born of the Virgin and said everything that the four gospels tell us.

But after years of religious studies classes at the University of Arizona, I felt myself swerving toward a moderate Catholicism and wasn't quite sure about many of the things I had been raised to believe. The history of the Bible wasn't as pure as I had been taught. I was questioning inconsistencies, like how simple textual analysis pretty much proves Paul didn't write the book of Hebrews. Basic facts about the nature of Jesus, of God, of our duties on this earth seemed to me less like eternal truths and more like things I happen to believe.

But I was still sure about two things. There was a spiritual world behind what we could see, and it contained both good and evil spirits. Angels, that is, and demons. I believed this for a couple reasons. First of all, the Bible said so. Time and again in the gospels, a demon-possessed person will cross Jesus' path and then the demon inside the person snarls and curses. Jesus rebukes the demon, casts them out, and the person is healed.

But beyond just the Bible, my sister and father had both seen demons. They've always been kind of closet charismatics, and for a while our family was going to both kinds of services. Charismatic Christians are the ones who speak in tongues and lay hands on sick people. At that church, we got regular reports from visiting missionaries who would tell hair-raising stories about how they'd faced down local witch doctors who would suddenly yell at the missionaries in a strange voice and in perfect English, or cause spears to levitate over them menacingly.

I'd never actually seen a demon myself, but all of us Christian kids traded demon tales the way other kids swap ghost stories, and for the same reason, because it's scary, but exciting, but scary, but exciting. So even though years went by, and I still never saw a demon, a little sliver of that fear stayed with me and kept me on my guard, just in case. If I ever did meet one, I wouldn't make the mistake of treating it like a metaphor.

So anyway, at the time of this story, I was a college senior, and to fill out my last semester of electives, I decided to take a class called Paranormal Anthropology. This was about strange phenomena. Dowsing, UFOs, ESP, past life regression, all that stuff you find on the X-Files. And the professor was really interesting, because although our textbook was a skeptical look at all these things, he would bring in guest lecturers who were actual believers, so we could get both sides of the story.

We were lectured one week by three UFO abductees. And the next week, we had a dowser try and trace the water mains on the University green. The dowser failed, and the abductees were weird. And, on the whole, it looked like science was winning.

But then, one day, the professor announced that our guest next time would be a medium, a woman who channeled spirits. And she was going to let herself get possessed, right there in the classroom, two days from now. As soon as he said it, I was terrified. For all my book learning, in some raw, anxious way I was still 10 years old and overwhelmed. There was going to be a demon in this classroom-- an actual agent of spiritual evil-- who was counting on people not believing in him. People would ask this demon questions, and this demon would answer, speaking with the voice of Satan, and everyone would nod and no one would know the real agenda of this creature.

I was the only conservative Christian I knew of in that class, which meant that I was the only one who could save us from, well, from being corrupted by evil in some direct, horrible way. I wasn't at all sure what the demon would do or say. All I knew was that what had been a simple academic pursuit had suddenly turned into the most serious spiritual test of my life.

Only, I was really not up to the task. My faith had wandered. I had gone to Catholic mass. I had several gay friends. I had said skeptical things about the authorship of Hebrews. Now it was as if the god of my old Christianity, the real God, the straightforward God, the God who the Bible plainly states is there and whom I had become too highfalutin to simply accept, was calling me back to the battlefield. And I had two days to get into spiritual shape.

I started fasting immediately, and holed up in my room for hours. I prayed, "Lord, Jesus, please protect me in this coming battle. Build a wall of protection around the classroom, and protect all my fellow students. Give me the wisdom to know what to say, the courage to face this evil in your name and please, please, please, please protect me."

I repeated this over and over for the next two days. I didn't watch TV. I didn't use my computer. I couldn't let anything distract me, because I knew that if I failed-- well, you probably saw The Exorcist, same idea. This was a magic monster, one who could probably smell the Holy Spirit dwelling inside me, and who would find some way to attack. All this was scary, but I have to admit, it was exciting, too, which is basically what the conservative Christian's whole life is like.

There's temptation on every side, you have to constantly immerse yourself in prayer, in the Bible, in the community of faith. But with that fear comes the thrill of getting to be an instrument of goodness in an evil world. And for me now, with this impending demon, here it suddenly was, years after I'd given up expecting it. I'd been groomed for this battle since I was a little kid. This was my chance to be a hero for the faith, just like my namesake, King David. I had read the Bible stories about him hundreds of times.

I walked in the class that Thursday wearing a cross necklace I had lately been setting aside, and I slapped down my New International Version Study Bible right there in front of me on the table. I just stared at it and prayed and didn't talk to anyone. I was trembling, partly from fear and tension, and partly, of course, from hunger.

And then the medium came in, an overweight woman of about 55. Faded jeans, faded T-shirt, tacky bead necklaces and long, graying hair. She had a friend with her who acted as her assistant. And this friend, also frumpy, said that the medium often had several different spirits come through her in a session, so we might notice her voice changing.

They dimmed the lights slightly. The medium went into her trance. And then her assistant said, she's just reached her spirit guide, who's an Indian chief from the Hopi tribe who died in the 1800s. Does anyone have any questions? An old sort of hippie-ish woman, an Indian spirit guide. This started seeming less sinister and more like something out of community theater.

But, of course I told myself, that's exactly what Satan would want me to think, because if the devil doesn't want us to believe in him, this was a really perfect disguise. But, then again, how would I know the difference?

And just then, the medium moaned and rolled her head, and her friend announced, she is now channeling the spirit of King David. King David. Hell, I was a Bible scholar, this was my turf. I flipped to the Psalms, the book that David is supposed to have written, and found a question I had always been curious about. When the teacher asked, does anyone have a question for King David?, my hand shot up.

The professor called on me and I rose to my feet. And, still staring intently at my open Bible, and with a voice that was actually quivering, I said, "Yes, um, King David? I notice here that some of your Psalms are called Maskils, and some are called Miktams, and according to my footnotes, these are musical terms. But scholars don't actually know what they mean. Could you please explain the difference?"

There was a brief pause. I was too scared to look at her face. Finally, the medium said, "Yes, I could explain. But the answer would be very technical, and I don't think it would interest anybody." And her friend said, "Next question."

It all happened so quickly that I wasn't sure how to understand it. I decided that the demon, who would clearly have known the answer, just didn't blurt it out because he wanted to avoid a fight with a real Christian. The second the bell rang, the women left the classroom without a word. I thanked God for the victory, and went to grab some pizza.

While I was sitting at a booth, waiting for my slice to arrive, I mentally replayed exactly what had happened. And I realized that God hadn't technically won. A win for God would have been the demon calling me out in a creepy voice, and me brandishing the cross and saying, "In the name of Jesus, I command you," and maybe papers flying everywhere. Instead, what had happened was that a liar had come into our classroom, and I'd beaten her with scholarship.

What's more, it hadn't even been close. Book learning had been easier, swifter, and more powerful than prayer and fasting combined. Right then, for the first time, I saw myself from the outside. And what I saw was that my belief in demons was actually kind of silly. My next immediate thought was, well, if demons don't exist except in stories I hear from other people, what about angels? For that matter, what about the Virgin birth? Oh, my god.

And before I knew it, I felt like I was falling helplessly, because it turns out you can't actually make yourself believe something if the doubts seem more likely.

When I think about it now, that one rational question put to the demon, that shipwrecked my faith. I had kicked open one door too many, and I could no longer stay inside where I felt safe. For a few years, I kept going to church. I kept trying to believe. But after awhile, I let go altogether. If you ask my family, they'd claim that when I fought that nonexistent demon, Satan actually won, that he couldn't have chosen a better answer to make the whole idea of demons seem ridiculous, and kill my faith forever.

Ira Glass

Dave Dickerson in New York.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Jane Feltes, John Jeter, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Jule Snyder, Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Production help from Seth Lind, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] [? Navarro ?], Bruce Wallace and P.J. Vogt. Music help from Jessica Hopper. Happy birthday, Jessica.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. And you know, part of management oversight is that he calls us into his office once a year for annual evaluations and reviews. I actually have right here a recording of one of the sessions.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week, with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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