515: Good Guys

Ira Glass

OK, here's what intrigued Ben. His friend Sonari told him that he'd come up with this thing. And there's no way to say this without sounding like an infomercial. But Sonari was doing this thing that was saving him lots of money.

And Sonari is exactly the kind of person who would know about this kind of thing. He's a business reporter. He's one of our colleagues at NPR news. Anyway, here's Ben.

Ira Glass

Ben, by the way, is This America Life producer Ben Calhoun. He and Sonari are buddies. And Ben says that Sonari came up with this new financial strategy one day when Sonari was shopping for shoes.

Ira Glass

So Sonari told Ben all this, because Sonari had started doing this all the time, asking for the good guy discount. And he thought that Ben should try it too. And Ben suggested this might be a good radio story for our show. And all of us here at the radio show, we all said great.

And we all told him, of course, as part of the story, you're going to have to go out and try to get the discount yourself. And Ben turned red and started to squirm. But he said, sure. And we put it onto our story list. This was last February.

11 months have gone by. And now and then, one of us would remember this at a story meeting and say, whatever to happened to that good guy discount thing? And Ben would get all embarrassed. And it was clear he was just hating the idea that he was going to actually have to go out in the world and do this thing. He could not bring himself to.

Ira Glass

A good guy, Ben said, would not make somebody else uncomfortable on purpose. And he was convinced that asking for a good guy discount, it puts the sales person on the spot.

Well, today on our radio program-- good guys. We have four stories, including I go with Ben as he tries to find out whether or not he has what it takes to get free stuff by claiming to be a good guy, even though he worries that doing that, trying the entire exercise, means that he is not a good guy at all.

Because, friends, it is a struggle sometimes to know what a good guy would and would not do. And in each of our stories today, we have guys trying to find that line, trying to stay on one side of the line, trying to stay good guys in a world where we all know that can be very, very difficult. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Takes One to Know One. So after 11 months of stalling, Ben finally headed out to get himself the good guy discount wearing a microphone hidden underneath his shirt. I went with him.

Ben Calhoun

First place we go, a baby store. It's a big national chain. I've bought stuff at this particular store before. And for a test, I chose one of these baby items that's mind-blowingly expensive, so much so that it's hard to imagine anyone actually buying it. It's a blanket for a stroller. It cost $190. My thought in doing this is that the markup is probably so insane that it'd make it easier to give a discount. Anyway, so I grab one, and I get in line.

The whole pitch still makes me queasy. But I'm committed to selling it as best I can. There's one cashier working.

It's hard to hear. But when I ask for the discount, she cracks a smile and kind of laughs and says, good guy discount? We don't do those.

I leave the thing on the counter. So first attempt-- we're 0 for 1. Ira felt like I should have tried harder, and for the next one, I should keep the thing going longer, lean harder on the shtick-- I'm a good guy, you're a good guy, what do you say? I am not so sure. So next stop.

This item-- winter boots. We go to a big, big sporting goods store, though not a chain just in case some strict corporate policy had been the problem at the baby store.

Ben Calhoun

At the registers, I get called up. There's a woman, maybe late 20s. She's got a lot of makeup. She looks fed up with something. My thought is, I'll smile a little more, be a little more friendly.

Ben Calhoun

0 for 2. She sends me on my way.

Ben Calhoun

Have a good one. It's like, have a nice day, with all the friendly burned off. So Ira and I head outside.

We go around and around. Until we remember, oh right, we can just find out. Ira goes back in.

Ben Calhoun

See? All of this brings us to attempt number three, record store. Yeah, they do still exist. I grab what should amount to $70 worth of records. I go to the counter. Behind it, there's a serious record store guy-- black hoodie, black wool hat, hair sticking out of the front.

Ben Calhoun

I mean, so many nos in such a tiny, tiny answer. I counted them-- five nos in 8.7 seconds. It's like a Russian nesting doll of no. And really, I would argue it's hard to say no that thoroughly unless you actually want to say no, unless you think you're being asked for something stupid by someone stupid.

This is what I believed would happen. And this one, it makes me 0 for 3. And I've got to say, it felt bad. And it raised the obvious question, what does Sonari have that I don't? As we headed back to the office, Ira said, maybe he's just more charming and better looking. So I called Sonari, and I asked him something that I probably should have asked him before, which is, exactly how often does this work for him?

Ben Calhoun

20%-- that's actually a lot of nos. He only gets one out of five. I tried three times. So I needed two more tries. Fine.

Ben Calhoun

So here we are, number four. The item is a clock. And here we go.

0 for 4. I head to a small cookware shop. And if Sonari's stats are one in five, this is the big game, do or die time. If the good guy discount is real for me, then this is it.

Ben Calhoun

Like the sword from the stone, my friend. Behold-- the good guy discount. Apparently, it can work for anybody. It'll work for you. But can we can just stop for a second? Just stop.

And I know that this is going to sound super earnest. And I'm real sorry about that. But I believe it, so I've got to say it. I don't think that you should try it. I'm not going to try it again. Sorry, Sonari.

I just don't think that we should go throwing around the term "good guy," like it's some kind of coupon. I think that "good guy" means something. Just the other day, I was with my son and my dad. And my kid is eating cake. He's two. He loves cake. And he's got one bite left. And I say, can I have a bite? And he looks up at me. And he holds out his hand, offers me his last bite.

And my dad says, what a good guy. When I was a kid, he used to say that to me too. I like the way the world looks during those moments. I think I'd rather have whatever that is than a discount.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our program.

Ira Glass

Act Two, The Heels on the Bus. So a test of whether or not you are a good guy, it can happen anywhere, as Mike Birbiglia well knows. He's a comedian and told this story onstage in New York.

Mike Birbiglia

Last week, I was meeting my wife in the city for dinner. And I went down to take the subway. And one of the unfortunate things about living in New York with the subway-- and you guys probably know this-- is sometimes on the weekends, the subway is just off.

And there'll just be a sign that's just like, there isn't the subway, you know? And it'll say, you could take the bus, you know? It's written in pencil. And there's an ellipses, you know?

So last weekend, that happened. And so I walked up to the bus. And I said to the bus driver, hey, the subway is off, but it said that I could take the bus to the subway. Do you know where I can get off? And the bus driver said to me, and I quote, he goes, "I don't know anything about the subway."

I was like, you don't know anything about the subway? You're wearing the same outfit as the man running the subway. If someone said to me, you see that guy walking down the street with the khaki shorts and the Kings of Leon T-shirt? You know anything about that guy? I'd be like, yeah, I'll tell you a few things about that guy. I know that he could use somebody.

There's only one other person on the bus. And it's this guy. And he looked up at me, and he goes, I'm taking the subway. You can follow me. So now I'm in an action film. I'm like, got it. I sit down, and I'm following this guy.

And then we go a few stops. And this lady walks onto the bus. And she was a pretty lady. And she wasn't just bus pretty. Like, she was pretty for the world.

And I did this thing that I sometimes do when I see a pretty lady, which is I looked at her long enough to realize that she was pretty. And then I looked at the floor. And then I never looked up again. That's my move.

And so I'm looking at the floor. And then I'm looking up at this guy I'm about to follow, because he's, like, my ride. But then he was staring at the lady. And I know we're all guilty of staring at some point or another. I think we've all done it.

But I think that there's an etiquette to staring. I think that you can use your peripheral vision if you want to look at somebody. You can stare at someone like you're inside of a spooky painting in Scooby-Doo where your face doesn't move, but then your eyes pan side to side, like you're living in the walls of a mansion.

But this guy was not doing the spooky painting. He was just full-on staring at this lady like a gargoyle. And I was so mad. I was just like, we all want to stare at the lady. But we don't. Because we are decent people. And we have decided as a group that we are not going to stare at the pretty lady.

But that's the difference between decent people and creepy people. Creepy people do the things that decent people want to do but have decided are probably not a great idea. Decent people are like, I would like to stare at that pretty lady, but it will make her feel uncomfortable. Creepy people are like, look, I'm going for it.

We go a few more stops, and the creepy guy stands up, looks at me, and says, let's go. I was like, oh great. Now she thinks I'm with you. This pretty lady and I have built up a rapport where we have an understanding that she is pretty and I am decent. And when I am in her presence, I stare at the floor. And now she thinks I am with you, a creepy man.

And so as I walk by this woman, I try to convey all of this with my eyes. Like, I am not with this guy. And that look takes so long to convey that the look itself becomes creepy. And I know it. And so I say, sorry, which were the first words uttered in a conversation we were not having.

As this woman understands her bus ride, she walked onto a bus, a creepy man stared at her for 10 minutes and then left the bus, and then another man, who she did not know was on the bus, approached her and apologized, which means what he did is worse.

And I'm so frustrated about the unfairness of the situation that when I get to the dinner with my wife, I'm explaining this whole thing in detail. And I'm like, it's not fair, because I am not creepy. I am decent. And my wife says, wait, is the moral of the story that you want credit for just not being creepy?

And I was like, exactly. Because I think that decent people are undervalued. And my wife says, but you do get credit. I married you. And I said, I want more than that.

Ira Glass

Mike Birbiglia. He's heading out next week on a 100-city tour from Milwaukee to Melbourne, or should I say "Melbin," called Thank God for Jokes. Details about when he is visiting your town at birbigs.com. Coming up, proving that you're a good guy to somebody who will never, ever know what you did. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program-- good guys, stories of people trying to be good guys and not always sure if they're succeeding.

Ira Glass

We have arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, No Man Left Behind. We now turn to a kind of classic story of a buddy who's trying to do a solid for another guy from Julia DeWitt.

Julia Dewitt

Out in the desert scrublands of northern South Africa in a place called The Karoo, there's nothing-- no trees, no water-- for as far as you can see.

Julia Dewitt

This is Don Shirley. Why he knows this place so well will become clear in a minute.

Julia Dewitt

Which means that this isn't just standing water. This water is filtering down to somewhere.

Julia Dewitt

Down below you is 900 feet of water. This is Bushman's Cave.

Julia Dewitt

The cave is almost 1,000 feet deep and 2 and 1/2 football fields wide. The main thing that lives in the pitch darkness is a species of strange little blind white cave shrimp. Otherwise, the cave is dark, deep, and dead. This cave is a dangerous place for humans. And it's basically totally inaccessible to almost all of us. But for deep water divers, this is heaven.

There are only a very few divers on the planet that have ever been anywhere near the bottom of this cave. And only about a dozen recreational divers ever dive to these kinds of depths, period. Don is one of these extreme divers. He met another of these deep water divers, a guy named Dave Shaw, back in 2002. They were immediately friends. And a couple of years later, Don took Dave to dive Bushman's.

On dive day, they got to the puddle, and Dave went in first. Dave swam down through the slot, and the cave opened up below him. While he was going down, he was doing something called laying a shot line. Basically, he was leaving a trail of rope in the total darkness. This is the only way he knew how to get out of the cave.

Julia Dewitt

This sounds unbelievable, but it's true. More people have been on the Moon than have been to the depths that these guys have. Now, Dave was exploring on the bare floor of the cavern. There's nothing to see but his light in the black and the white rope that he dragged with him. Then suddenly--

Julia Dewitt

No one knows exactly what happened to Deon Dreyer. But a decade earlier, Deon was diving with a team in Bushman's. When they stopped to take a headcount, Deon was gone. People had been looking for his body ever since.

Julia Dewitt

Deon was 20 when he was lost in Bushman's. Dave didn't take finding Deon lightly.

Julia Dewitt

So when Dave came up, he told Don he was going to come back and get Deon's body.

Julia Dewitt

The thing is that a dive like this is a major operation. It took them months to plan.

Julia Dewitt

Combining extreme depths with the hard work that Dave had to do to get Deon's body into a body bag came with a lot of risk. At depth, too much nitrogen is kind of like a narcotic. Basically, it feels suddenly like you drank five martinis in a row.

Too much helium can give you twitching fits. If you breathe too heavily, like Dave might have to while he's moving around Deon's body, you pass out. And then, of course, there's the bends.

Julia Dewitt

To prevent the bends, Dave would take several hours to come up to the surface. So they recruited a team of support divers that would go into the water intervals to check on Dave at various depths while he came up.

Julia Dewitt

Don would go the deepest.

Julia Dewitt

Don followed the shot line down through the slot and into the cave.

Julia Dewitt

But the light wasn't moving.

Julia Dewitt

Don dove past 800 feet, deeper than he had ever been before.

Julia Dewitt

He heard a sharp crack.

Julia Dewitt

This just means a piece of his breathing apparatus broke. Don trained constantly for moments like this. So he knew exactly what to do. He would just add oxygen to his gas mixture manually.

Julia Dewitt

Don knew then that this was it. It was the end of the line. He had to turn around and go back.

Julia Dewitt

Don knew that he now had over 10 hours in the water ahead of him. Don slowly ascended up to the roof of the cave. At this point, he started to pass out. And then, he got a helium bubble in his ear.

Julia Dewitt

Don lost grip on the shot line. And as he was passing out, reviving again, and passing out, he started swimming in these little circles, spinning around looking for the line. Remember, this line is the only way Don knows how to get out of the cave.

Julia Dewitt

Don eventually stabilized himself. And he started his ascent again towards the surface. He met a support diver. And using a waterproof pencil and one of these slates the divers use to communicate underwater, Don wrote him a message.

Julia Dewitt

For hours, the team up above waited to see if he would make it out alive. His only job was to breathe. Dave's light down below had disappeared.

Julia Dewitt

Don was put into a decompression chamber and then taken in the morning for more treatment at a hospital in Johannesburg. Dave did not come up that night. Dave was dead. And then, a week later, Don got some news.

Julia Dewitt

As the camera rolls, you see Dave trying to get Deon's body into a body bag.

Julia Dewitt

Then Dave also gets tangled. He pulls away. But now he's tied to Deon's body.

Julia Dewitt

Listening to the video, you can hear Dave's breathing start to get shallower and shallower as he starts working harder and harder.

Ira Glass

That story came from Julia DeWitt. That was first broadcast on the Public Radio show Snap Judgment, which has gotten so good. If you are not downloading their podcast every week already, it's at snapjudgment.org or the iTunes store. They're also heard on many Public Radio stations.

Ira Glass

Act Four, The Deepest, Darkest Open Secret. More than four years ago, back in 2009, a US soldier got in touch with our program. And he was attached to a special operations combat unit. He was getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan.

And he offered to do a story for us about what it's really like to serve. One of our program's producers, Sarah Koenig, started talking to him. His one condition is that we would not use his name. So for this story that you're about to hear, we're calling him Adam, which is a pseudonym that he chose.

And a disclaimer-- Adam says some disturbing things about himself, but also about his fellow soldiers. We want to be clear that this is just his own experience. This is his own thoughts. This is his own perspective, his own story. He does not speak for the military in general. He is speaking for himself.

We think also that this story about war probably is not something that children should be hearing. And a warning-- also we quote some people who use an offensive term at one point in the story. OK, here's Sarah.

Sarah Koenig

When he first got in touch with us, Adam said he wasn't like the other guys in the Army. For one thing, he was almost 30 when he joined, about a decade older than most people. And he'd had a good career in the tech world as an engineer. But he had been unhappy doing that. He wanted to try something difficult and frightening and unknown.

He decided he wanted to go to war, even though he thought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were bogus and even though the other guys in his unit considered him-- and this is their language-- a "liberal fagot." So yeah, he said he'd give us an outsider's perspective. And I said, sure, let's see what happens. So he started sending me recordings from Afghanistan like installments in a diary. And then, not too long after he deployed, Adam sent me a recording I found jarring.

Sarah Koenig

It seemed to Adam that the way they talked about it, a lot of macho bluster about wanting to kill the bad guys, was just a cover for a much more basic desire they had-- that deep down, these guys didn't want to just kill the enemy. They wanted the opportunity to kill another human being period.

Not everyone was like this, he said, but most of them. And at first, Adam said, this kind of disturbed him. But then, after a while, it didn't.

Sarah Koenig

Take a moment to compile all your stereotypes of a Public Radio producer. And now apply them to me. And you're right. I'm exactly who you think I am. I'm a peaceful sort. I don't come from a military family. I've not been in a lot of bar fights. I haven't lived in the South, playing violent video games.

That makes me very different from Adam, who did all those things. So I recognize I'm coming to this a little more wide-eyed than a lot of other people might. Still, I don't know what to make of Adam. I like him. I like talking to him. I think he's smart and weird and honest.

Here's a rational man saying he wants to kill someone just to see what that's like. What are we supposed to make of that? But this isn't a story where I'm going to get to the bottom of that question in the next 15 or 20 minutes. This is a story where I just ask that you hear him out.

Some things you should know before we start-- Adam ended up doing three different tours in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011. And he never did kill anyone. Being in war messed him up in certain ways. He's been seeing psychologists weekly for a couple of years. He's been diagnosed with severe PTSD. He has dramatic mood swings. And he barely sleeps, maybe three or four hours a night.

Adam's not on active duty anymore. He's back in the US working on a Ph.D. And so recently I played him back some of the recordings he'd sent me. I wanted to find out what he made of his 2009 self.

And he said, yeah, what I said back then about wanting to kill someone, that wasn't an exaggeration. And it had surprised him to realize it, he said, because he was in his late 20s when he joined. He thought he knew himself pretty well. But the army and the training, it changed him.

Sarah Koenig

I spoke to other men who trained with Adam and who also served in Afghanistan doing the same job as Adam's. And I asked them if it was real, this mindset of wanting to kill just to kill. And they all said, yeah. Maybe not to the extent Adam experienced it, but yeah. They said it was common.

They said things like, quote, "It's not pretty to talk about. And nobody wants to hear that back home. But that's part of it." Another guy said, "I didn't join to go out and kill people. But once you do the training, I don't know, it's almost like a job. And your job is to kill people. And you do want that experience."

I talked to a psychiatric expert on war trauma and PTSD. And he also agreed. "This is true," he said. "This is a part of war that people like to ignore, the pleasure of killing. Killing is our society's most basic prohibition. So that's what military training is for," he said, "to get people to the point where they can cross that line."

Of course, the US military doesn't want sociopaths or would-be murderers in its ranks. Doctor Michael Matthews, a psychology professor at West Point who studies how soldiers react in dangerous situations, said in his experience, soldiers who truly think that way, who really just want to kill for killing's sake, those people are uncommon. And if they do surface, he said, they should be screened and probably kicked out of the military, which Adam would agree with.

But what Adam is saying is that there's a subtler thing that happens. There's some other class of people who aren't sociopaths but who go through military training, and the desire to kill is suddenly there. It seems natural to him that this happens, normal. But just because bloodlust is normal, that doesn't mean Adam thinks it's OK. In fact, he thinks he shouldn't have been allowed to go to Afghanistan at all.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show.

[MUSIC - "GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS" BY CASPER VAN BEETHOVEN]

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Brian Reed with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Dana Chivvis and Allison Davis. Seth Lind is our operations director.

Emily Condon is our production manager. Elise Bergerson is our administrative assistant. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Research help from Michelle Harris. Music help from Damien Grey, from Rob Gettis.

Mike Birgilia was recorded at UCB East in Manhattan and Littlefield in Brooklyn.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

Thanks as always to our show's co-founder, Torey Malatia. You know, his new plastic surgery is-- I don't know. It's just at that awkward phase.

Mike Birbiglia

Where your face doesn't move, but then your eyes pan side to side.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass-- back next week with more stories of this American life.

Announcer

PRI-- Public Radio International.