This week a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran named Wesley Autrey saved a man who had fallen onto the New York subway tracks by leaping onto the tracks himself and pressing the fallen stranger down into the one foot high space left beneath the oncoming subway car (which did indeed speed over them). Everyone survived.

You have to believe you can physically manage that before trying it, right? Or not? And it’s interesting Autrey had Navy training. But how far would you go to save a perfect stranger? What would you risk? Autry leapt, leaving his two daughters on the subway platform, and he yelled up–when the train was stopped but still on top of him–to ask someone to tell his girls he was all right.