For The Love Of Fred

A dog, a Marine and a question: Who rescued whom?

- Craig Grossi, Washington, D.c.

"WHAT KIND OF DOG IS that?” the woman asked me. There was a slight accent to her voice that made me pause for a moment.

People were always surprised when Fred ran out from the back room to greet them at the men’s clothing store where I worked, a job to pay the bills while I finished my degree at Georgetown University.

The woman’s daughter bent down and scratched Fred behind his ears. “He’s from Afghanistan,” I said. “I served there when I was in the Marines.”

There was a flicker of interest in her dark eyes, so I kept talking.

Inside our Marine compound, we’d been under near constant attack. My nerves were shot. In the afternoons, the temperature would reach 115 and the Registan Desert, Sangin District, Helmand Province, fell quiet. There was a stark beauty to the desert you never get used to. I was staring into the heat when I saw him, short legs, floppy ears, trotting across the compound to a shady spot. He wasn’t like the other dogs I’d seen in Afghanistan. Those dogs ran in packs. This guy was fending for himself in the middle of a war zone.

I grabbed a piece of beef jerky and walked over to him. He sat but watched my every step. I paused. “How’s it going?” I said. His eyes were so expressive, almost human. I heard a noise…thwap, thwap, thwap. A cloud of dust kicked up behind him. He was wagging his tail.

He was maybe eight months old. His fur—mostly white, with large spots of light orange-brown—was covered with black bugs the size of dimes. I offered the jerky and he took it. I dug my fingers into his fur, coarse and matted in dust. He leaned into me, and I wondered if he’d ever been petted. I’d always wanted a dog as a kid, but my family was into cats.