BATH

I t’s not really clear who saved who: Craig Grossi or his dog, Fred.

In his new book, “Craig & Fred: A Marine, A Stray Dog, and How They Rescued Each Other,” Grossi tells the story of how he met Fred and how their friendship blossomed over the years. Grossi shared part of the story Tuesday evening at the Patten Free Library in Bath.

Though he grew up in a cat family, Grossi always wanted a dog. He even bought a leash and went around the neighborhood, walking stranger’s dogs for free. But despite his love for canines, he never had one growing up.

Grossi graduated from high school in 2001, just months before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Among other things, that incident drove him to join the Marines, and he headed to boot camp in 2003. He was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but desperate to serve in a combat zone he left the service, rejoining later in a human intelligence position.

“After years, I had found my place in the Marines,” he recalled.

Grossi was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, where he proved himself early and was permanently assigned to a recon team.

In October of that year, Grossi’s team were sent to the city of Sangin during an ongoing campaign that would be deemed the bloodiest battleground of the war. The team was flown in via helicopter in the dead of night, where they worked until morning fortifying a compound as a base. For the next seven days, said Grossi, his team was under a near constant barrage of mortars, bullets and rocket-propelled grenades by the Taliban.

“It is just a testament to those recon Marines,” said Grossi, “and how brave and tough and smart they were (that we survived).

“In the middle of all of this, I spotted this little dusty, goofy dog,” he added. “And he was so different.”

Most of the dogs in Afghanistan, said Grossi, were not friendly. They’re valued for things like dogfighting or protection, he added, meaning that a little dog like this were of no real use. Due to the aggressive nature of the animals there, the Marines had a rule that they were not supposed to approach stray animals.

“It was in between mortar attacks one day,” said Grossi. “I just watched him trotting around this little base that we had made, and I couldn’t help but see that there was this little light about him.”

Drawn to the dog, Grossi broke his training and approached the dog with a piece of beef jerky.

“I got a couple more steps, and he started to do something that to this day has had an impact on my life – it’s a huge part of our story. He started to wag his tail,” he said, choking up. “This guy had nothing to wag his tail at.”

It was that “stubborn positivity,” as Grossi called it, that won him over. Knowing that he broke the rules, Grossi turned and returned to his things, and to his surprise the dog followed. A fellow Marine commented that it “looks like you made a friend,” but Grossi says he heard, “Looks like a Fred.”

It felt right.

Despite regulations, Fred became a permanent fixture at the team’s base over the following weeks. He went out on missions with the team and kept them company between attacks. As the days wore on, Fred and Grossi developed an intimate friendship. Grossi knew he couldn’t leave him on the streets.

But there was a problem. In about a month’s time, the team would return to Camp Leatherneck, where regulations were a good deal stricter and keeping a dog could result in a pretty harsh punishment. Torn, Grossi said he left the decision up to Fred whether to come back to camp and face punishment or to stay in Sangin.

As Grossi read the passage about getting on the helicopter leaving Sangin from the book, he teared up. Fred had followed him into the dust cloud churned up by the helicopters blades.

Fred came back with him to Camp Leatherneck, but the full story of how he was able to smuggle the dog into camp and get him back to America is in Grossi’s book.

“Spoiler alert: He gets home,” laughed Grossi.

Grossi had rescued Fred from a terrible situation on the streets in Afghanistan, but it was once he got home that Fred was able to return the favor. Dealing with what his experienced overseas, Grossi said he found sharing Fred’s story therapeutic.

“It showed me how awesome our story is and how much I love to tell it,” he said. “The more I told it, the more I wrote it, the more it felt like this is big. This is bigger than me and Fred.”

As Grossi started taking the steps of writing his book, he realized that Fred was helping him cope with post traumatic stress disorder.

“We would both jump at the same noises and we would both kind of identify with some of the same triggers,” said Grossi. “It was something that we worked through together.”

nstrout@timesrecord.com