My Boo

I have a wonderful dog; she’s a German Shepherd, 107 pounds, beautiful as a woman, with almond-shaped, chocolate brown eyes and delicate legs like a deer's. I got her after I wrote a story about Leonardo DiCaprio, in 1998, and this guy started stalking me. He felt I had insulted Leo.

Really the story was just a kind of joke, a riff on the absurdity of celebrity; but this kooky fan took it seriously. “Come on,” I’d tell him in the middle of the night, when he’d call and ask me “if I was writing” (my number was listed then), “you don’t really think Leo gives a fuck what I write, do you?” When he started calling me from the phone booth near my building, I started to get a little worried.

I called the police, was directed to a detective who took the whole thing a lot more seriously than I had. Apparently, it’s not a good idea to talk to stalkers, especially not in the middle of the night. Seems attention is all they want, or need. “So what do I do?” I asked the detective. “Move. Change your number," he told me.

But I loved my apartment then. It was above Rolf’s German restaurant on Third Avenue (which later provided lots of meat bones for Boo) and had a 500-square foot terrace (the roof) where I used to have lots of parties, back in those seemingly simpler, Golightly days when Bill Clinton played the saxophone on Arsenio. “Get a dog,” the detective suggested then. “A big one.” Hence, Boo. My Boo. My dad bought her for me.

I don’t have to tell you how much I love her. You’ve heard it all before; people and their pets. You’ve felt it yourself, if you've ever lived with an animal. It’s a relationship as deep as with any person. Who can account for the mystery, the joy. And forgive me for bragging about my darling, but we must admit, the German Shepherd is renowned to be a special sort of dog. I think she is, anyway.

So, I go out this morning to walk her, around 7 a.m. and there on the corner is this middle-aged African-American man. He asks if he can pet her, I say sure, and he starts telling me, “I had one of these in Vietnam. He saved my life.”

He said that he was shot, lying bleeding to death, surrounded by enemy fire, and no one could get him but the dog. The dog pulled him back to his unit.

“After the war, they just left him there to die,” he said.

I went and got him a cup of coffee.

When I got home I did a search on Vietnam and German Shepherds. It seems that during Vietnam, Shepherds and other dogs saved as many as 10,000 soldiers.

After the war, “they were declared ‘surplus armaments’ and either euthanised or left to unknown fates.”

You can see a film about it at www.war-dogs.com and hear these testimonials: "We were attached to these dogs. These animals had feelings; they hurt; they cried; they got sad, they got happy; they saved a lot of boy's lives," says Spencer Dixon, a Vietnam dog handler.

"Without Toro, there's no way I'd have made it back to the United States. I wouldn't have made it probably three months without Toro." says Carl Dobbins, another Vietnam dog handler.