Megan Leavey – the real-life Marine whose unbreakable bond with a bomb-sniffing German shepherd has been turned into a new movie starring Kate Mara – says her beloved Rex saved countless American lives in Iraq after being written off as a troubled dog.
"He was everybody's kind of secondary dog. His attitude didn't really mix well with a lot of people. So they didn't really bond with him like I did," Leavey told Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg on Friday.
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Leavey remains a bit stunned that her inspirational story, simply titled "Megan Leavey," is now in theaters across the country, with Mara in the title role, along with Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" movies and Bradford Whitford, the sinister dad in the 2017 horror flick "Get Out."
"I honestly don't even think that it clicked it was real until I saw a movie poster in my movie theater where I go in the mall. And I was like 'wow, I guess this is really happening!'" said Leavey, who lives in the leafy suburbs north of New York City.
Thinking back, Leavey, 33, said it's sometimes hard to believe how much has happened in her young life, which led to the military after the Sept. 11th 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
"I graduated high school in 2001. I feel like that had a really big impact on my life being a New Yorker. My father has worked in New York City in whole life. I grew up here," she said.
"I didn't really know what to do, like every probably 18-year-old can relate to. But after that happened it just felt like there was a bigger purpose in the world rather than just going to class. I kind of wanted to be a part of that."
She enlisted in the Marine Corps and trained at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California, as a military police officer, which is where she met Rex, a scrappy, somewhat standoffish K-9 patrol dog.
"I didn't even know about the K-9 program... I was like ‘I want to do that. I grew up with pets all my life. I had to work really hard to get chosen to go into that program," Leavey told Malzberg.
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