Part One
What does it take to turn a life of risk into a life of service?
In a recent episode of Leadership Story Talks, hosts Jerome Deroy and Julienne Ryan spoke with John Graham, director of Giraffe Heroes International, whose life has included the kinds of adventures that sound almost impossible to summarize. He shipped out on a freighter as a teenager, climbed the North Wall of Mount McKinley, hitchhiked through war zones, served as a Foreign Service officer, worked in the middle of the war in Vietnam, and later became a peacemaker and advocate for civic courage.
But the real story was not only about adventure. It was about what adventure was hiding, and what John eventually discovered underneath it: a call to service.
Julienne described John’s book Quest: Risk, Adventure, and Searching for the Meaning of Life as impossible to summarize because each chapter contains its own astonishing turn. The word that came to her as she read was “prism,” because John’s story carries many truths at once. There is risk and recklessness, courage and avoidance, danger and longing, violence and tenderness, loss and purpose. Light moves through the story from different angles, revealing a life that had to be lived, questioned, broken open, and redirected.
Searching for Manhood
When Jerome asked John the question at the heart of every Leadership Story Talks episode — what experience shaped who you are today? — John began in Tacoma, Washington, where he grew up badly bullied and hungry for models of manhood.
That search led him, at seventeen, to a job as a crewman on a cargo ship traveling from San Francisco to the Far East and back. The ship was crewed by tough men with muscles, tattoos, and a rough education to offer a young man from a safe environment who knew very little about the wider world. John quickly absorbed the lesson he thought he was being taught: real men were tough, violent, fearless, and physically dominant.
One moment in particular stayed with him. On his first night aboard, a crewman made an advance toward him, and another crewman, a huge engine-room worker named Roy, violently intervened. To young John, that became the image of manhood. He went back to his cabin and practiced in the mirror, trying to imitate the toughness, the language, and the posture he had just witnessed.
That summer became a portal into a new identity. When he returned home, he told his parents he did not want to finish high school. He wanted to be a seaman because, to him, that was what real men did. His parents refused, but the imprint remained. From that point forward, risk and adventure became central to his understanding of himself.
The Adrenaline Years
The pattern continued. A few years later, John hitchhiked through the Algerian revolution because, as he put it, he had never been in a war before. He spent time with French Foreign Legionnaires and encountered another version of toughness that reinforced the model he had already begun to build.
Then came mountaineering. John joined a team that made the first direct ascent of the North Wall of Mount McKinley, a climb so dangerous and difficult that it became legendary in North American mountaineering. After surviving that experience and many close calls, he began to believe his life was charmed. He was hooked on risk, convinced he would not be killed, and increasingly identified with the idea that masculinity meant danger, strength, and invulnerability.
Eventually, he asked the State Department to send him to the most dangerous place they had: Vietnam. He became an advisor to the city of Hue in the northern part of South Vietnam during the war.
By then, John had entered a different kind of danger. This was no longer adventure from a distance. People were living and dying around him, and his decisions carried real consequences.
The Song That Broke Through
In Vietnam, John found himself in Hue during the 1972 Easter Offensive. The city was surrounded, American troops had been withdrawn from the region, and only a handful of American civilians remained. Refugees streamed into the city. Officials fled. The government collapsed. Smoke, fire, panic, and violence filled the streets.
In the middle of that chaos, John had a tape recorder and a single tape from the PX: Gordon Lightfoot’s Sit Down Young Stranger. The song spoke to him because it was about a young man trying to find himself, feeling pain, loneliness, and loss. Listening to it, John broke down.
He realized he did not believe in the war. He had not gone to Vietnam out of patriotism or conviction. He had gone because being in a shooting war was the last adventure he had not yet experienced. He wanted the ultimate adrenaline rush of kill or be killed, and in that realization, the shallowness of his life came crashing into view.
He was no longer a teenager imitating toughness in a mirror. He was twenty-eight years old, surrounded by people whose lives were at stake, and he was forced to face the truth that he was there for the wrong reason.
That moment did not instantly transform him. Real change rarely works that way. But it cracked something open.
Finding the Heart Beneath the Armor
After Vietnam, John was sent to California, where he began the difficult process of putting his life back together. He described it as “three steps up, two steps back,” because the identity he had built around toughness did not dissolve easily.
In an encounter group with other men, John was confronted with a truth he did not want to hear. They told him that, yes, he was big and tough, but he also had a heart. At first, he rejected this fiercely because it threatened the core identity he had built for himself. But later, running down paths outside the retreat house, he realized they were right.
He had nailed a sheet of heavy plywood over his heart.
That image is powerful because it shows how protection can become imprisonment. What began as a way to survive bullying and fear had become a way of shutting down feeling, empathy, and connection. For years, John had moved through poverty, disease, violence, and human suffering without allowing himself to care deeply. He had cared about risk, adrenaline, and himself.
The work now was to feel again.
Using Toughness for Good
The State Department later sent John to the United Nations, where he was put in charge of America’s policies toward what was then often called the Third World. The United States was primarily focused on the Cold War, but John found himself confronted with problems of poverty, racism, violence, and injustice. This time, instead of closing his heart, he decided to use his skills differently.
He was tough. He was smart. He knew how to negotiate. He understood power. And he began applying those abilities to peace and justice issues.
One of the efforts he is most proud of involved helping set the stage for the end of apartheid in South Africa. At the time, the U.S. government wanted to move slowly because of business and political interests. John quietly worked around that resistance, sharing information with counterparts from Africa and Asia so they could put pressure on the United States. Eventually, that pressure helped lead to a strict arms embargo against South Africa’s military and police.
For John, this became another turning point. He discovered that the very qualities he had once associated with danger and self-centered adventure could be used in service of something better. His toughness did not have to disappear. It had to be redirected.
He could work for peace instead of war. He could use risk in the service of justice. He could make a positive difference.
Diplomacy on a Napkin
One of the most remarkable stories John shared involved the Cuban delegation at the United Nations. At the time, American diplomats were not supposed to speak with the Cubans, but John discovered that members of the Cuban delegation loved baseball as much as he did. Because they could not be seen talking together, they met quietly in restaurants near the UN and developed real friendships.
Later, at a conference in Belgrade, John and some Cuban counterparts went to a workers’ restaurant after parking their official limousine blocks away so no one would see it. Over rice, beans, too much wine, and political conversation, they began discussing the American hostages being held in Iran. The Cubans believed Fidel Castro might be able to influence the Ayatollah to release them. In return, they wanted the United States to lift all or part of its economic embargo on Cuba.
They sketched out the idea on a napkin.
Weeks later, one of John’s Cuban friends pulled him aside at the UN and told him Castro would do it. John then had to admit to his own government what he had been doing. The response was swift: no. The United States would not allow Castro to receive credit for freeing the hostages.
The deal died, but the lesson did not. John had come close to a significant act of peacemaking through relationships he was never supposed to have built. It reinforced something Julienne observed during the conversation: some of John’s greatest work happened through listening, showing up, getting perspective, and building networks in unexpected places.
Sometimes the person we are told not to talk to is exactly the person who can help change what is possible.
In Part Two, we continue with the moment that forced John to make a promise about the rest of his life — and the work that promise led him to build.
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