The Poultry Leadership Podcast
"Welcome to 'The Poultry Leadership Podcast,' where we dive deep into the world of poultry leadership to help you soar to new heights in your career. Join us as we sit down with some of the industry's most accomplished leaders, farm owners, and allied professionals. Gain valuable insights, strategies, and personal stories that reveal the secrets behind their success. Discover what makes these poultry visionaries the outstanding leaders they are. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, our show is your go-to resource for unlocking your full leadership potential. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey to becoming the poultry leader you aspire to be."
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The Poultry Leadership Podcast
From Death-Defying Risks to Honoring Heroes — The Remarkable Journey of John Graham
John Graham's life reads like an adventure novel, but with a profound transformation at its core. At just 17, he left behind his sheltered existence in Tacoma, Washington, for a summer job on a freighter bound for the Far East. That voyage would set him on a path of increasingly dangerous adventures spanning decades and continents.
Graham recounts harrowing experiences with remarkable candor – mountain climbing expeditions where avalanches narrowly missed him, hitchhiking through war zones, and navigating political revolutions. His seemingly insatiable hunger for adrenaline led him to the U.S. Foreign Service, where he strategically positioned himself in the divisions handling wars and revolutions, primarily in Africa and Asia.
The turning point came during the Vietnam War. As Graham orchestrated desperate measures during a battle for the city of Hue, he experienced a profound moral awakening: "I didn't give a damn about this war... The only thing that mattered to me was fulfilling my own needs for taking risks." This realization began a transformation that would redirect his considerable skills and courage toward humanitarian work.
His most dramatic moment of reckoning occurred years later during the sinking of the cruise ship Prinsendam in the Gulf of Alaska. Trapped in a lifeboat during a typhoon with rescue chances dwindling, Graham had what he describes as a spiritual confrontation that cemented his commitment to meaningful service. Following his miraculous rescue, he joined forces with his wife Ann Medlock at the Giraffe Heroes Project, where they've spent over 40 years telling stories of people who "stick their necks out" for the common good.
Now in his 80s, Graham offers wisdom that transcends political divisions: "There's no more important quest for anybody than our personal lives being meaningful." His journey from self-serving adventurer to humanitarian reminds us that finding purpose through service creates bridges across even the deepest divides. What will you do to make your life meaningful?
Links - Giraffe Heroes Project
John Graham - https://www.johngraham.org/
Hosted by Brandon Mulnix - Director of Commercial Accounts - Prism Controls
The Poultry Leadership Podcast is only possible because of its sponsor, Prism Controls
Find out more about them at www.prismcontrols.com
Welcome to the Poultry Leadership podcast. I'm your host Brandon Mulnix, I want to welcome you to today's episode and I think you're going to find this one quite interesting. It's not every day that you get to talk to an 82 year old grandfather who's got stories of an amazing adventure. Most people that have the stories that he has aren't alive anymore because they probably died during one of those stories, and this guy his name's John Graham has lived an amazing life. I mean, you can look him up on Wikipedia and you can find all kinds of adventures that this guy's done, and so I want to invite John on the show because John speaks from the heart. John speaks to us with wisdom, age old wisdom, stuff that needs to be passed from generation to generation. And guess what? He doesn't know a darn thing about chickens. So stay tuned, guys. John, welcome to the show.
John Graham:Thank you, you took my opening line, man. I was going to say I don't know a damn thing about chickens.
Brandon Mulnix:It's okay, you said it anyways. Hey, John, tell us a little bit about yourself.
John Graham:Well, I'm lucky to be alive, which you kind of got to, I mean the time I was 40, I'd almost I counted I guess I'd almost died a violent death. I mean almost, I mean really close to a violent death, a dozen times the time I was 40. And, like I say, I'm lucky to be alive. Washington, living in a totally white bread community. There was no adventures anywhere. My parents were, you know, a good, stable Republican family and nothing exciting ever happened and I was expected to go to high school and then the University of Washington and then, I don't know, start work in Tacoma or Seattle someplace, and that's what everybody did, my sister did that.
John Graham:But then a weird thing happened that utterly changed my life and I won't give you all the details, that'd take too long, but through some weird circumstances I found myself getting a job on a freighter going to the Far East and back when I was barely 17 years old. Now, in those days a freighter wasn't a container ship, this was in 1959. So a freighter was a big boat with Terry and the Pirates, look to it. It was run by 50 or 60 really tough guys tattoos, muscles, all the rest of it and I got a job on a freighter and I set sail from San Francisco to spend the summer in the far East. Now these 50 or 60 tough guys took one look at me, this nerdy little kid from Tacoma, washington, who was undoubtedly heading for college and all that nicey nicey stuff and they were determined to teach me life lessons. They knew I would never get in a classroom and they did, they did.
John Graham:You can imagine what those lessons were going across the Pacific. I mean six guns and rock and roll. I mean it was like amazing to a 17-year-old. I remember the first port of call was in a place called Iloilo, as I remember, it was a tiny port in the middle of a jungle in the Philippines and the ship had stopped there to pick up coconuts. Port in the middle of a jungle in the Philippines and the ship had stopped there to pick up coconuts. We stopped there and the first night there the seaman took me down to the bars in town, which were like fast roof bars and there was liquor and prostitutes, a whole bit. I mean it was like a big fight broke out. I lost track of what was going on because I was so drunk broke out. I lost track of what was going on because I was so drunk. They got me drunk the first time in my life that they hauled me back to the ship and saved my life and I had a hangover that lasted for three days. I suddenly began to realize that there was a bigger, wider world than Tacoma Washington. I mean wow. And that whole trip was so colorful, it was so violent in a way, um, in a way that that it was completely new to me.
John Graham:I mean, young men, we always look for role models, especially when you're 16, 17, right, you're looking for role models. I love my dad, but he was about the gentlest person you'd ever hope to see. He never got promotions because more aggressive males were always batting him down and he wasn't the role model I looked at because I was getting bullied by kids at school, for example. So I was looking for something more than a really quiet intellectual, and my dad wasn't that.
John Graham:But on this ship man, I mean, my protector on the ship was a guy named Roy. It was a 250 pound black guy who was determined to protect me and keep me from getting killed in barroom brawls or whatever, and roy was a great example. I mean, I remember just second or third day out or up on deck and, uh, one of the other seamen starts making, uh, you know, sexual advances to me and roy grabs that guy around the, around the neck with his shirt, uh, and slams him up against the bulkhead and in there proceeded was a string of magnificent cussing. Oh, I never heard cussing like that. And Roy told that guy that if he ever put his such and such hands on me, he was going to take this guy's such and such body part and shove it down his throat. I just sat there.
Brandon Mulnix:Oh, wow.
John Graham:And then he shoves the guy down, kicks him a couple times and the guy slinks off. I remember that night going down to the cabin where I bunked, practicing to be like Roy, slamming an imaginary guy up against the mirror and trying to growl like Roy I'm going to. Roy was my hero and from that moment on, the heroes I look for in my life are all people capable of physical violence. But that was the first of it, and I was nowhere near able to do that because, like I say, I was, like you know, a nerdy, 98 pound, weakling, whatever. I always got beat up and I was never good enough to be an athlete in high school. So, you know, I had to really struggle. But I soon began to learn and very soon after that I get to write a risky after.
John Graham:Yeah, after my freshman year in college, I scraped up enough money to hitchhike in europe. Uh, and I did that. I hitchhiked in europe and I was looking for all kinds of adventures, because after roaring on the and ship which was called the Golden Bear, after rowing on the Golden Bear, I wanted nothing but adventure. I hitchhiked in Europe. I felt I could do that. Oh, by the way, also when I got to university I rode crew. It took a lot, but I put on 20, 30 pounds of muscle in a year. So I was no longer a 98-pound weakling and I began to get tougher and tougher. And my mind was getting tougher and tougher. So I could hitchhike around Europe.
John Graham:And I remember I was at a youth hostel in Switzerland. I went there to climb the Matterhorn, that spiky mountain in Switzerland, which was great fun. And then I saw in the newspaper that there was a war still going on in Algeria, the colonial war. The rebels were fighting the French army and the still going on in Algeria, the colonial war. The rebels were fighting the French army and the French foreign agent in Algeria. And I said, oh, wow, that's cool. And I got to get in the middle of that war because that's a hell of an adventure for me. So I hitchhiked down through Morocco and hitchhiked across the border into Algeria. Only there wasn't a border because there was a war going on. And I was smart enough to put an American flag over my chest so that I wouldn't be taken for offense or else I would have been shot. And the rebels were great they would stop cars going in my direction at gunpoint and demand that the driver take me where I wanted to go. I just thought that was terrific.
John Graham:And here I was, hitchhiking through over the middle of a shooting war, and I was was so naive that I either didn't care about the dangers or didn't realize it, or whatever. But things got more and more adventuresome. The very next summer, for example, I was with a group of climbers from the University Mountaineering Club and we went up to Alaska to tackle the north face of then Mount McKinley, now Denali. Yeah, I still call it Denali, I don't care what Mr Trump says Dammit, it's Denali. But anyway, we went after the climb Mount McKinley, on a climb that nobody climbed before because it was so frigging dangerous and I mean dangerous. Avalanches were coming down that wall, and it was the biggest mountain wall in the world, bigger than any of the mountain walls of Mount Everest, and no one had ever climbed it. So we were going to climb it.
John Graham:And we did, and it was one hairy-ass adventure after the other. I mean, avalanches would sweep down and they would miss us and rocks would fall and they would miss us and we'd take terrific falls and the rope would catch us. I almost drowned in the McKinley River, for example, but we got to the top and that climb, if you look it up, is now one of the most iconic mountain climbs, first ascents in North American mountaineering, called the Wickersham Wall, north Wall of Mount McKinley. So after that I was really determined, obviously, that I was never going to get killed by my adventures. So with that in mind that I was indestructible, my adventures got more and more extreme. After college I hitchhiked around the world and I could prattle for the rest of our session with the adventures you can imagine hitchhiking around the world, and I'm talking about hitchhiking through a desert of death in Afghanistan, hitchhiking through all places that became the headquarters with the Taliban, and there I was and I just walked through it all without a scratch.
Brandon Mulnix:It's funny you say hitchhiking, John, because in today's generation people think they're going to get killed if they hitchhike, let alone or killed by a hitchhiker, let alone hitchhiking around the world.
John Graham:I know it kind of saddens me, brandon, because you know, there I was, the world was my oyster, so many adventures out there and there weren't that many of us, but you saw quite a few hitchhikers around. And don't forget also that this was the mid-60s and so the world wasn't as dangerous then in many ways as it is now. It wasn't a wash in drugs, for example. So yeah, a little bit of hashish in a hitchhiker's pack, but not the stuff that goes on now. And police forces and army forces looked on hitchhikers as kind of like irrelevant, crazy Westerners and didn't really bother us, and so it was a lot less dangerous. I don't know if you could do what I did then, but I literally except for the oceans, I literally hitchhiked around the world sleeping in haystacks and living on three, four dollars a day.
John Graham:Also at that time I mangled the stringer contact from the Boston Globe to write stories for the Boston Globe as a correspondent on every war I came across. So I got into the war in Cyprus. That was cool because the rest of the professional journalists in the evening would all hunker down in their hotels and I wouldn't. I'd put on a piece of light clothing so I could be seen at night and I'd go walking on the ceasefire line, just walking down there with guns pointed at me from both sides. In Cyprus the war then was between Greeks and Turks, so there would be Turkish guns on one side and guns on the other and I would walk down the middle of that talking to people if I could. And I think nothing of it. The other correspondents, the real professionals who were getting drunk in the hotel bars, thought I was crazy, but it was great fun. Then I went to cover the war in layos, in the Plain of Jars, and then the beginnings of the war in Vietnam, where I went out with the South Vietnamese Army patrols.
John Graham:I ended up in Australia for a while because I had by then a degree in geology. So I worked for a short time as a geologist in Australia. Then I came to the conclusion that I wasn't a rich person. Nothing was more important than my life of adventure and I had to do something to keep that going. How could I do that? Well, I thought foreign service. That's cool. I'll join the foreign service.
John Graham:And I did. I passed the exams for the US foreign service and then I got the State Department. I conned the State Department into not sending me to fancy embassies in Europe where I'd have to wear a coat and tie, but they put me into this part of the Foreign Service that works with wars and revolutions, mostly in Africa and Asia. That was terrific. My second post, for example, was the first revolution in Libya, and it was exactly what I was looking for in the foreign service. I mean, here I was in in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi who was my age, by the way had just taken control of the country and the country was a mess and everybody else in the embassy was freaking out, because you know there was a revolution.
John Graham:I loved it. I mean, the first time I saw a car burning in the streets or a mob of protesters shaking their fists, I was in my element. I just loved it. I just loved it and I knew, like I said, I would never be hurt. I had that weird conviction. So, after surviving the revolution in Libya, I demanded to be sent to Vietnam, where there was, of course, a shooting war. Then I told the State Department to send me to the most dangerous approach they had. They did. I was the advisor to the city of huawei, which was a small city just 50 miles south of what was then the dmz, dividing the north from the south in vietnam. And um, it was uh, it was a shooting war. I was in that part of the foreign Service that sure didn't wear coats and ties and I was armed and I dealt with a lot of intelligence issues and did a lot of fairly nasty stuff. That was also part of the war effort. But I never wore a uniform. I was over there as a civilian.
Brandon Mulnix:John, I want to talk about something that I learned about you when we were talking to set up this podcast. Wasn't Vietnam? That was the moment where things started to change for you.
John Graham:Yes, so amazing. It took me that long because by now I was in my late 20s, but it did happen. As you say, it did happen in a battle in Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had almost surrounded Hue. Their tanks and guns were only five or six miles from the city. By that point the American forces had been withdrawn from Vietnam, the military forces, so I and just three other civilians were in Hue and there were tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops bearing down on us. I knew that a rescue helicopter couldn't get me out, because if one arrived in Hue, my South Vietnamese counterparts would be clamoring to get onto the helicopter and I'd have to shoot my counterparts, literally shoot them off the skids. So that wasn't going to happen. So my life really depended upon the battle for Hue.
John Graham:It so happened that at the height of the battle, my job then was to create a stable base area, which was really difficult because the South Vietnamese Army had basically broken and only remnants of it remained to fight. The North Vietnamese and most of the city leaders had fled because there was still a path out of the city. It wasn't quite surrounded. They fled to Da Nang. So basically, I and the other three American civilians ended up running the city trying to create martial law, which was necessary because all the arms and ammunition for whatever that was left of the South Vietnamese Army had to go through the city. And yet the streets were jammed by deserters. Deserters from the South Vietnamese Army divisions were blocking everything. Not only that, but they were drunk and they were raping and pillaging and creating a real mess, and people were panicked. And so, all of a sudden, I had like a couple hundred thousand panicked people on my hands, an enemy army five miles away, and it's like oh, this is a tough situation. So I said to the deputy mayor, who was at least brave enough not to have fled we got to stop the deserters, because they're the problem. If we can stop the deserters, get the arms, ammunition to the troops fighting on the north, we have a chance. He says how are you going to do that? I don't know. Let's set up a firing squad. And so we did. We set up a firing squad. The thing was was that the deserters, however, were all farm boys who had been dragooned off their paddies maybe a week or a month before, and they were scared out of their wits and drunk and whatever. Yeah, they were doing bad things and they're burning and raping and looting, but nonetheless they were kids, right. And so I set up this firing squad to start shooting these kids. And in the middle of this, imagine the night constant series of booms and bangs, artillery incoming, outgoing artillery, panic refugees streaming by, people yelling and screaming. It was like an incredible scene, but more violent than any movie I ever saw. And yet the next morning the skies finally cleared and American fighter bombers from carriers off the coast were finally able to fly and they blasted the hell out of the oncoming North Vietnamese forces and and my, the city was saved and my life was saved.
John Graham:But at the middle of that, before I knew that would happen, and when I realized that I had set up this firing squad, I came to grips with the fact that I didn't give a about this war. Not only that, I knew it was a lost cause, because I could see for myself there wasn't anywhere near enough glue to keep a south vietnam together. The south vietnamese government was completely corrupt and inefficient. America's war effort was a classic mistake, a huge mistake. I was only there because of the adventure. I was there because of the adrenaline and I was fine. Adrenaline rushes were fine when I was 22.
John Graham:But now I had the power of life and death over a whole lot of people and I was still operating the same way. It suddenly became clear how shallow my life had become, which is the answer to the point you just made. I finally realized that, christ, the war is a losing effort. I don't believe in this war. I think the war is evil. In fact, my home is 8,000 miles away and I'm here only because the only thing I care about is my own adrenaline rush. I didn't give a damn about anybody else. I didn't give a damn about the situation. The only thing that mattered to me was fulfilling my own needs for taking risks, and that was fine when I was 21.
John Graham:But when I was 29 and people were dying because of my decisions, well, that was another thing, and I remember putting my head down and just weeping, realizing that at 28, 29 years old, my life had become that shallow. So I got rescued because of the fighter bombers and I come back, go to something called encounter groups in California, which which was basically people getting together to talk about what was going on in their lives. And I was trying to get through this because I had a healthy case of Pete, what we now call PTSD, and then I had all of this misgivings. I had to reshape my life and it was difficult. The encounter groups helped some, but I began to crawl out of that hole, man. I began to crawl out of the hole and try to see what I could do to reverse my life.
John Graham:Instead of causing wars and revolutions, how about ending them? How about working for peace and justice issues in the world equity? Because in my life, in my foreign service life, I'd seen a whole amount of violence and poverty and disease. I knew how bad things were out there. And now I had a chance to do something about it because I was bright and tough and I was now in the mid-level, low senior ranks on the Foreign Service.
John Graham:So I had some swat and I ended up at the United Nations, which was like perfect for me, because I was put in charge of American policies toward Africa at a time when the African nations were being decolonized, the European colonizers were going home, the new nations were struggling to make things work and there was a huge amounts of poverty and injustice, and the European nations and the United States really didn't give much of a damn about it either.
John Graham:We had no friends over there, nobody trusted the United States. And here I was thrust into this and all I could see for the first time in my life was how can I make the world a better place? A question I'd never asked 10 years before. But how can I make the world a better place, all this inequity, all this injustice, all this violence and disease? What can I do about it? And I found at the United Nations there was a lot of things I could do about it. So I mean, just hesitate there, because I'll tell you some of those stories. But I can see from the way you're holding your chin you've got something to say.
Brandon Mulnix:John, I'm just amazed. I mean, there's so many people I know that in their 20s and their teens they just gravitated towards adrenaline, life, finding identity, finding purpose, and you literally survived wars. You were making decisions that ultimately didn't have a vested interest in, and again it took a moment in Vietnam to change everything. For you, it's empowering to know that people grow up, people interact with these young adrenaline junkies every day and there's hope for them. There's hope, there's guidance, and sometimes it takes hitting rock bottom or making a decision to finally kind of turn things around and then to dedicate the rest of your life to making a world a better place. It just is inspiring to me, John. I mean I knew a little bit of your story going into this, but I'm just sitting here inspired because this is early in your journey. I mean this is in the first third of your life that you've had this adventure and yet you've spent the rest of your life making the world a better place.
John Graham:That's true, but in a curious sort of way the first part had to happen, I had to hit bottom. And it's like I think, brandon, that first of all, every young person not just men, every young person, I think has this sense of adventure and stuff At least I hope they do and thinks they're indestructible, all that kind of stuff. But for me it was just an extreme case, and when I kept surviving all these things it became a really extreme case and where it begins to wear off in other people. For me it only got bigger and better.
John Graham:And Vietnam didn't end it by no means. The rest of my life has been very adventurous, so much just that I managed to transform, transmute whatever the right word is my adventuring and my skills and my resources into doing something that was worthwhile and that really began at the United Nations, in my work fighting for peace and justice issues there. And also the other thing I want to say is I don't think I was ever a quote bad guy. I think that as a child I was a very compassionate little boy.
John Graham:I had a doll, for example, and I kept that doll years longer than most male children in a Croatian family my mother's Croatian are allowed to keep dolls and I love that little doll. And my mother keeps saying what a kind little boy I was and I think I've always had a compassionate heart. But when the bullying started, and especially after I'd met Roy and the seaman on that freighter, I hammered a heavy piece of plywood over my heart and pretended I didn't have a heart, because I was so ashamed of my father for constantly getting bested and beat up, and so ashamed that I was my father's son that I would grow up to be a wimp, just like he was. Again, I love the man, but he was a wimp and I was so afraid I'd grow up that way that I just put this heart and I figured, if I put this piece of plywood over my heart and took my cues from Roy and the Golden Bear or the French Foreign Legionnaires in Algeria or watching movies with John Wayne or whatever, that, that's who I would be. And so by the time I get to Vietnam I had this enormous barrier over my heart so I could go through all this. Then all of a sudden, bam, that barrier just got ripped away and I was left weeping and completely screwed up.
John Graham:Thank God for a year off in California, where I was able to start regaining my footing and not go crazy and then crawl my way back. So it's a complicated thing. I do, as I think I said in an earlier conversation with you. I spent a lot of time counseling and mentoring young men, and you're right, I mean they all feel bumptious and whatever, and I think that's great, but they're all looking for something. They're all looking for a meeting in their lives. And I didn't begin to find that meeting until after that session in Vietnam. But it's possible. Young men, young people, can find that meeting earlier than I did. I was a test case for being awfully slow at it.
Brandon Mulnix:So, John, did you have this point? As you're starting to repurpose your life, you're starting to give back, you're a delegate. There's all these things that you've done. What got you to that point where you found your purpose in that? When did you feel most alive in doing that?
John Graham:First of all, it was the small stuff. Coming out of California, I really was a changed person, at least in a personal sense. I began to spend a lot more time with my kids, for example. I began to form genuine friendships instead of domineering transactional relationships. I began to develop a fuller personality, and that was at a very small personal level and that was important. That was the first step. The first step was just without that piece of plywood nailing over my heart.
John Graham:I realized that I could be a guy people actually liked and I did form some friendships and my relationship with my kids improved and this feels pretty good. Then, at the United Nations, I realized that I could use this transform, this change, john Graham, to do some good in the world, because I didn't lose the fact that I was strong and tough I mean, you didn't want to mess with me and I knew a lot so I was a real. I could become a real engine for doing some good in the world, and I became that. One of the first things that happened that just totally convinced me that I wanted to devote my life to this stuff was something that happened in 1979. I was at the United Nations, right, and that was a time when we had really bad relationships with the Cubans. I guess it really hasn't improved much.
John Graham:They were so bad that I wasn't even supposed to talk to the Cubans because they were commies from Cuba. And after all, this is after the Bay of Pigs and all that kind of stuff, cuban Missile Crisis. And on the other hand, I formed a lot of friendships with the Cubans because they were fun and smart and, as far as I could tell, honest, most of the other people of the UN were stiff and unbending and boring. And so I talked a lot with the Cubans. I couldn't do it openly, but we would talk in parks and restaurants in the UN area and mostly it wasn't about politics at all, but we were all baseball nuts so we talked baseball. We would spend a lunch talking about the collapse of Red Sox, pitching that year or something you know. That developed some real friendships with the Cubans. Okay, that developed some real friendships with the Cubans. Okay, that's part one.
John Graham:At the same time, the big crisis in America was that 53 people in our embassy in Tehran in Iran had just been taken hostage by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and poor Jimmy Carter, the president, couldn't get them out and it was a real thorn in his side and in the nation's side and it was a real big diplomatic issue right. So back to story one. The non-aligned nations, the third world nations, the nations of Africa and Asia, all met. Their leaders met once a year in one of their capitals. And in 1979, they were no early 1980, maybe January 1980, they all met in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, then Yugoslavia. So I went there too. As the senior American responsible for our politics with this class of the world, I knew more of these people than anybody else. I was America's main point man toward the entire third world. I was in Belgrade at the same time. I couldn't go to the meetings, of course, but I knew everybody, so I call her them in bars and stuff after the meetings and they would tell me what they wanted me to know or talk to me about what was going on in the conference, and I would cable that back to people who were interested back in washington, and some often I was used to convey messages. For example, a foreign minister might approach me and say I really want you to get this private message to your secretary of state about the peace plan in I don't know what Lebanon or whatever. It was Okay. So it was a relationship that really worked for both sides, a win-win relationship.
John Graham:So I'm over there in Belgrade, the Cubans are all over there too. I have friends in the Cuban delegation and they say after the first or second night of the conference hey, john, take you out to dinner, come on, have dinner with us. So I say sure, and uh, the I go with the cubans. And hey, we had to go in a big black limousine. And they hated that because these were real communists, you know, and the idea of driving in a black limousine was incredibly embarrassing to a real communist. But they had to do it because it would be a great loss of faith to the Yugoslav government if the Cubans didn't take a deal. But at least they insisted on not having dinner in the fancy part of Belgrade. They insisted on finding where the other side of the tracks was and going to the poor section of town and finding a workers' restaurant. We parked the limousine three, four blocks away so that they wouldn't be seen in a black limo. We walked the rest of the way and found a dirty workers restaurant and whereupon they ordered, uh, rice and beans and pork and, uh, huge amounts of red wine, and we had having a great time.
John Graham:Somewhere around midnight we start talking politics and the big issue was the Iranian hostage crisis and these 53 Americans being held hostage in Iran. So one of my Cuban buddies, raul, says hey, what about that, john? I said, yeah, it's a real problem for us. It's a real problem. We can't get these people out. And he thinks about it. He says you know we might be able to help. I say, well, really, these people out. And he thinks about it. He says you know we might be able to help. I see, well, really, he says yeah, because I don't know how he says, but our guy, our president, fidel castro, happens to have really good relationships with the ayatollah khomeini, the head of iran. It's kind of like a father something or something. But the two men get along really well and maybe castro can be an intermediary and help present a peace plan that gets your guys out. And I said, well, you're going to want something in return, right? He said, sure, we would ask that you lift all or part of the economic embargo which is now strangling our island. So that would be the deal You'd lift all or part of the economic embargo. Castro gets your people out, or at least makes economic embargo. Cash will get your people out, or at least makes a good faith effort to get your people out. So we think that's a good idea. We're all at that point pretty drunk. We'll end up.
John Graham:A few weeks later. We're back in New York and Raoul approaches me, the other back end of a pillar where people can't see us, and he whispers hey, john. He said hey. The old man says well, do it. I said what are you talking about? He looks really annoyed with me. He says Castro says he would be willing to intercede with the Ayatollah Khomeini to get your people out in return for the deal we talked about in the restaurant.
John Graham:So my eyes widened. I said really, you mean that Really? Oh man. So I go running across the street. Now I'm in a real pickle because I'm not even supposed to be talking to the Cubans, right? But now I have to spill all the beans. I have to say exactly what happened, what happened in Belgrade, why it happened. And my masters in Washington and New York are pretty shocked to know that one of their diplomats has been sneaking around the back end there for months doing all this stuff and doing all this private diplomacy. But on the other hand, I keep saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, all right, do whatever you have to do to me, but this is an offer. Well, it took them about two hours to decide that they were going to reject Castro's offer, because that way we'd have to give credit to Castro if he got our people out, and there's no way we're going to give this commie bastard credit for anything. So, no, we're not going to take it. And, by the way, you're lucky you didn't get fired. We're not firing you because you broke every rule in the book in doing this.
John Graham:I walked away from that and I just felt really good. I mean, I was lucky I didn't get fired, but I knew I had done the right thing. And had there not been such assholes on my own government, small-minded people I could have got those hostages out a year before they were finally sprung. And I came damn close to doing that and I did it on my own and I did it by establishing trust with people who were supposed to be my enemies and I felt really good about that. And I kept doing stuff like that. I mean, the next year I'm not going to tell the whole story I did stuff that helped end apartheid in South Africa, fighting racism in South Africa. So you know, I was in the middle of all these things.
John Graham:It got to the point where I realized that I could no longer work for the State Department because our State Department, or any State Department, was led by small-minded people and peppered with some total assholes and they would never give me the freedom to do what I needed to do. And now I was getting to be a senior officer I was, I think, the youngest equivalent of a full colonel at that point, headed for a life of ambassadorships and stuff, and I had to give all that away, which was another point of pride, in a way, that I gave it all away and quit. I quit because I realized I could never again work for anybody, because my ideals were then so powerful. It was things that shifted so dramatically from that battlefield in Vietnam that I could no longer take orders from anyone, because nobody else would be idealistic enough or have enough guts or perseverance to do what I wanted to do. I was going to change the whole frigging world, brandon. I was going to change the whole frigging world.
Brandon Mulnix:John, I believe that, I totally believe that, and I'm still amazed, because how old were you when you left the US government? 38. 38 years old. Do you know how many people, by the time they're 38, have traveled the world, have done one, one hundredth of what you did? Very few to have lived to that. And yet you know. Here you are. You're 38 years old, you've got your kids, your family, you're married, through all this marriage breaking up at that point because I had changed completely and the strings were just too much, and that was the end of it.
Brandon Mulnix:So life's still happening, the same thing as your focus on work and everything going on. All that stress affected your marriage and you're going into this next chapter of your life. What got you into the next chapter? What got you through it?
John Graham:Oh, man, are you asking all the right questions? I'll tell you what got me in. It was almost drowning, almost drowning, yeah. Yeah, I left the Foreign Service right with a head full of ideals and I thought I was so naive. I always have a good gift to gab right. So I thought if I just started giving speeches and writing books and articles, that I would instantly become famous and I would charge change in the world. People would be flocking to hear my lectures and stuff Didn't happen.
John Graham:Man Didn't happen. People don't respond by being preached at, and I was going nowhere and going broke fast and so I'm cutting like desperate and a friend comes up to me and he says look, I think you're running out of money, right, and no one's coming to your lectures. Well, look, you can make out a lot of money lecturing on cruise ships. You're a really good speaker, you have a tremendous amount of stories. You go on a cruise ship, you give a couple lectures, they pay you an absurd amount of money and it's a really sweet life. I said, okay, I'll try it, and my first effort was successful. I got a job as the guest lecturer on a cruise ship called the Princeton Dam and it was heading from Vancouver to the Far East. I got to take my daughter, mallory, with me, who was then 13, and we fly out to Vancouver and board the ship. It looks like it's going to be just a wonderful time and we go up to Alaska and look at the fjords and stuff and then we head out to sea and I learned that I give one of my lectures. No, I don't, I don't give one of my lectures. The next day I'm supposed to give that lecture, but that night, this particular night, third night out, there's a captain's ball and I realized that I'm hired not just to give lectures, I'm hired to put on a tuxedo and look handsome and waltz blue haired widows around the dance floor. This is a cruise ship, right? So there's a lot of blue-haired widows and my job is to waltz them around the dance floor. So I'm thinking, not without a lot of irony, that okay, all right, yes, yes, yes.
John Graham:Just a year or so ago I was doing this Cuba thing. I was helping end apartheid. My life is devoted to our peace and justice issues. I was helping end apartheid. My life is devoted to our peace and justice issues. I'm going to change the world. Oh yeah, I'm waltzing blue-haired widows around the dance floor.
John Graham:I didn't seem very consistent. Oh well, I got to do this. I got to earn some money. And I'll tell you what I'll do. I said I promised myself I'll spend six months a year lecturing on cruise ships, making some money, and then the other six months I'll save the world. How's that? We're like kidding myself.
John Graham:Anyway, the third night out after this ball, the intercom awakes Mallory and me about two in the morning and I just come in from the ball, I put the taxi or down on a chair and the loudspeaker says sorry to wake you up, but there's been a small fire in the engine room and no problem, we're putting it out. But you really should probably get up and think about coming up to the ship's lounge where we'll provide free drinks and we'll use ship's blowers to get the smoke out of the ship, so then you can go back to sleep. Mallory and I ignore this. About 10 minutes later the same voice comes on, this time sounding pretty urgent. It says we really insist that you go up to the ship's lounge. It doesn't say put on warm clothes. It doesn't say take your life vest, nothing like that. And Mallory and I get outside the door and we head toward the stairwell we had been using, but it's blocked by a fire door which is slammed shut automatically. So Mallory finds another door and the other way and we clamber up to the promenade deck where the ship's lounge is, and you go in the ship's lounge but it's full of smoke so you couldn't stay in there and everyone else.
John Graham:There's 550 people on the ship, so it's. But today's standard is really small and about 250 crew and 250 passengers and the passengers are all out on deck and, because we haven't been warned, some people are there in their nightclothes and stuff, you know, and it's cold. This is October in the Gulf of Alaska, so it's cold. People are ripping down curtains from the windows or tablecloths or whatever and and trying to stay warm and getting a little worried because any fool could see, looking back, that the smoke coming at the stairwells where we just come was blacker and thicker than ever. So they lied to us. Whatever was burning down there was burning more. The smoke fire couldn't have been out. So people are getting a little worried.
John Graham:It's two o'clock now, three o'clock in the morning. Captain comes out on the deck and says okay, I'm sorry to say we have to ask you all to move to the fantail, the rear of the ship, and we'll provide more booze. We're working on getting this fire out, so we all collect back there. Funny part of it the ship's orchestra is out there as well, out on the fantail. It isn't playing near my God, this isn't quite the Titanic, but it's playing show tunes from Oklahoma.
John Graham:Decades later, mallory and I go watch the movie Titanic and we're just holding each other's hands because there were some parallels that were really exact. Anyway, about four in the morning or so, the smoke is now not coming up, not just the stairwells, but coming up from the sides of the ship and the captain says I'm afraid we've lost the battle with the flames and I'm going to ask you all to go to your lifeboat stations. Mallory and I go up the lifeboat too. On the side of the lifeboat it says it's made for 45 people. I asked Mallory to count how many people are there and it's like 60 or 70.
John Graham:But that's okay because we all crowd into that lifeboat and by some miracle, none of the lifeboats capsized, even though this was a brand new ship and nobody had really prepared for it and the crew was not poorly trained. Nonetheless, six or seven lifeboats all drop into the ocean without any of them swamping. I'm on the side of the lifeboat closest to the ship, and so I have to use my hands and shoulders to keep pushing away from the ship so that banging back and forth doesn't crack the boards on the lifeboat. And the ship's hull is hot. I mean the iron is hot. I mean there's a hell of a blaze going on down there. We drift away from the burning ship and wait for morning.
John Graham:At dawn now we're 140 miles off the coast. So this is like, seriously, in the middle of the North Pacific A big oil tanker has answered the SOS and at dawn this big oil tanker hoves into view but it's so big it can't maneuver. It can't maneuver to the lifeboats and it's so big that you can't get anyone off the lifeboats because these are all old people and clamoring 50 feet up a swinging rope ladders just isn't going to cut it with people who are in their 80s, so they have to wait for helicopters. By now an SOS has run all over the Pacific. I mean it's from.
John Graham:San Francisco to Alaska. And so helicopters are arriving from shore bases. They hover over a lifeboatboat and they lower a chair at the end of a chain, put one person in it. The chair gets hoisted into the helicopter. They do that seven or eight more times and then take a load off to the deck of this oil tanker and drop them, come back for more. So the helicopters move as they can, and they have to move fast because Typhoon Vernon is heading out.
John Graham:We knew this because they distributed Dramamine the night before and the typhoon is coming on and the sea, which was calm when we entered into the lifeboats, was now not calm. At a certain point the helicopters can't fly anymore. At that point Mallory has been rescued. I see her safely off in the helicopter and in lifeboat number two there's just eight of us left and the helicopter pilot signals previous time that he can't come back. It's just too dangerous for a helicopter to fly in the middle of a typhoon and we're now looking at a typhoon. We're looking at 30-foot seas. That means it's like being in a up and down a six-story building, in waves and winds that are gusting to 60 knots. The eight of us are hanging under that lifeboat, foundering. We're getting swamped, we have to bail, but it's hard to bail, because then you have to take a hand off the lifeboat and you can easily get thrown out, but we're doing the best we can.
John Graham:The key thing is light. It's now about four or five in the afternoon, but it's getting dark because this is the last go right, and it's getting on winter. I know from mountain climbing that we're all suffering from hypothermia. Nobody has warm clothes, and I know what hypothermia looks like. You get really cold, but then you get warm again, and then you go to sleep and you don't wake up, and that's how hypothermia kills you. So I realized we're in that first stage of hypothermia. I figure we all have six, seven hours to live, and the thing is, though, that it's still a bit of light.
John Graham:The only path to safety left out there are Coast Guard cutters, these small ships that have also steamed out from Sitka and come full bore out to the 140 miles out, and they're frantically looking for us, and the visibility is now down to 100 meters or so. The visibility is really poor, but still there's a chance. It isn't dark yet, and so Coast Guard guys are really professional, so they have this search pattern and they're looking for us and they can't find us. But if it gets dark, then we're dead because we have no lights, no flares, no radio, nothing, no reflector mirrors. So once it's dark, the chances of being seen by a coast guard cutter are zero. Before dark maybe they're 10, but they're not nothing. Gonna be dark in half an hour. So I'm saying, okay, we got a little bit of a chance, but once it's dark we're dead. Now we got thrown out of the boat or they'll find our corpses in the lifeboat in the dawn or whatever. But half an hour is the key, not five or six hours before hypothermia kills us, but half an hour, because that's how much light we got left.
John Graham:So I'm thinking, hmm, I've been through all these crazy ass adventures and I walked away from every one of them. I've always thought that I was indestructible. And this time, I don't know, it looks like the odds are like one in a million. This may be when I really buy it. This may be when my luck really fails, that I die. This could be it. Then I get to thinking, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That would have been fine when I was doing all the wrong things in Vietnam or whatever, but I'm doing all the right things now. I mean, I helped end apartheid, I damn near got the hostages out of Tehran, peace and justice issues, all that stuff. I'm doing all that stuff and I've devoted my life to making the world a better place.
John Graham:And now, god I wasn't religious, by the way, no, no, no. But I didn't know what else to do. What else do you do but pray when you're in a situation like that, whether you're religious or not? So I look up and I say, all right, god, I don't get it. I don't get it. Here I am, I'm on the upside of my life. I'm doing what I thought you, god, wanted me to do, in other words, helping the.
John Graham:That makes no sense at all, I thought. I thought I mean I went to a Jesuit high school. I believe in order in the universe. You know snowflakes, the structures of crystals, stuff like that. I believe in order in the universe. Well, there's no order in this. Just as I get my life together and I got another 50 years to do your work, making the world a better place, you're killing me. That makes no sense at all.
John Graham:My prayer turns into this angry, bleak, and I was screaming at God what the hell are you doing? And this message comes back. The other seven guys, of course, don't hear a thing. And to this day, maybe it was the wind, maybe it was, but I got this message loud and clear and God says or the message says, or the wind says whatever it was, stop kidding yourself. Stop kidding yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, stuff you do at the UN, great, okay.
John Graham:But now you're lecturing on a cruise ship and it's a lot of fun and it's paying you absurd amounts of money. So you got off this cruise ship. You're going to lecture on another cruise ship. It's a soft life, man, and you got to get serious.
John Graham:Either you are what you said you were when you left the United Nations an engine for good, and you're devoting your life to that end but you might as well die out here, because the rest of your life won't be living. You'll be a total hypocrite for 50 years. You got a choice to make basically shut up god didn't use these words but or get off the pot. So I hook up and I'm totally beaten. I know I'm dying and I, I just said, okay, I give up. Yes, and in that instance, and I I I'm sure every one of your listeners is saying, oh, come on, but I swear this is the truth In that instant the Coast Guard cutter Butwell comes crashing through this wild storm it was so bang on, it would have cut the lifeboat in two, had to look out not seeing us and I got rescued and I went back to New Yorkork and I never looked back and I kept that promise. And that's my long answer to your question john, my listeners, they understand, I understand.
Brandon Mulnix:I wasn't out in the middle of the ocean. I was a member of the US Coast Guard. Oh, and it's amazing how stories collide, how, at one point, raised my hand and said I'm willing to die for our country. I joined the Coast Guard and served in the great state of Michigan, where I'm from. But what amazes me is you said it you faced so many things when you were living for you, then you were living for others, but it all didn't matter until that night in the boat when it all came crashing down. And then you really changed your life because you, you started an organization. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about giraffeorg, yeah, because I think that's where you continue to serve today, and so continue on, john yeah well, the first thing I want to say was I did not start the giraffe heroes project.
John Graham:My wife Ann Medlock, started it. She was a writer and editor in New York City, fed up with all the bad news and conventional media, and she knew there were heroes out there and that they were shaping society. But no one ever told their story not the New York Times, not nothing. So she decides to start her own broadcast network from a small apartment in Central Park West. She would find heroes, people who were sticking their necks out West. He would find heroes, people who were sticking their necks out men, women, even kids and get their stories told. And this was not 1982 beginning. So the story of her vehicle was at first vinyl records, remember those? They went round and round the turntable. She would record their stories with a handheld microphone and then she would get a star of stage and screen, and there are plenty of those in New York to do the voiceovers and create three four-minute little snippets that she'd send off to radio stations to play, all telling the story of the giraffe hero and then offering some comment about heroism.
John Graham:And it was great. I thought it was lightweight because I thought, as I said, I was a great speaker, so I thought my lectures were going to be far more powerful. I was so wrong. Anne's Giraffe Heroes Project began to gain adherence. There was a big article in the New York Times in a couple of years, whereas my lectures were floundering, and about that early time I met her. I fell instantly in love with her, you can imagine, and so I joined the Giraffe Project a year or two after she'd started it, and we've been working together on it now for like 42, 43 years doing the same thing.
John Graham:We're still doing the same thing. We find heroes all over the planet and tell their stories Now not on violent records, of course, or with faxed press releases, but we do it on social media websites and the like. And we've created a whole program for kids, the Giraffe Heroes program helping kids build lives, courage, compassion. I run Giraffe Heroes International, which has now got seven eight overseas branches, mostly in Africa and Asia, helping people start their own giraffe projects and do their own honoring of their own heroes. I'm on, you know I still love to talk, so I do a lot of blogs and podcasts and Twitter feeds and whatever, all on the same themes of courage, courage and service, and we've been doing that now for 43 years. It's been remarkably successful. Our strategy and strategy was the oldest one in the book. I mean I got since neanderthals, I guess, tens of thousands of years.
John Graham:Any society that wanted to get more of its people to be heroic told stories of heroes. That's how they did it. That has never stopped. The troubadours in the Middle Ages were doing the same thing and Anne Medlock, founder of the Giraffe Heroes Project, is doing it for our age. And that's what the Giraffe Heroes Project does. We're storytellers and we inspire other people to stick their necks out by telling the stories of heroes. It's been remarkably successful. That's our base. And then we've now together written I don't know five, six books.
John Graham:And she's older than I am, she's 91 and I'm 82. And we're not going to stop. Why would we stop? Until they pull me out of here in a pine box? I'm not going to. Well, no, that's not true. I tell my grandkids look, don't put me in a pine box. If I get a terminal diagnosis, I'm going to put on a light jacket and start walking towards the summit of Mount Rainier, which is not far away. And uh, when I get near the top, I'm going to just accidentally fall on a crevasse and that'll be the end of me. That's the way I want to go.
Brandon Mulnix:That's neither here nor there, but I just thought I'd tell you that.
John Graham:Anyway. So the Giraffe Heroes Project has been the template and the master plan for everything that we do, whether it's telling the stories, blogging, podcasting, writing books, whatever and Ann and I have been totally aligned on that for a long time.
Brandon Mulnix:John, you've given a lot of time and I'm sure our listeners are going to reach out. Check out the giraffe project at giraffeorg. It's a very, very simple website create domain, create everything. I have to share something because John and I don't agree on a lot of things. We do on story, we do on a lot of things, but when we first started talking, we could tell very quickly that we're not coming from the same areas. We do on a lot of things, but when we first started talking, we could tell very quickly that we're not coming from the same areas. We're not coming from the same things, and so what I want to encourage you by this is sometimes you have to have conversations with people that you don't necessarily agree on everything with to get the real story. And that's where I really appreciated John.
Brandon Mulnix:As we got to know each other, we continued to dive deeper and deeper to find the connections that helped connect us, where I could be confident in sharing John's story with you. Because if we just see everybody at a surface level with what's going on in the world, there's so many of these stories, there's so many people that have hero stories, there's so many people, but we get so transfixed by the surface levels. So I wanted to share that listeners, because I know just how powerful relationships are, stories are. It's our responsibilities as leaders to get to know the people that we work with, the people that we talk with, the people that we interact with. So, john, is there any final message that you have for the Poultry Leadership Podcast listeners?
John Graham:Well, I want to endorse what you just said, because I feel exactly the same way. Nothing that I've said, I think, so far has a Republican or a Democrat into it. I mean, this is just life. My bumper sticker, if you will, for life is that there's no more important quest for anybody Republican, democrat, whatever no more important quest than our personal lives being meaningful. That's it. I don't care if you're strung far right or strung far left. It's true. It's true.
John Graham:You look for things that make your life meaningful. In my view, my experience has been a really good, stable source of that kind of meaning and some kind of service. And I'm not talking about sackcloth and ashes. I'm not talking about becoming Mother Teresa. I'm not talking about being someone running around in how shall I say this? You know, liberal circles with all their do-gooders in intense.
John Graham:I'm talking about being of service in any way you can. In the business world, for example, you can be of service by making a great product, selling it for a fair price, with decent environmental relationships and relationships with your employees. Or you can be of service in the professions. You can be of service, certainly. You can be a service raising chickens, for no question about it, providing a real service and a real source of sustenance and pleasure for millions of people. So you look to what can provide service and then you tie it to what's meaningful in your life. Your grandkids are meaningful, for example. Your kids are meaningful.
John Graham:You look for that, that, and it does not have a red or a blue to it, and I think that's what Brendan and I I don't think either of us discovered it. We're not naive. We both knew that it existed out there, but the fact that we've spent now hours together enjoying each other's company is just a reaffirmation that there are certain things in life that just make life better. And and finding meaning in that life is important. And it also allows you, once you begin, to realize that so many things that bring meaning are the same things that bring meaning to someone who doesn't agree with you politically. It allows you to talk, it allows you to establish a little trust in a society that, as we all know, has become really badly polarized there. All right, I'm going to stop, because I know has become really badly polarized there.
Brandon Mulnix:All right, I'm going to stop because I know you've got to end this. Well, poultry listeners, I absolutely appreciate your time. I appreciate John's time. You can find more information about what John Graham and his amazing wife are doing for the world still changing the world. As long as there's breath in his lungs, he's going to be serving people and we get to experience that from afar. So, poultry listeners, poultry podcast listeners, please share this episode. It's a great, great message that means so much to others, not just in the industry. So share this with others. Help others become better leaders. And again, thank you, Prism Controls, for allowing me the time to sit with John and share his story with future leaders in the industry. So thank you.
