A Biography Tells the Truth About the Boy Who Fooled the Navy

‘Calvin Graham: Combat Veteran at Age Twelve’By Diane DiekmanAltruria Publishing Company, 88 pagesThousands of underage American men have enlisted in the armed services, like my father who ran away from home at 15 to sign up for the navy. They were given honorable discharges, including Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, a 16-year-old high school dropout in 1956, who became Chief of Naval Operations on April 24, 1994. Calvin Graham, however, holding the record as the youngest enlistee during World War II, did not fare so well, as Diane Diekman recounts in her inspiring and dispiriting biography. A seasoned biographer as well as a retired naval officer, Ms. Diekman originally became interested in Graham’s picaresque story by watching a 1988 TV movie, “Too Young the Hero,” about him, which she found moving and distressing. She corresponded with Graham during the last years of his life, and this biography is the result of many years of pondering and tracking the vicissitudes and triumphs of her subject.Graham, dressed up in his older brother’s clothes, and claiming to be of age in a false document signed by his mother, was assigned to the USS South Dakota in 1942, seeing action in two battles in the South Pacific. Although he performed well under fire even while sustaining injuries, he inadvertently ended his service by blurting out his true age to an officer.Not only was Graham’s enlistment invalidated, which meant he lost any claim to medical benefits and honors, he was put into the naval brig in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he suffered sexual abuse and accusations that he had tried to avoid further service by saying he was underage.Like many young men who enlisted, Graham came from a broken home that included an alcoholic mother and few resources to sustain him after he was released from the brig. Without even a high school education, he had trouble supporting himself and found it difficult to maintain a family life much better than the one he had left to join the navy.Until his later years, Graham — who died in 1992 at the age of 62 — had no powerful supporters to plead his case, to restore his awards and his medical benefits. How he had been injured in the war became a story that kept changing, inviting suspicion that resulted in the denial of his appeals. Ms. Diekman patiently establishes the actual details of Graham’s life, verifying many of the essential facts, and explaining the desperate circumstances of a veteran who doggedly pursued what was owed to him.During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Graham’s case came to the attention of both senators from Texas, Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Jim Wright, and Senator Joe Biden — all of whom realized an injustice had been done to a brave young man who deserved to be honored, not punished. With the combined efforts of these powerful politicians, some of Graham benefits were restored, relieving him of the heavy medical expenses he had incurred.Graham’s story, Ms. Diekman shows, is representative of other serviceman who feared their underage enlistments would be discovered, which would have meant dealing with a bureaucracy that did not have the capacity to recognize Graham’s plight.It is worth quoting Ms. Diekman’s conclusion, which succinctly demonstrates why Graham’s story troubled her:“The Bureau of Naval Personnel (BUPERS), later renamed Naval Military Personnel Command (NMPC), followed rules and procedures throughout the years, denying requests even in spite of Congressional pressure. If only someone on that staff had recognized the case of a twelve-year-old combat veteran who’d served his country well, there might have been a judgment call to give him what he was asking for. “The lack of recognition of the extraordinary service of a child soldier made his post-war struggle to secure recognition and honor almost as daunting as active combat.”The resilient Graham never gave up on himself and the country he served. His story transcends the suffering from the wounds of war and of modern administrative rule-bound procedures. This is also a story about a biographer’s quest to establish a reliable record, which she does by pointing out the inaccuracies of press reports and of “Too Young the Hero,” although the movie brought home to the biographer the urgent necessity of getting Calvin Graham’s story right.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

A Biography Tells the Truth About the Boy Who Fooled the Navy

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