In August 1967, Lefler and
Graham signed up for three years under the buddy plan, which promised that friends
who joined together would serve together. Almost immediately after arriving in Vietnam, they were separated.
If Lefler feels double-crossed, he won't say so.
"I can't knock the Marines, because I'm a former Marine, no matter how bad it was," Lefler says.
Graham can't speak for himself. He died last Thursday at 61 and was buried yesterday with a 21-gun salute from a Marine honor guard.
Lefler was shipped north to Hue. Graham was sent farther north to Quang Tri province in Vietnam's narrow neck, close enough to the border to be easily infiltrated by battle-hardened North Vietnam Army troops.
"They'd send Marines out, 100 Marines against 4,000 NVA soldiers," Lefler says. Graham was told to "walk point because he was new."
A rifleman with the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, Graham was in-country three weeks when he was caught in a murderous rice-paddy ambush. A deadly crossfire tore the sky apart as the Marines took heavy casualties.
Graham's back, arms and legs were sliced by shrapnel, his head broken by a bullet that tore into his brain. He was expected to die before he could be medivacked out, Lefler says. "He fooled them all. He lived a long time."
How he lived is the major part of the story.
His younger brother Dan, 57, a driver for Conicelli Toyota, of Conshohocken, remembers that when he was a kid newspaper carrier, big brother Mike "would get up an hour before time to fold my papers, or if I was sick, deliver them for me."
When he returned home from Vietnam with a 100 percent disability "he was kind of a completely different person," Dan says. "He probably lost, I would say, maybe 60 percent of his mentality."
