Given all the dangers a motor transport operator in the Corps faces, this wasn’t supposed to be the ride that changed Lance Cpl. John Graziano’s life. Not when he returned from Iraq unscathed, after driving 7-ton trucks for 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, as the unit sustained heavy casualties during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi.

Not when he had just watched his sister get married, made a down payment on an engagement ring, and weighed plans to start a new life in Nashville.

But nearly a year after sustaining life-altering injuries in an Aug. 26 crash, while riding in a car with the son of celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan, Graziano, 23, remains unconscious and near comatose in a Florida hospital. A piece of his skull was removed long ago, to give his swollen brain the room it needed, and he is expected to need full-time medical care for the rest of his life.

Amid all this, 17-year-old Nick Hogan — real name, Nicholas A. Bollea — sits in jail for his role as driver in the accident. A cavalcade of lawsuits has been filed, and the Hulkster himself appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” to apologize for statements he made during a recorded jailhouse telephone conversation with Nick, which were later released to the media.

Still, the questions hang in the air like an AH-1W Cobra hovering in the desert: Who is Lance Cpl. John Graziano? Was he caught between two worlds, rubbing elbows with TV stars and battle-hardened grunts alike? And why was he hanging out with the teenage celebrity in the first place?

He wanted to make something of himself. It’s a reason many people use when describing someone who joined the Corps, and family and friends say it applies to Graziano, too.

The middle of three siblings, Graziano was born on Staten Island, N.Y., but spent most of his childhood living in Dunedin, Fla. A town of about 35,000 on Florida’s western coast, Dunedin is known for its beaches, its peacefulness and its baseball stadium, which serves as the spring training home for the Toronto Blue Jays.

It’s also where friends say Graziano developed into the athletic, kind-hearted, sarcastic Everyman they miss. Involved in everything from surfing to ice hockey, Graziano was constantly on the move, friends said.

But he still found time to attend weekly sessions with a Christian youth group and was respected for his calm demeanor and dry wit, said Stephen Barker Lyles, 24, a close friend from high school. “He didn’t say much, but when he did, man, everybody listened,” Barker Lyles said.

Graziano’s family moved away from Florida for about two years, but when they returned, the young man settled in with old friends and attended Dunedin High School. At 17, he met Ashley Berry at a youth basketball game, and the couple quickly began dating, she said.

Berry said Graziano was easy to fall for, and consistently put other people first. “I was with him for seven years, and I don’t think he ever yelled at me, even in an argument,” she said.

After graduating high school in 2003, Graziano wasn’t satisfied with the “menial” jobs he was working, said his father, Edward Graziano. He enlisted in the Corps in May 2005 and headed to boot camp a month later.

“I wasn’t pushing him toward the Marines, but he made the decision that, ‘If I’m going into the service, I’m going into the Marines. I’m going into the best,’ ” his father said.

Caught in a struggle

Graziano didn’t have an answer for what came next when he returned to Florida — and Berry said it led him to someone he first met in high school at a Tampa car show: Nick Hogan.

Already a reality TV star when Graziano returned from the war, the teenage Hogan asked Graziano to join the crew of his precision driving team. It benefited them both, friends said: Graziano needed cash badly, and Hogan was looking for people he could trust.

It’s here that the stories diverge. The Hogan family and some friends say Graziano loved spending time with his celebrity pals, and spent several days each week living there.

Others say that Graziano was merely working for the Hogans because he needed a job, pointing to his decision to re-enlist in May 2007 as a drilling reservist as evidence of his unhappiness.

Van Nostrand said the arrogance Nick Hogan and his friends displayed struck him immediately when he visited Graziano in Florida. “We walked away from Nick and all his buddies one night while he was fixing a car. I remember asking him, ‘So is this what you do all the time?’ ” Van Nostrand said. “He said that those guys weren’t true friends like the people he met in the Marine Corps, and that they were fake. He was thinking at times about just going back into the Marine Corps.” But that wasn’t all he was considering, Berry said. A dedicated artist, Graziano was debating a move with Berry to Nashville, where he hoped to start a clothing line or make money by investing in and refurbishing trendy loft housing.

“This is such a contemporary scene, kind of like New York or L.A., and he knew he could get ahead here with his clothing line and his architecture,” said Barker Lyles, a member of the fledgling country band Love and Theft.

“He always called me with ideas for his clothing and would be like ‘Hey, what about this idea? What about this idea?’” Berry, 21, and Graziano also were making plans for the future. He had already made a down payment on an engagement ring she designed, and they were considering getting a beach house if Nashville didn’t work out, she said. “He specifically wanted to get one that wasn’t in great condition,” she said. “He wanted to spend the time with me to make it what we wanted it to be.”

Everything changes

Events the night of Sunday, Aug. 26, remain hazy, but certain facts are indisputable. According to police reports, Nick Hogan crashed a yellow 1998 Toyota Supra owned by his father at 7:31 p.m. in Clearwater, Fla. The Supra — a vehicle Nick Hogan had bragged to Rides magazine was a magnet for babes — was badly mangled in the crash. Hogan was traveling more than 60 miles per hour on a city street, causing the vehicle to strike a curb, spin 180 degrees and slam into a large palm tree, police said.

While it was not immediately apparent how serious Graziano’s injuries were, it became painfully clear over the next 24 hours, his father said. Graziano suffered a severe head wound. His intestines stopped working in the hospital, and his kidneys briefly shut down. He also went into cardiac arrest at least once, and a piece of his skull was removed.

Debra Graziano said doctors were saying “the most horrible things to us about our John’s injury.”
“I was in shock from the moment I saw him,” she said. “For the next few months, I maintained the deer-in-the-headlights look. I appeared relatively normal on the outside, but all I kept saying for months was, ‘It’s not real, this is not happening.’ It became my mantra.”

Nick Hogan, on the other hand, was treated and released the same night for a wrist injury, Edward Graziano said. Police later determined that a childhood friend of Graziano, Daniel Jacobs, 23, was racing Nick Hogan at the time of the accident in a 2003 silver Dodge Viper. Jacobs was sentenced to 90 days of probation in February after pleading no contest to reckless driving, but was not charged in connection with Graziano’s injuries.

Holding out hope

John Graziano was scheduled to deploy again to Iraq in December 2007 with his Reserve unit, the Tampa-based 4th Assault Amphibious Battalion.

Instead, he resides at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, receiving physical therapy that includes hooking him up to a machine that makes his body walk, his mother said.

Edward Graziano said his son is also scheduled to soon receive reconstructive cranialplasty surgery, in which an acrylic bone would be placed over the hole made in his skull by doctors after the accident.

Nearly a year later, a hoist is still needed to get John Graziano out of bed. He is wheeled around in a wheelchair by family and nurses attempting to stimulate him, but saliva must be sucked from his mouth regularly, his father said.

Nevertheless, family and friends hold out hope that Graziano will continue to improve, even though the lawsuit filed against the Hogans said he will likely need permanent full-time medical care. “We have a tremendous support system,” Debra Graziano said. “He is much loved by many and with the proper resources and years of rehab and all the new technology up and coming for traumatic brain injury ... I believe we will have our John back.”

The Hogans, meanwhile, continue to struggle with the spotlight. A messy divorce between Hulk Hogan and his wife, Linda, has been tabloid fodder for months, and their daughter Brooke, 20, has handled questions about her brother and parents as a new reality TV show, “Brooke Knows Best,” debuts July 13.

The cruel irony of a Motor T Marine surviving war only to be severely injured on a city street is not lost on the Graziano family or his friends. “It still hurts to see my friend the way he is,” Van Nostrand said. “It sucks because we’re both Marines and both warriors, and to see another warrior like that ... He has been through firefights and IEDs and all sorts of other things, and to see him like that because of recklessness, it just kills me.”

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