He served with a bomb assembly team with the Manhattan Project and was present at the Operation Sandstone nuclear tests in 1948.

He was required to wear civilian clothes and pay room and board for the first five days of Beast Barracks until July 6, when he reached his 17th birthday.

Graves spoke to Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, the commander of Army Service Forces, and another friend of his father's, who agreed to this request.

In June it moved to Marseilles, whence it sailed to the Philippines via the Panama Canal, Hawaii and Ulithi on the SS Lurline.

Graves served in Japan with ENCOM from 23 September 20 October 1945, when he was transferred to the Engineer Section of Eighth United States Army Headquarters.

[6] During the war the military side of the Manhattan Project had relied heavily on reservists, as the policy of the Corps of Engineers was to assign regular officers to field commands.

To replace them, the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, asked for fifty West Point graduates from the top ten percent of their classes to man bomb assembly teams at Sandia Base, where the assembly staff and facilities had been moved from Los Alamos and Wendover Field in September and October 1945.

For training purposes, Company B was initially divided into command, electrical, mechanical and nuclear groups, but the intention was to create three integrated 36-man bomb assembly teams.

When Groves left the AFSWP, the sending of officers to study for postgraduate courses was reconsidered, as three years was thought to be too long to be away from the service, and there was talk of cancelling the program.

[24] While at MIT, Graves met Nancy Herbert Barclay,[25] a graduate of Wellesley College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, who was working for a law firm in Boston.

[25] Upon graduation from MIT, Graves was supposed to return to the AFSWP, but he spoke to Lieutenant General Thomas B. Larkin, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for Logistics, and another friend of his father's, and had his orders changed.

Instead, Graves was sent to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, where he spent a year as Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff, General Cortlandt V.R.

His main task was drafting NATO airfield standards in the wake of 1952 meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Lisbon.

His unit built storage areas for Honest John missiles at Osan, paved roads, and constructed depots.

On returning to the United States, he was assigned to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to work on Project Plowshare, a proposal to use nuclear weapons to excavate a sea-level canal through Panama or Nicaragua.

[32] In September 1968, Graves assumed command of the 34th Engineer Group, which was based at Vung Tau, and later at Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, supporting the 9th Infantry Division during the Vietnam War.

[35] Graves returned to the United States in September 1969,[36] where he became the deputy director of Military Construction in the Officer of the Chief of Engineers in Washington, D.C.

[37] As such, he was responsible for $1 billion of military construction each year for the Army, United States Air Force and NASA.

[37] In July 1981, Graves retired from the Army, and became a consultant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.,[37] and Burdeshaw and Associates.

A memorial service was held at the Fort Myer Old Post Chapel, after which he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery.