Lauri Törni was born in Viipuri in Finnish Karelia and went to war at twenty when the Soviet Union invaded in 1939. In the Continuation War that followed he led a detachment of ski troops behind Soviet lines — raiding, ambushing, living in the forest for weeks — and became famous enough at home that the Red Army offered a bounty for his head. Finland awarded him the Mannerheim Cross, the highest decoration it has.
When Finland made peace with the Soviet Union in 1944, Törni did not. He went to Germany, trained with the Waffen-SS under an assumed name, and returned to organise resistance if the Soviets occupied his country. They did not; he was arrested by the Finnish authorities for treason, served time, and was pardoned in 1948. This part of the story is not tidy, and the catalogue does not tidy it: the man fought the same enemy under a flag that also belongs to the worst of that war.
In 1950 he stowed away on a ship to America, jumped into the sea off the coast of Sweden once and swam the Gulf of Mexico to shore once, worked as a carpenter and a cleaner in New York, and in 1954 enlisted in the US Army as Larry Thorne under a law written for European refugees. He went to Special Forces, and men who had fought against Finland in Karelia found themselves being taught winter warfare and survival by the man who had done it to them.
He went to Vietnam twice. On 18 October 1965, as a MACV-SOG operations officer, the helicopter carrying him went down in bad weather over Laos on a covert mission. He was forty-six, and he was declared missing.
It took thirty-four years to find the crash site, and in 2003 what was left of him was buried at Arlington. The stone says LARRY A. THORNE. Finland, Germany and the United States all decorated him; the Special Forces school at Fort Bragg named a building after him; and there is still an argument, in Helsinki more than anywhere, about what to call a man like that.
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