October 18th, 1965. Mountains northwest of K Duke, Vietnamese Le Oceanian border. A CH34 helicopter orbits alone at 8,000 ft. Clouds are swallowing the peaks below. Rain hammers the plexiglass. The mission is complete. The reconnaissance team is safely on the ground in Laos. The insertion helicopters have departed.
The bird dog forward air controllers have been released. The Huey gunships are gone. Everyone has left. One man ordered them all to go. Then he stayed. His helicopter circles in deteriorating weather alone above enemy territory because 10 men in the jungle below might need extraction under fire. The radio crackles.
The ground team confirms no enemy contact. The man keys his mic, heading back to base. 5 minutes later, other aircraft hear 30 seconds of continuous radio keying, then silence. The man in that helicopter was 46 years old. He had already earned his nation’s highest military decoration. Twice. Once from Finland, once from the United States.
Before either of those from Nazi Germany. His father said it plainly. He was war crazy. Even before he was as high as a rifle, he was born to be a soldier. Lori Alan Torri was born May 28th, 1919 in Vapori, Finland, a city that no longer exists on Finnish maps. It’s Russian now, Vyborg. His father, Yalmari Turney, captained coastal ships and had fought in Finland civil war as a white guard.
The boy grew up collecting skills that would kill men. The civil guard taught him to shoot. Skiing gave him mobility in terrain that stopped armies. Boxing taught him to close distance and absorb punishment. By the time other boys his age were deciding on careers, Lorie Turney had already chosen his enemy, the Soviet Union.
The Soviets invaded Finland in November 1939, the Winter War. Turney was 20 years old, a supply NCO who rose to anti-tank patrol leader within weeks. At the Battle of Lamemedi, he distinguished himself enough to earn a commission as second lieutenant and Finland’s Medal of Liberty. When the war ended in March 1940, Finland had lost, but Touney had learned something.
Small units moving fast through terrain the enemy considered impassible could break formations 10 times their size. The continuation war began in June 1941. Finland joined Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, not because the Finns loved Hitler, but because they wanted their land back. Turnie received brief Vafan SS training in Vienna but returned to Finland without seeing combat under that flag.
What came next was pure turnney. He organized and commanded Detachment Touney, a deep penetration guerilla unit that operated behind Soviet lines. They moved on skis. They struck at night. They vanished before the Soviets could react. The Red Army put a three million Finnish mark bounty on his head. At the battle of Ilmancy in July 1944, Turnie’s actions earned him the Manheim Cross, Finland’s equivalent of the Medal of Honor.
He was 25 years old. When Finland signed an armistice with the Soviets in September 1944, Tney kept fighting. He joined German forces in 1945 as the Reich collapsed, captured, escaped, returned to Finland, convicted of treason for serving Germany after the armistice, sentenced to 6 years, pardoned by the president after serving part of his term.
By 1949, Lorie Turney had no country left that would let him fight the Soviets, so he went to America. Before enlisting in the United States Army, Turney reportedly cut out the piece of his left arm that bore his Waffen SS blood type tattoo. He would carry scars from Finland, from Germany, from his own knife, and soon from Vietnam.
On January 28th, 1954, a 34year-old Finnish veteran with a thick accent and a chest full of foreign medals walked into a US Army recruiting station under the Lodge Filin Act. He gave his name as Larry Allen Thorne. Private Thorne was assigned to the 77th Special Forces Group Airborne at Fort Bragg. Three years later, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant.
By 1958, he was serving with 10th Special Forces Group at Bad Tuls, West Germany, the same town where he’d received his SS training 17 years earlier, now on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. In 1963, the Green Berets had just received President Kennedy’s official blessing. Special forces in those years was small, elite, unconventional, exactly what Turney had been doing in the Finnish forests two decades earlier.
At Fort Bragg’s special warfare school, Thorne taught skiing, survival, mountaineering, guerilla warfare. He was over 40 years old and could outmarch men half his age. They called him Larry, but those who knew his history called him the legend. His English carried an accent so thick you could cut it.
When he gave orders, men sometimes had to ask him to repeat himself. When he spoke quietly to friends, he sounded like a man from another world because he was his weapon of choice in Vietnam, a Swedish K submachine gun and a vintage Springfield M1903 bolt-action rifle with a scope. Master Sergeant Charles Petri, who served with Thorne in Germany and later in Vietnam, recalled, “He carried it with him constantly.
I never asked him why. Maybe he felt comfortable with it. He was a very good shooter. Captain Larry Thorne arrived at Chaolong CydG camp in the Mong Delta in November 1963, commanding 600 Vietnamese and Cambodian militia men. Within hours of arriving, he spotted a Vietkong flag flying on a nearby hill.
He organized volunteers, crept around enemy positions, ripped down the flag, and stuffed it in his rucksack. The camp took mortar fire so often the green berets nicknamed it little den bienfu. The man who had fought Soviets on skis was about to learn jungle warfare. Tinben camp sat on the vin canal in Anjiang province right against the Cambodian border.
April 1964 the Vietkong were probing the perimeter every night. Thorne commanded detachment a 734 and he knew something his men didn’t. Some of the Strikeforce soldiers he commanded were spies. He didn’t try to find them. That would take time he didn’t have and create suspicion that would fracture the unit.
Instead, Larry Thorne did something no one expected. He secretly mined his own machine gun positions. The mines were positioned to kill anyone who reached the guns from the wrong direction without destroying the weapons themselves. If enemy infiltrators tried to turn the captured guns inward on the camp, they would die. The guns would survive.
Thorne’s men could retake them and keep fighting. It wasn’t paranoia, it was geometry. In Finland, Tney had led guerilla operations where the Soviets never knew who was a partisan and who was a farmer. He’d learned to design traps that identified the enemy in the moment they acted. The principle was the same here. If he couldn’t identify every infiltrator, he’d create a trap that would identify them for him.
The Vietkong hit Tinben in force. They overran several defensive positions. Infiltrators inside the perimeter reached the machine guns and turned them toward the camp’s interior. Exactly as Thorne had predicted, he detonated the mines. The infiltrators died. His troops counterattacked and retook the positions.
Thorne called in air strikes by US. Air Force T28 Trojans, propeller-driven trainers, converted to ground attack, slow enough and precise enough to drop Napal within meters of friendly positions. The napalm broke the assault. Liquid fire that clung to everything it touched. The sound alone, a low rolling whoosh followed by screaming, could stop men from advancing.
Every member of detachment a 734 was wounded in that fight, including Thorne. He received two purple hearts for the action. He refused evacuation. This wasn’t new behavior. On March 23rd, 1942, during a ski patrol in Finland, Turney had stepped on a Soviet landmine. Severely wounded, shrapnel embedded in his body.
He went a w from the hospital to rejoin his unit. The pattern held across two decades and three flags. Thorne did not stay in hospitals. Thorne stayed in the fight. Robin Moore, author of the Green Beretss, embedded with special forces units in Vietnam. He modeled the character Captain Steve Corny directly on Thorne.
The novel’s first chapter, a CIDG camp under siege, an officer who’d fought Russians and Germans, an impossible defense that held through unconventional tactics. That was Tinbien. That was Thorne. Moore wrote it as fiction because the operations were still classified. But the men who served there knew. Master Sergeant Charles Slattz Petri had served with Thorne at bad tults before Vietnam.
When they encountered each other again in Vietnam in 1965, Petri remembered, “We were both very surprised when he arrived because we had not seen each other for a long time. I was really happy to meet you. It lifted my fighting spirit 100%.” Thorne’s approach to combat wasn’t reckless. It was calculated aggression based on 25 years of experience.
In Finland, the Soviets put a bounty on his head because Detachment Turney fought like gorillas, not conventional infantry. They struck from unexpected angles. They turned defensive positions into traps. They made the enemy’s superiority in numbers irrelevant by refusing to fight where numbers mattered.
At TinbiN, Thorne applied the same principle. If the enemy was inside your perimeter, turn the perimeter itself into a weapon. The logic was simple. A defensive position has two sides. One faces out, one faces in. Machine guns are mounted to fire outward. But if an infiltrator reaches that gun and turns it around, suddenly your strongest defensive weapon is aimed at your own men.
Thorne solved this by making the act of turning the gun suicidal. The infiltrator dies. The gun survives. Your men retake it. The position holds. It worked. After his first tour, Thorne returned to Fort Bragg. He could have stayed. He was in his mid-40s. He’d earned his American decorations. He’d proven himself in a new kind of war.
But Larry Thorne was not finished. In February 1965, Captain Larry Thorne deployed to Vietnam for a second tour. This time, he was assigned to the most secret unit in the American military, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group, MACVS. His mission, help launch America’s covert war into Laos.
The Hochi Min trail ran through Laos Oceanian territory. The United States could not publicly acknowledge operations there. But if the trail remained untouched, North Vietnam would pour unlimited men and material into South Vietnam forever. Someone had to go into Laos. Someone had to prove it could be done. Thorne had spent months flying aerial reconnaissance over eastern Laos, learning the terrain, planning insertion points, developing standard operating procedures for crossber operations.
He became by all accounts intimately familiar with the area where MACVSOG’s recon teams would operate. In October 1965, MAC Visog prepared to launch its first ground mission into Laos. Larry Thorne would be flying command and control. October 18th, 1965. Operation Shining Brass, the first Max Visog crossber reconnaissance mission into Laos.
The strategic problem was simple. The Ho Chi Min trail ran through Laos. North Vietnamese troops and supplies poured south through La Oceanian territory and the United States could not publicly acknowledge crossing that border. But if MACVSOG could insert reconnaissance teams into Laos, small invisible reporting enemy movements, American air power could interdict the trail without admitting ground operations existed.
The tactical problem on October 18th was weather. The two forward air controller bird dogs reported conditions as marginal clouds below mountaintops increasing ground fog but the mission was authorized. MAC VSOGs first ground penetration of Laos would launch. The target D1 a suspected North Vietnamese truck terminus on Le Oceanian Route 165 approximately 15 to 20 m inside Laos.
The mission insert recon team Iowa confirm enemy activity. Call in air strikes extract. RT Iowa consisted of two American green berets, Master Sergeant Charles Slattz Petri and Sergeant Firstclass Willie Card, one South Vietnamese officer and seven Nung fighters, 10 men total. The air package, two RVN AFH34 Kingb helicopters from the 219th Vietnamese Air Force Squadron.
Call signs cowboy and Mustachio. One additional CH34 as command and control aircraft with Captain Larry Thorne aboard. Two 01 E bird dogs as forward air controllers. Majors Harold Nipper and Harley B. Piles plus Marine Captain Winfield W. Sison. US Army Huey gunships for fire support. Air Force B57 bombers on standby.
1745 hours the two FAC bird dogs departed Comuk Special Forces Camp. Major piles reported weather marginal but manageable. 1,800 hours. Three King Bees launched from Comm Duke alongside the Huey gunships. Thorne was aboard the chase helicopter. His job, orbit the landing zone, receive the initial report from RT Iowa on the ground and extract them immediately if they hit a superior enemy force.
The flight arrived over the target area at sunset. Cloud cover was thickening. The mountains were disappearing into gray. The pilot circled, searching for a gap in the overcast. Around 1820 hours, a brief opening appeared. The two insertion kingbees, Cowboy and Mustachio, spiraled down through the clouds, discharged RT Iowa into the jungle, and climbed back to altitude.
First successful MACVS insertion into Laos. The ground element was on the ground. Thorn’s chase, King B, and Bird Dog 55 attempted to descend. The clouds closed. Visibility zero. They could not follow. This was the decision point. The mission’s ground phase had succeeded. RT Iowa was inserted. The insertion helicopters were empty and climbing back through the weather.
The Huey gunships were burning fuel. Bird Dog 55 was struggling to maintain visual contact with anything. Weather was worsening rapidly. Cowboy and Mustachio would later report they had to climb to 8,500 ft just to clear the cloud tops. Captain Larry Thorne ordered the insertion kingbees to return to Comm Duke. He released Bird Dog 55.
He released the Huey gunships. Everyone left. Thorne stayed. He remained orbiting above the target area in case RT Iowa encountered enemy contact. If they needed immediate extraction under fire, he would be there. That was his job as command and control officer. If he left and they hit trouble, they would die. The logic was sound.
The weather was not. His helicopter orbited alone somewhere near 8,000 ft above the clouds. The mountains invisible below, the sun setting beyond the storm. Rain beginning to hit the plexiglass. The rhythmic thop of the CH34’s rotors in thin air. Radiostatic. Around 1830 hours, the radio crackled. RT Iowa transmitted. Insertion successful.
No enemy contact. They were safe on the ground. The mission had succeeded. Thorne keyed his mic. Heading back to base. Approximately 5 minutes later, other aircraft in the area heard a constant keying of a radio for roughly 30 seconds. A stuck mic or someone trying to transmit with no words coming through. Then silence.
All repeated attempts to raise the KingB received no response. Master Sergeant Charles Petri was on the ground with RT Iowa when Thorne’s helicopter disappeared. He and Card completed their mission, calling in 88 bombing sorties against the truck terminus over the next several days, producing multiple secondary explosions.
Petri didn’t learn Thorne was missing until extraction. Major Harley B. Piles and Captain Winfield W. Sison, flying bird dog 55, also disappeared in the storm that night. Their remains would not be located until 1992. The returning King B crews reported the weather so severe they could barely clear the cloud tops.
Thunderstorm, ground fog, mountains swallowed by clouds, visibility effectively zero. No one saw what happened. The most likely explanation: Thorne’s helicopter attempting to navigate back to K Duke in zero visibility flew into a mountainside. No enemy fire, no mechanical failure documented. The jungle took him.
The tactical logic of staying was flawless. As CNC officer, Thorne was responsible for extracting RT Iowa. If they encountered trouble if he left before receiving confirmation they were safe and they hit an ambush, they would have no immediate extraction. They would be 10 men alone in Laos with no support. They would die.
Thorne stayed because that was the job. The mission succeeded because he stayed. RT Iowa’s insertion was confirmed. They completed their reconnaissance. They called in air strikes that destroyed enemy supplies and killed North Vietnamese soldiers. The first Mos V Soogi ground mission into Laos was a success. It cost Larry Thorne his life.
The search began at first light October 19th 1965. It continued for approximately 30 days. Searchers found nothing. No wreckage, no crew, no trace. The crash site lay on an extremely steep jungle-covered mountainside under dense triple canopy forest. The helicopters couldn’t land. Ground teams couldn’t reach it. The jungle kept its dead.
On October 19th, 1966, one year after his disappearance, Captain Larry Thorne was officially declared presumed killed in action. He was postumously promoted to major on December 16th, 1965. The men who served with him refused to believe he was dead. Every year, special forces veterans gathered to toast his health.
No one, they said, was better equipped to survive than Larry Thorne. He’d survived the Winter War, the Continuation War, German collapse, prison, treason charges, swimming to America. Maybe he’d survived this, too. But the jungle had him, and it would keep him for 34 years. Before his death, Larry Thorne helped establish the foundation for what would become the most secret and most effective American ground operation of the Vietnam War.
He flew multiple aerial reconnaissance missions over eastern Laos, learning the terrain in detail. He helped develop standard operating procedures for Macvogi crossber operations. He served as operations officer and command and control planner. He became, by all accounts, intimately familiar with the entire area where SOG’s recon teams would operate.
The mission he died supervising, RT Iowa’s insertion on October 18th, launched a covert war that would last a decade. MACVS operations ultimately forced Hanoi to divert approximately 40,000 troops to rear security missions along the Ho Chi Min Trail. The recon teams that followed RT Iowa would become the most decorated unit of the Vietnam War.
Larry Thorne helped build that. He was the first SOG operator to die for it. His awards Legion of Merit Postumous Distinguished Flying Crossostumous for his actions on October 18th, 1965. General Orders number 33, July 26th, 1967. Bronze Star Medal with V device for valor at tinbn. Purple heart with oakleaf cluster. Two confirmed awards.
Presidential unit citation postumous in 2001 for SOG service. Combat infantryman badge. Master parachutist badge. Special forces tab. The distinguished flying cross citation reads in part, “Major Thorne volunteered to accompany submission aircraft during the introduction of the patrol in place of the assigned individual.
” Major Thorne remained with one aircraft in the immediate area to receive an initial report from the patrol on the ground. This was done with total disregard for the inherent dangers and with selfless concern for the ground forces. In so doing, he exposed himself to extreme personal danger, which ultimately led to his disappearance and the loss of his aircraft.
The citation calls it extreme personal danger and selfless concern. That understates it. Thorne sent everyone else home and stayed alone in a storm because 10 men on the ground might need him. That’s not selfless concern. That’s who he was. 1997, a joint US Vietnamese team located wreckage during a survey mission. Grid coordinates Yankee Charlie 8 95105 Fuak Sun District technically inside South Vietnam approximately 10 mi south of K Duke on a mountain side so steep workers would have to cut steps and string ropes to reach it. July 26th 1999
full excavation began. Joint task force for full accounting. US and Vietnamese personnel working together to recover remains. Michael G. Island. US State Department official and Vietnam veteran was present at the excavation. He recalled there was a great deal of scattered wreckage plus some remains. One of the rotors was in a tree about 25 m off the ground. 25 m 80 ft.
The helicopter had hit with enough force to drive a rotor blade into a tree 8 stories high. The recovery team found several hundred bone fragments, possible teeth with gold crowns, and the barrel and receiver of a Carl Gustav M/45 submachine gun. The Swedish K that Master Sergeant Petri remembered Thorne carrying constantly.
September 20th, 1999, repatriation ceremony in Hanoi. Secretary of State Maline Albbright attended. The remains of four men, Thorne and the three Vietnamese air crew, were returned to American custody. June 4th, 2003. The families formally accepted identification based on forensic analysis. June 26th, 2003. Arlington National Cemetery, section 60, grave 8136.
The remains of all four men were buried together in a single casket. full American and Vietnamese military honors. Four flags on the coffin, Finnish, German, American, South Vietnamese. Jua Rajala, Thorne’s nephew, represented the family. He said simply, “Buried in America because that was the choice that he made.
At the crash site in Vietnam, Rajala left a plate bearing the letter T and a diagonal lightning bolt, the symbol of detachment turnney, the guerilla unit his uncle had commanded in Finland 60 years earlier. A Vietnamese colonel who had fought with the Vietkong in that area during the war, also attended the Arlington ceremony, a gesture of reconciliation.
Former enemies honoring a soldier. Mao Ko Visto served under Tney at the battle of Ilmansi in 1944. Ko Visto would later become president of Finland serving from 1982 to 1994. When asked about Tney as a leader, Kyo Visto said, “Thorne as a leader was liked. In many ways, he emphasized that we were all the same bunch, and he bore his share just like the others.
He did not ask anyone to do something he did not do himself. He carried his own load, marched at the lead, and was one of us.” After Thorne’s burial, some in Finland debated whether to restore his honor after the treason conviction from 1945. Ko Visto’s response, “You cannot restore what was never lost.” There’s a story from Rafford, North Carolina, before Thorne deployed to Vietnam.
A civilian friend, Locky McFadian, invited him to dinner. Thorne was served pickled peaches. He’d never seen them before. He watched the others eat, then dove in enthusiastically. Later that evening, in his heavy Finnish accent, he casually told his host, “Locky, I have killed more men with my bare hands than you have killed doves.
Not bragging, just a fact.” Said the way another man might mention he’d been to Europe. Modern recognition. The Larry Thorne headquarters building at 10th Special Forces Group, Airborne, Fort Carson, Colorado. The Larry Thorne Award for the best operational detachment alpha in 10th SFG Special Forces Association.
Chapter 33 in Cleveland, Tennessee, named in his honor. 2010, Larry Thorne was named the first honorary member of the United States Army Special Forces Regiment. Colonel Sha Swindell said at the ceremony, “He was a complex yet driven man who valerously fought oppression under three flags and didn’t acknowledge the meaning of quit.
” 2011 inducted into the US special operations command commando hall of honor in Finland ranked 52nd in a great Finn’s national listing. A 2006 poll by swoman Sautilus magazine voted him the most courageous of all Manheim cross recipients and there were only 191 men who ever received that award. In 2014, the Swedish power metal band Sabaton released Soldier of Three Armies. The song tells Thorne’s story.
Millions of streams. The legend reaching a generation that never knew the wars he fought. The controversy followed him even to Arlington. He is the only known former Waffan SS member buried there. Some called for his removal. Others defended him, pointing to the Finnish context, a small nation fighting Soviet invasion, accepting help from the only country willing to provide it, then switching sides when Germany lost.
Within the special forces community, the verdict is simpler. Larry Thorne fought communists his entire adult life under every flag that would let him fight. Finland gave him the Manorheim cross. America gave him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Both nations buried him with honors. The men who served beside him remember a soldier who refused to leave anyone behind. That’s the legacy.
A helicopter orbiting alone in deteriorating weather. October 18th, 1965. Mountains disappearing into clouds. Rain beginning. Radiostatic. Then the last transmission. Heading back to base. 30 seconds of continuous radio keying. Then silence. The viewer now knows what they didn’t at the start.
The man in that helicopter had already survived two wars, two armies, two prison escapes. He’d received his nation’s highest military decoration from Finland at 25 and would receive one from America at 48 postuously. He’d cut out his own tattoo to serve a third flag. He’d learned three army’s ways of war and combined them into something uniquely his own.
He stayed orbiting in that storm because 10 men on the ground might need him. Larry Thorne did not leave men behind. Not in Finland, not in Germany, not in Vietnam. The mission succeeded. RT Iowa completed their reconnaissance. They called in 88 bombing sorties. MACVSOG’s covert war into Laos became operational reality.
The trail would be contested for the next decade. Thousands of American and Vietnamese recon team members would follow where RT Iowa led. Larry Thorne helped build that. He died proving it could be done. His father said he was born a soldier. He was also born in a city that no longer exists on Finnish maps. Lori Turney, Larry Thorne, SS Htormfurer, Major, United States Army, 46 years old.
Four flags on his coffin. He never stopped fighting. He just ran out of sky.
