He Fought for Finland, the Waffen-SS, and the Green Berets. Vietnam Was His Last Mission.

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]It is 1964, the Mekong Delta, South Vietnam. A Viet Cong battalion is about to overrun an American Special Forces camp. The camp commander, a 45-year-old Green Beret captain, already knows they are coming.

[00:00:14]He has known for days. He cannot stop the infiltration. So, he has done something else entirely. He has placed mines at his own machine gun positions.

[00:00:24]Not to stop the enemy from reaching the guns, to let them reach the guns, and then detonate the mines the moment they try to use them. When the Viet Cong overrun the perimeter in the darkness and seize the machine guns and turn them toward the defenders, the captain reaches for his detonator.

[00:00:41]The mines go off. His men retake the guns. The camp holds. The captain is wounded in the battle. His commanders tell him he can go to the rear. He refuses. He requests command of a special operations base instead. His name in the US Army records is Captain Larry Thorne. That is not the name he was born with. The man standing in that burning camp in the Mekong Delta had already fought two wars for Finland, trained with the Waffen SS, been convicted of treason by his own country, escaped from prison, jumped off a cargo ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and swam ashore.

[00:01:16]He was at that moment one of the most dangerous and experienced soldiers on Earth.

[00:01:21]Almost no one in Vietnam knew who he really was.

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[00:01:36]To understand what Larry Thorne was doing in Vietnam, you need to understand where he came from. And the answer is unlike anything else in the history of the Vietnam War.

[00:01:45]He was born Lauri Allan Törni in 1919 in Viipuri, Finland, a city on the Soviet border. He grew up with one obsession, fighting the communists next door. His father said he was war crazy before he could hold a rifle.

[00:02:00]At 19, the Soviet Union invaded Finland.

[00:02:03]Törni fought them. He was exceptional.

[00:02:06]So exceptional that in 1943, his commanders gave him his own unit, Detachment Törni.

[00:02:12]Deep penetration behind Soviet lines, intelligence gathering, sabotage, disappear before the enemy can respond.

[00:02:21]It was special forces work 20 years before the term existed.

[00:02:25]One of the men who served under him in Detachment Törni was a young soldier named Mauno Koivisto.

[00:02:31]Koivisto would later become the president of Finland.

[00:02:35]When Finland was forced to make peace with the Soviet Union in 1944, one of the terms was that Finland had to arrest its own veterans who had served alongside the Germans.

[00:02:45]Törni was arrested, tried for treason, sentenced to 6 years. He escaped, was recaptured, was pardoned, left Finland.

[00:02:56]In 1950, he boarded a cargo ship in Venezuela bound for the United States.

[00:03:01]He had no visa, no legal right to enter the country. Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, near Mobile, Alabama, he went over the side and swam to shore.

[00:03:11]In Brooklyn, he found the Finnish-American community, learned English, worked as a carpenter.

[00:03:16]In 1953, through an act of Congress organized by Wild Bill Donovan, the former head of the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, he was granted residency.

[00:03:28]Donovan knew exactly who Törni was. He helped anyway.

[00:03:32]In 1954, Lauri Törni enlisted in the United States Army as a private. He was 35 years old. He changed his name to Larry Thorne. And he walked into the Special Forces, the one place in the American military built for men exactly like him.

[00:03:48]Before we get into what happened in Vietnam, if you've never heard this story before, that's exactly why this channel exists.

[00:03:57]We cover the soldiers history forgot.

[00:03:59]Subscribe now and tell me in the comments, how many flags did you think one man could fight under?

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[00:04:08]In late 1963, Captain Larry Thorne arrived in South Vietnam for his first tour of duty.

[00:04:15]He was 44 years old. He had been fighting, with brief interruptions, for 24 years. He had survived things that would have killed most men twice over.

[00:04:25]And now he was in the Mekong Delta, the vast river system in the south of the country, where the Viet Cong moved freely and the South Vietnamese Army struggled to gain a foothold. His assignment, Special Forces Detachment A-734, training and advising CIDG forces, Civilian Irregular Defense Group troops, at remote camps along the Cambodian border.

[00:04:49]The same kind of work Detachment Thorne had done in the Finnish forests two decades earlier.

[00:04:55]Go deep into hostile territory, train the locals, survive.

[00:05:00]At the CIDG camp in Tan Bien, Thorne did something that his men talked about for the rest of their lives.

[00:05:06]Intelligence told him the Viet Cong were building up outside the wire. He couldn't stop the infiltration.

[00:05:12]The jungle was too dense, the VC too experienced. So, he thought differently.

[00:05:17]He placed mines at his own machine gun positions, rigged so that anyone who seized the guns and tried to turn them on the defenders would trigger the explosives, killing the attackers, leaving the weapons intact.

[00:05:30]It was the kind of tactical thinking that came from a man who had spent decades studying how battles actually unfold, not how doctrine says they should.

[00:05:39]When the Viet Cong attacked in force, they overran part of the perimeter. They reached the machine gun positions. They turned the weapons toward the camp's interior and open fire. Thorne detonated the mines. His men retook the guns.

[00:05:53]But despite all of it, Tin Bien was almost lost. The VC force was too large, the pressure too sustained. Thorne called in an air strike. T-28 Trojan attack planes dropping napalm and strafing with.50 caliber machine guns.

[00:06:08]Close enough that the defenders could feel the heat. The camp held. Thorne received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for Valor. He was wounded. His commanders offered him evacuation to the rear.

[00:06:20]Away from the fighting, away from the danger. He refused. He requested command of a special operations base instead.

[00:06:29]The battle at Tin Bien was described in detail by author Robin Moore in his 1965 book The Green Berets, the best-selling account of special forces in Vietnam.

[00:06:41]The main character of the book's opening chapter, Captain Steve Corney, was based directly on Larry Thorne.

[00:06:48]The Green Berets was later made into a film starring John Wayne. The character based on Larry Thorne appears in the opening scene. The real man was still in Vietnam, and he was about to go somewhere even the Green Berets didn't officially go.

[00:07:03]In February 1965, Larry Thorne returned to Vietnam for his second tour.

[00:07:09]This time his assignment was different.

[00:07:11]He was transferred to MACV-SOG.

[00:07:15]The name Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group was a deliberate lie. SOG was not a studies group. It was one of the most classified special operations units in American military history.

[00:07:29]Its existence could not be officially acknowledged. Its missions could not be officially reported. Its men, if captured, could not be officially recognized.

[00:07:38]SOG's primary mission in 1965 was the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The trail, the network of roads, paths, river crossings, and jungle routes that the North Vietnamese used to move men and supplies south, ran largely through Laos.

[00:07:54]Striking it required sending men into a country where America was not officially at war.

[00:07:59]Every mission was a political crisis waiting to happen.

[00:08:02]Every man who went was officially not there.

[00:08:06]Thorne's role in SOG was critical. He was instrumental in building the standard operating procedures for the entire organization.

[00:08:14]The protocols, the insertion methods, the communication systems that cross-border reconnaissance teams would use. He was in effect writing the playbook for a kind of warfare that had never been done before.

[00:08:25]In October 1965, the first cross-border mission was ready to go. Operation Shining Brass, the first clandestine SOG insertion into Laos.

[00:08:36]Small reconnaissance teams to locate North Vietnamese supply depots and mark them for air strikes. The mission was scheduled for October 18th, 1965.

[00:08:45]Larry Thorne was assigned to supervise the insertion. Three CH-34 Kingbee helicopters, South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft, old with outdated instruments, launched from Kham Duc Special Forces camp. The weather was deteriorating.

[00:09:01]Clouds hung low over the mountains.

[00:09:03]Visibility was poor.

[00:09:06]The first two helicopters inserted the reconnaissance team successfully. The team was on the ground. Mission complete. Thorne's helicopter turned back toward Kham Duc. Another aircraft monitoring the radio frequency watched what happened next.

[00:09:20]Thorne's Kingbee had been flying north.

[00:09:22]Then it made a sudden, unexplained 180-degree turn.

[00:09:26]Then the radio went silent. 56 search and rescue missions were launched in the days that followed. Helicopters, aircraft, ground teams. They searched the mountains of Phuoc Son district for any sign of the crash. They found nothing. No wreckage, no radio signal, no survivors, nothing.

[00:09:45]Larry Thorne was listed as missing in action. On October 19th, 1966, exactly 1 year after the crash, he was officially declared dead.

[00:09:56]Among the men who had known him, who had watched him do things that shouldn't have been possible, the news landed differently than most.

[00:10:03]Some could not accept it. The idea that Larry Thorne was simply gone, that the jungle had taken him, seemed somehow insufficient. Too ordinary for a man who had survived everything.

[00:10:15]Some believed he was still alive somewhere in the jungle.

[00:10:18]Some feared he had been captured and handed to the Soviets, who had wanted him since 1944 and had placed a bounty on his head worth 3 million Finnish marks. He had cheated death so many times that people couldn't believe he had finally run out of chances.

[00:10:34]For 34 years, the jungle kept its secret. The Vietnam War ended in 1975.

[00:10:40]The country reunified. The world moved on.

[00:10:43]Larry Thorne remained officially dead, officially missing, officially unresolved.

[00:10:49]In 1999, a joint Finnish and American recovery team located the crash site in the mountains of Phuoc Son district. The wreckage of the King Bee was there.

[00:10:59]What remained of the aircraft lay where it had fallen 34 years earlier, reclaimed by the jungle, but not gone.

[00:11:06]DNA analysis confirmed the identities of the South Vietnamese air crew.

[00:11:11]Dental records confirmed what the men of Special Forces had suspected, but couldn't prove.

[00:11:16]Lauri Allan Törni, Larry Allan Thorne, had died on October 18th, 1965.

[00:11:23]He was 46 years old. His remains were repatriated to the United States.

[00:11:28]A ceremony was held at Hanoi's Noi Bai International Airport, attended by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Ambassador Pete Peterson. He was formally identified in 2003.

[00:11:39]On June 26th, 2003, Major Larry Alan Thorne was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

[00:11:48]He is the only former member of the Waffen SS ever interred at Arlington.

[00:11:52]At the ceremony, US Army Special Forces Colonel Shawn Swindell said, "He was a complex, yet driven man who valorously fought oppression under three flags and didn't acknowledge the meaning of quit."

[00:12:05]The Larry Thorne Headquarters Building at Fort Carson, Colorado, home of the 10th Special Forces Group, bears his name.

[00:12:13]He is memorialized on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Panel 02E, line 126.

[00:12:20]In Finland, he was ranked 52nd in the list of the greatest Finns of all time.

[00:12:25]In a survey by the military magazine Suomen Sotilas, he was voted the most courageous of all recipients of the Mannerheim Cross, Finland's highest military honor, and in the book The Green Berets by Robin Moore, the book that introduced most Americans to Special Forces, the character based on Larry Thorne appears in the opening chapter, the most capable soldier in the book, the one everyone else looks up to.

[00:12:50]The real man was more extraordinary than the character.

[00:12:53]In the Special Forces community, Larry Thorne is a legend. Ask any Green Beret about him and they know the name. They know the three flags. They know Thien Bien. They know shining brass.

[00:13:06]They know the 180° turn and the radio going silent.

[00:13:11]Outside that community, almost no one has heard of him.

[00:13:14]Vietnam took a lot of men. It took them in firefights and helicopter crashes and ambushes and disease.

[00:13:21]It took them in jungles that swallowed everything.

[00:13:23]Aircraft, equipment, bodies, and gave nothing back for decades.

[00:13:29]It took Larry Thorne at the age of 46 on a clear operation on a flight back to base after the mission had already succeeded.

[00:13:37]He had survived the Winter War, the Continuation War, the Waffen SS, two Finnish prisons, a swim across the Gulf of Mexico, an Iranian mountain, the Battle of Dien Bien years of covert operations.

[00:13:52]He did not survive a helicopter turning around in the mountains.

[00:13:55]There is a grave at Arlington National Cemetery that is unlike any other.

[00:14:00]The headstone reads Major Larry Alan Thorne, United States Army Vietnam.

[00:14:06]What it doesn't say is everything else.

[00:14:09]Three flags three wars one man who didn't know how to stop.

[00:14:14]Vietnam was his last mission. He deserved better than to be forgotten.

[00:14:18]If you want to read the full story, J.

[00:14:20]Michael Cleverly's biography, Born a Soldier, is the definitive account of Larry Thorne's life. The link is in the description. If you've never heard of this man before today share this video.

[00:14:32]Say the name Larry Thorne Lauri Törni and subscribe because there are dozens more stories like this one waiting on this channel.

[00:14:41]I'll see you in the next one.

[00:14:42]SEO describing chapters and tags.

[00:14:47]Titles A, The Green Beret Who Fought for Finland, the Waffen SS, and America then vanished over Vietnam.

[00:14:54]B, War Three Flags Vietnam was his last mission. His body wasn't found for 34 years.

[00:15:01]Describing, in 1964, a Green Beret captain in the Mekong Delta placed mines at his own machine gun positions and waited for the Viet Cong to take them.

[00:15:11]His name in the US Army records was Larry Thorne.

[00:15:15]That was not the name he was born with.

[00:15:17]Before Vietnam, he had fought two wars for Finland, trained with the Waffen SS, been convicted of treason by his own country, escaped from prison, and swam ashore in the Gulf of Mexico after jumping off a cargo ship.

[00:15:30]In October 1965, his helicopter vanished over the jungles of Laos on the first covert MACV SOG cross-border mission of the Vietnam War.

[00:15:41]His body was not found for 34 years. He is the only former member of the Waffen SS buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Now, this is the story of Larry Thorne, the most extraordinary soldier in Vietnam, and almost no one knows his name.

[00:15:56]Subscribe for a new military history documentary every week. Like and share.

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