Larry Thorne

In the autumn of 1939, a young Finnish recruit named Larry Thorne (“Lauri Törni” in Finnish) would have ended his compulsory military service in the Finnish army a few kilometers away from the Soviet-Finnish border.  But just days before, Stalin’s Red Army launched an all-out assault on Finland, and all Finnish troops were frozen in place.  The war threw the young man into a time and place where his talents as a soldier were soon legendary on both sides of the front.

Over the following 25 years, Thorne became a legend among the soldiers who fought the century’s wars. In his native Finland, he fought in the country’s first to its last battles against the Soviet Union. He won Finland’s Mannerheim Cross, the equivalent of the American Congressional Medal of Honor. He became an effective, sometimes ruthless, seemingly reckless leader of one of the most elite units in the Finnish army, an army considered one of the best in World War II. In response to Thorne’s brave, devastating raids behind Soviet lines, the Red Army placed a price on his head, dead or alive, reputedly the only Finnish soldier singled out for bounty

During the years of transition from World War II to the Cold War, Thorne was a refugee, a political prisoner, a fugitive, an exile, and an illegal alien. He literally jumped ship off Mobile, Alabama, and eventually was granted legal status in the United States through an Act of Congress. Once legalized, he enlisted in the American army to become an early member of the American Special Forces and a Green Beret legend.

No book captured the heroism of America’s warriors of those years more than The Green Berets. The fact remains that the men who fought in the Vietnam War were as valiant as any of their forefathers. The Green Berets gave them credit at a time when few at home were willing to do so. Larry Thorne was the book’s first Vietnam hero: “Kornie” in Chapter One, the chapter that served as the basis for the movie.

If Thorne’s life served as the mid-century soldier’s paradigm, it is not surprising that it ended along Vietnam’s chasm of national despair. When directing a secret mission into Laos, his helicopter was lost. Even before The Green Berets was playing at movie houses around the US, his life, in the great Hollywood tradition, had already become an adventure and a tragedy.

Born a Soldier is a tour of the mid-20th century’s conflicts, as experienced through the Larry Thorne’s remarkable life. The story sketches the broad panorama of history’s most glorious and grisly century, one when the world was in a real or virtual state of global war for all but its first and last decades.  It recounts the adventures of a man who in life loomed larger than folklore could ever make him. The story of Larry Thorne is a journey with a truly amazing and colorful man, through some of the worst days of the mid-20th century.