[Viiksitimali]

Lauri Allan Törni aka Larry Thorne.



More on Larry Thorne

[Stonewall Jackson]

There is a lot of speculation that W.E.B. Griffin based one of the characters in his Brotherhood of War series, Karl-Heinz Wagner, on Larry Thorne.

Wagner was a lieutenant in the East German Army who made it across the border with his little sister and promptly joined the US Army as a private. He went through Special Forces training, became a first lieutenant, served in Germany and Africa before going to Vietnam, where he served with honor until a Viet-Cong grenade left him paralyzed.

If you read a detailed history of Larry Thorne, such as Michael Cleverley's The Times and Life of Larry Thorne, there are a great many similarities between Thorne and Wagner.

[Stonewall Jackson]

"Nobody respects a country with a poor army, but everybody respects a country with a good army. I raise my toast to the Finnish army." - Josef Stalin, 1948