In 2003, a soldier was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full honors. He had been a Finnish war hero. A Waffen-SS officer. A convicted traitor. A stowaway. And a US Army Green Beret. All the same man. His name was Lauri Törni. He was born in Finland in 1919, and his entire life was shaped by one thing. He hated the Soviet Union. In 1939 the Soviets invaded Finland in what became known as the Winter War. Törni fought in it as a young soldier. Finland was massively outnumbered and still made the Red Army pay a staggering price before agreeing to peace. When war with the Soviets broke out again in 1941, Törni became a legend. He led a small unit of ski troops on raids deep behind Soviet lines. Hit fast. Vanish into the forests. Do it again. He was so effective the Soviets reportedly put a bounty on his head. Finland awarded him the Mannerheim Cross, its highest military honor. In 1944, Finland made peace with the Soviet Union. For Törni, the war wasn't over. He went to Germany to keep fighting the Soviets. He trained with the Waffen-SS and was commissioned as an officer. When Germany collapsed in 1945, he surrendered to the British, escaped from a prison camp, and made his way back to Finland. Finland arrested him for treason for serving in a foreign army. He was sentenced to six years in prison. He escaped. He was caught. In 1948, he was pardoned. Then he vanished from Finland for good. He made his way to Sweden, then sailed to Venezuela. From there he got a job on a cargo ship bound for the United States. When the ship reached the Gulf of Mexico, he jumped overboard and swam to shore. In 1950 the US passed a law letting foreign veterans who joined the US Army earn American citizenship. Törni signed up immediately and changed his name to Larry Thorne. The man who had fought in an SS uniform now wore an American one. He joined the Special Forces. The Green Berets. Rose through the ranks. Became a captain. In 1962 he led a dangerous mission into the mountains of Iran to recover classified material from a crashed American plane. Then came Vietnam. He joined MACV-SOG, the top secret unit that ran missions behind enemy lines. On October 18, 1965, his helicopter went down in the jungle of Laos during a mission. He disappeared. For more than 30 years, nobody knew exactly what happened to him. In 1999, the crash site was finally found. His remains were identified in 2003. He was buried at Arlington among the men he served with. A soldier under three flags who spent his entire life fighting the same enemy, in three different uniforms, across three decades.

June 6, 1944. An American paratrooper jumps into Normandy in the dark and lands on the roof of a church. By the end of the war he had been declared dead, held a funeral he didn't attend, escaped the Nazis, and fought his way toward Berlin in a Soviet tank unit. His name was Joseph Beyrle. He's believed to be the only American soldier to serve in both the US Army and the Red Army during World War Two. Beyrle was from Muskegon, Michigan. He joined the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. His buddies called him Jumpin' Joe. On D-Day night his plane was hit by flak and he jumped early. He came down on a church roof, slid off, and lost his unit in the chaos. For a few days he fought on his own, blowing up a power station and cutting German communications. Then he was captured. Here's where it gets strange. A German soldier ended up wearing Beyrle's uniform and dog tags. That German was killed. When the body was found, the Americans identified it as Joseph Beyrle. The army told his parents their son was dead. His hometown held a funeral mass for him. His obituary ran in the local paper. Meanwhile, he was very much alive, being moved from one German prison camp to another. He escaped more than once. One time he and two other prisoners jumped off a train heading east. They thought they were heading for Russia and freedom. They got lost and ended up in Berlin, where they were caught by the Gestapo, beaten, and tortured. In January 1945, from a camp in eastern Germany, he finally made a clean escape. He went east, toward the gunfire. Toward the Soviets. When he found a Soviet tank unit, he walked out with his hands up, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted the only Russian he knew. American comrade. It worked. He asked to join them. And they said yes. For about a month, an American paratrooper rode with Soviet tank crews as they pushed toward Germany. He used his demolition training. He fought. He was reportedly welcomed by a Soviet officer who was one of the rare women commanding a tank battalion. Then a German dive bomber attacked. Beyrle was badly wounded. He was evacuated to a Soviet hospital. Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov reportedly visited, heard his story, and gave him papers to get to the American embassy in Moscow. When he showed up, the embassy didn't believe him. As far as the US was concerned, Joseph Beyrle was dead. They held him under guard until his fingerprints proved who he was. He made it home to Michigan in April 1945. In 1946 he got married. In the same church where they'd held his funeral. Decades later, in 1994, he was honored at the White House by President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin for serving both countries. And the last twist. His son, Joseph Beyrle II, grew up to become the United States Ambassador to Russia.

Later that same morning off Samar, as the battered escort carriers of Taffy 3 caught their breath after driving off Kurita's fleet, a handful of Japanese planes appeared overhead and did something new and terrible. Instead of dropping their bombs and flying away, they dived deliberately into the ships. One of them crashed squarely into the escort carrier St. Lo, which blew up and sank. It was the first warship ever sunk by an organized kamikaze attack, and it opened the most harrowing chapter of the Pacific air war. The kamikaze was born of pure desperation, the decision I described through the eyes of the pilot Seki. By the time of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese navy was being destroyed and its remaining pilots were too few and too poorly trained to fight the Americans in the air on anything like even terms. So the leadership reached for the unthinkable: pilots who would not try to bomb and return, but would aim their bomb-laden aircraft directly at American ships and crash into them, spending one plane and one life to try to sink one ship. The word kamikaze, "divine wind," recalled a legendary typhoon that had once saved Japan from invasion. On the 25th, the first organized special attack units went in against the escort carriers off Samar and Leyte. The planes came in and dived. Several hit their targets. One struck St. Lo on the flight deck, and the plane and its bomb punched through and set off the carrier's own fuel and ammunition. A series of catastrophic explosions tore the ship apart, and St. Lo sank, the first ship sent to the bottom by a deliberate suicide crash. Other escort carriers were hit and damaged the same day. A weapon unlike any the Americans had faced had arrived. It grew into a terror that shadowed the rest of the war. Over the following months, as the Americans closed in on Japan, the kamikaze was unleashed in ever greater numbers, reaching its horrifying peak at Okinawa in 1945, where wave after wave of suicide planes threw themselves at the American fleet, sinking dozens of ships and killing thousands of sailors, inflicting the heaviest losses the United States Navy suffered in the whole war. Young men by the thousands were strapped into planes, sometimes barely trained, sometimes in aircraft loaded only with enough fuel for a one-way trip, and sent to die. It was a weapon that revealed the depth of Japan's desperation and the terrible logic its leaders had embraced, the willingness to spend the nation's young men as human bombs rather than accept that the war was lost. For the American sailors it was uniquely dreadful, an enemy who could not be deterred by the fear of death because death was the entire plan, planes that kept coming through the flak, through hits, aiming to crash. It made the last year of the Pacific war a thing of special horror. And it all began here, on the morning of the 25th, when the planes dived on Taffy 3 and St. Lo blew up and sank. At the end of the greatest naval battle ever fought, with its fleet in ruins, Japan had unveiled the weapon of the hopeless, and the divine wind began to blow.