Vet led efforts to bring aid to villages in Laos
The Vietnam War left a terrible mark on Lee Thorn, searing him with posttraumatic stress disorder from guilty memories of loading bombs onto jets to rain fiery death upon Laos. So he left a mark in return.
After mustering out of the U.S. Navy in 1967, he cofounded Veterans for Peace and then devoted his life to trying to heal the impoverished nation he helped devastate all those years ago.
Throughout decades of tireless campaigns, Thorn uplifted poor villagers in Laos by installing pedalpowered computers and supporting jungle coffee farmers, medical clinics and bombclearance campaigns. Just before he died of cancer at 77 on June 25 near his San Francisco home, some of
his final words were about the country he had come to adore.
“I tried to do the best I could to make up for what we’d done there,” he told The Chronicle by phone from his hospice bed at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, where he died. His voice was barely perceptible, weakened by the disease. “I wish I could have done a lot more.”
When reminded of the efforts he’d made and how he had overcome the homelessness and alcoholism he sank into after the war, he managed a chuckle.
“Yeah, it’s been a pretty good ride, hasn’t it?” he whispered.
Thorn made his first stride into activism after his 1967 honorable discharge from the Navy when, as a student at UC Berkeley, he cofounded the Veterans for Peace group. A forerunner of the veterans antiwar movement, the group grew to 65,000 members by 1972, as Thorn combined efforts with fellow Vietnam veteran and future Secretary of State John Kerry and activistsinger Joan Baez. When it later merged with Vietnam Veterans
Against the War, Thorn settled into a career as a community organizer for peace, disability rights and antipoverty causes.
In 1998, he read a newsletter article by Bounthanh Phommasathit, a Laotian woman who had fled the village of Phon Hong in the 1970s to become a social worker in Ohio. She wanted to help her people back home. Thorn and a friend stuffed backpacks with medical supplies, delivered them to Phon Hong, and the widespread reaction by veterans and Laotians was so positive he founded the Jhai Foundation with Phommasathit’s help.
Jhai means “hearts and minds working together” in Laotian, and until its recent closure it provided economic and technical help to poor villages throughout Laos. Its biggest moment came in 2003, when Thorn recruited tech pioneer Lee Felsenstein to create a computer that could be powered by bicycle pedals and communicate through WiFi cards tacked to mountaintop trees.
The idea was to give internet access to Laotians living in huts with no electricity so they could find current prices for rice, silk and chickens and not be lowballed by city buyers. Thorn and Felsenstein — who invented the Osborne 1, the world’s first portable computer — led a team to Laos to install the socalled Jhai Computer, and after several tries the Jhai took hold as the first pedalpowered wireless computer designed for Third World villages.
Thorn expanded his efforts in Laos to include exporting coffee beans to America, installing wells, and supporting efforts to clear unexploded bombs and mines from the countryside. U.S. forces dumped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, making it the most heavily bombed nation per capita in history.
Asked what disturbed him most about participating in the Vietnam War , Thorn would say it was his hitch on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger loading cluster bombs and phosphorous rockets onto warplanes headed over the ancient Plain of Jars and other targets in Laos.
At night, he screened onboard films of the sorties.
“Guys would die, and I would close down inside a little more each time,”
Thorn recalled. “What we were doing, killing that many people from the air, broke something inside of me.”
Thorn was born in Kansas City, Mo., to Lee Everett Thorn II, a movie theater executive, and Shirley Thorn, a school nurse. After his Navy service and as he built his career as an activist, Thorn married, divorced, and struggled with homelessness and alcoholism before getting clean and earning an MBA at the University of San Francisco. In 1988, he married Bernadette McAnulty, and they remained together in San Francisco until his death.
“My dad understood that real change in the world is what matters,” said Thorn’s son, National Public Radio host Jesse Thorn.
“To have unconditional acceptance in the place where he went to seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and to know his work engendered gratitude and not resentment, meant so much to him,” he said. “And I felt it when I went to Bounthanh’s village in 2005, and everyone treated me like I was their child.”
Michael Blecker, director of the veterans aid group Swords to Plowshares, said Thorn did other vets with PTSD a service by being so open about his struggles — and did everyone else a bigger service with his reconciliation work.
“Lee was the real deal in every respect as someone who was tormented, tortured by what he went through,” Blecker said. “He did his homework and made sure he understood the story. He was an activist, a scholar, a organizer. His fingerprints are everywhere in the efforts to heal from the war.”
Thorn is survived by his wife; his sons Jesse of Los Angeles, John Thorn and Brendan Thorn of San Francisco; and three grandchildren.
Services are pending.