Finland’s Accidental Super Soldier: The Wild True Story of Aimo Koivunen and the Meth-Fueled Ski Escape

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Strange History Podcast, the show where

0:03 Speaker 1: history's strangest humans leap out of the footnotes and into

0:07 Speaker 1: your earbuds, normally because they've done something incredibly weird, impressively misguided,

0:13 Speaker 1: or borderline superhuman. Today we continue to follow my DNA.

0:18 Speaker 1: We're heading into the icy forests of Finland to meet

0:21 Speaker 1: a man who accidentally turned himself into a one man

0:24 Speaker 1: marvel origin story using nothing more than skis panic and

0:29 Speaker 1: an entire bottle of wartime methamphetamine. His name was Imo Koivenin,

0:35 Speaker 1: and whether Finland intended to create a super soldier or not,

0:38 Speaker 1: they absolutely did so. Strap in, grab some pine needle tea,

0:43 Speaker 1: and maybe don't take anything your doctor didn't prescribe, because

0:47 Speaker 1: this is the unbelievable, medically confusing, completely true story of

0:52 Speaker 1: the Finnish soldier who overdosed on meth, skied for days,

0:57 Speaker 1: dodged the Soviet Army, survived a landmine, explode, ate a

1:00 Speaker 1: bird raw, and lived to tell the tale.

1:04 Speaker 2: Welcome to Finland, where even the weather is hostile.

1:08 Speaker 1: To understand I'mo Koivnin, you have to understand the Finland

1:13 Speaker 1: of nineteen forty four, an environment so brutally cold, so dark,

1:18 Speaker 1: and so unforgiving that even bears probably woke up from

1:22 Speaker 1: hibernation just to complain. The country was locked in the

1:26 Speaker 1: continuation War with the Soviet Union, which meant soldiers weren't

1:30 Speaker 1: just fighting the enemy, they were fighting the climate, the

1:34 Speaker 1: deep snow, the endless forests, and the daily existential dread

1:39 Speaker 1: that comes with operating in temperatures where your eyelashes can

1:43 Speaker 1: freeze together. But Finland has a cultural concept called sisu,

1:48 Speaker 1: a word that roughly means grit, endurance, courage, stubbornness, and

1:54 Speaker 1: the unshakable belief that if something awful is happening, the

1:58 Speaker 1: correct response is well, I'll survive it out of sheer spite.

2:03 Speaker 1: Imo was se Su personified. He was part of a

2:06 Speaker 1: Finnish ski patrol sliding through the wilderness on reconnaissance missions

2:11 Speaker 1: that were less winter wonderland and more cold, exhausting nightmare

2:15 Speaker 1: from which there is no escape.

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2:40 Speaker 3: fear and adrenaline just don't come out on their own.

2:43 Speaker 2: Meet Imo, the Man, the Myth, the human miscommunication.

2:50 Speaker 1: Imo Koivunen was twenty seven years old, built like a

2:53 Speaker 1: finish oak tree, and trained to survive in arctic conditions

2:57 Speaker 1: that would make most of us cry, lie down, and

3:00 Speaker 1: accept frostbite as our new lifestyle. On March eighteenth, nineteen

3:05 Speaker 1: forty four, Amo's ski patrol was ambushed by Soviet forces.

3:10 Speaker 1: The team turned around and skied like their lives depended

3:13 Speaker 1: on it, because they did. Hours passed, the snow deepened,

3:18 Speaker 1: the cold intensified. Everyone was exhausted, and Amo knew he

3:22 Speaker 1: had to stay alert to navigate and stay alive. Fortunately,

3:26 Speaker 1: or rather disastrously, Amo was carrying the group's supply of pervitin,

3:31 Speaker 1: the methamphetamine tablets issued by the Finnish Army to keep

3:35 Speaker 1: soldiers awake. These pills were powerful, potent and absolutely not

3:40 Speaker 1: meant to be consumed in bulk. But when Amo, shaking

3:44 Speaker 1: with cold and wearing giant winter gloves, tried to open

3:47 Speaker 1: the bottle, it slipped, every pill spilled into his palm, and,

3:52 Speaker 1: in a moment that will go down in the history

3:54 Speaker 1: of choices you can never take back, he swallowed the

3:57 Speaker 1: entire bottle. He later admitted he had no ice. Why

4:01 Speaker 1: panic exhaustion, Finland, we simply don't know. Within minutes, i'mo

4:07 Speaker 1: blasted into what can only be described as turbo mode.

4:11 Speaker 1: His heart rate skyrocketed, his senses sharpened, The world became

4:15 Speaker 1: a blur of snow and adrenaline. He started skiing faster

4:19 Speaker 1: and faster, until he wasn't just escaping the Soviets, he

4:22 Speaker 1: was out running his own patrol. Eventually, he skied so

4:26 Speaker 1: far ahead that he lost them entirely and plunged deeper

4:29 Speaker 1: into the wilderness, now a one man's ski meteor, propelled

4:33 Speaker 1: by pure chemical chaos.

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4:41 Speaker 3: the lamp designed for people living in places where the

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5:05 Speaker 2: Hallucinations, land mines, and raw bird.

5:09 Speaker 1: Oh my, Imo wasn't just skiing fast, He was skiing

5:13 Speaker 1: into another dimension. He began hallucinating, seeing shapes and figures

5:18 Speaker 1: in the snow that did not exist. He blacked out,

5:21 Speaker 1: woke up alone, skied more, blacked out again, and kept going.

5:26 Speaker 1: His survival instincts were on autopilot, overridden by pharmaceutical jet fuel.

5:32 Speaker 1: Then came one of the most unbelievable moments of the

5:35 Speaker 1: entire ordeal. While staggering through a snowy clearing, he stepped

5:40 Speaker 1: on a Soviet land mine. It detonated. The explosion, shredded

5:45 Speaker 1: his clothing, blasted him off his skis, and hurled him

5:48 Speaker 1: across the ground in a cloud of snow and fear.

5:52 Speaker 1: But somehow, because Finland, Amo lived. He got back up,

5:57 Speaker 1: half naked, half conscious, and entire highly done with everyone's nonsense.

6:02 Speaker 1: At one point, starving and delirious, he spotted a bird

6:06 Speaker 1: hopping along the snow. Instead of admiring its beauty, Amo

6:10 Speaker 1: lunged at it, caught it with his bare hands, and

6:13 Speaker 1: ate it raw. Later, He managed to boil pine needles

6:17 Speaker 1: in melted snow to create a kind of desperate survival soup,

6:21 Speaker 1: which probably tasted like sadness but kept him alive for days.

6:27 Speaker 1: He wandered the frozen wilderness alone. He skied more than

6:31 Speaker 1: two hundred fifty miles. His heart rate hit two hundred

6:35 Speaker 1: beats per minute and stayed that way for days, a

6:38 Speaker 1: medical impossibility that doctors later described as something that absolutely

6:43 Speaker 1: should have killed him. But Imo kept skiing because the

6:46 Speaker 1: alternative was stopping and freezing solid.

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7:20 Speaker 2: The rescue, or as Finland calls it, Tuesday.

7:25 Speaker 1: After over a week alone, Amo stumbled into a finish camp, collapsed,

7:30 Speaker 1: and was rushed to a field hospital. His pulse was

7:33 Speaker 1: still dangerously high. He weighed about as much as a snowshoe.

7:37 Speaker 1: He was malnourished, exhausted, dangerously dehydrated, and alive. The doctors

7:44 Speaker 1: could not believe it. His survival defied every medical rule

7:47 Speaker 1: they knew. Yet Amo made a full recovery, returned to

7:51 Speaker 1: civilian life after the war, and lived peacefully until his

7:55 Speaker 1: death at age seventy one. He rarely talked about what happened, because, honestly,

8:01 Speaker 1: how would you even start that conversation? Hi I once

8:06 Speaker 1: took all the drugs meant for an entire platoon and

8:09 Speaker 1: accidentally re enacted the plot of the Revenant.

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8:18 Speaker 3: the heated inserts designed to protect your toes in the

8:21 Speaker 3: coldest climates, whether you're walking to your car or skiing

8:25 Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty miles across a war torn wilderness

8:28 Speaker 3: while hallucinating snow goblins. Frostbite footwarmers will keep your toes

8:33 Speaker 3: warm and toasty. Frostbite footwarmers, because losing toes went out

8:38 Speaker 3: of style in the eighteen hundreds.

8:40 Speaker 1: And that, dear listeners, is the absolutely true story of

8:44 Speaker 1: Imokoivenin the Finnish soldier who turned himself into a hyperactive

8:49 Speaker 1: snow ghost and survived one of the wildest endurance trials

8:53 Speaker 1: ever recorded. He skied through blizzards, he skied through hallucinations,

8:58 Speaker 1: he skied through explosions, he skied through starvation, and he

9:03 Speaker 1: somehow came out the other side alive, proving once and

9:06 Speaker 1: for all that Finland is built differently. Thank you for

9:10 Speaker 1: listening to the Strange History podcast. I'm Amy reminding you

9:14 Speaker 1: to stay curious, stay strange, and above all, follow the

9:18 Speaker 1: recommended dosage always and subscribe. We promise it will be

9:23 Speaker 1: a wild ride.