Hog’s Exit: Jerry Daniels, the Hmong, and the CIA

19. Kickers for the CIA

252 || 19 Kickers for the CIA W HY smokejumpers were recruited to work overseas; chronology of a relationship between the U.S. Forest Service and CIA; admiration for adventurers. LEE “TERRIBLE TORGY” TORGRIMSON, grade school friend; Missoula crony Jerry jumped for two or three years before the CIA started recruitin’ guys out of the smokejumper base. I remember Oehlerich talking about a bunch of smokejumpers not coming back to Missoula. He said they got “other jobs.” And I’m sure that’s what it was. They were being recruited by the CIA from their Forest Service jobs so they could train at the airbase in Marana, Arizona, then head overseas. KEN HESSEL, former smokejumper; former Continental Air Services (CASI) Air Operations, MR2, Laos I’ll tell you why the CIA was interested in smokejumpers. They went after people who knew parachutes, plain and simple. Air drops was the only damn way they could supply those people in Tibet or up there in that rough terrain in Laos. So they came to the jumpers ’cause we had the expertise to rig cargo and not only drop the supplies into timber but jump into timber if we had to. JACK TUPPER DANIELS, brother of Jerry Daniels When Jerry was first doing the Air America cargo drops, that’s all he was doing, dropping cargo into Laos. He told me he made 300 and some flights in one year and he was shot at almost every time. He said, “But most of them didn’t reach the plane.” Mostly it was rifle fire and you could see tracers coming up and then curve down before they got to you. Once in a while they’d go over a .50-caliber gun. One time he told me he was sitting on a seat and he got up to check on some cargo and a .50-caliber round went right through the chair he’d been sitting on. So he had some close calls, but that didn’t seem to bother him at all. Kickers for the CIA || 253 MIKE OEHLERICH, former smokejumper; former Air America loadmaster, Laos I got recruited out of the Missoula smokejumper base after coming back from early fire season in Silver City, New Mexico. Probably that was in the spring of 1961. I got a phone call, and they asked me if I could keep my mouth shut, and did I want to go to work overseas for good money. Not too many weeks after that I landed at Takhli airbase in Thailand, and right away, to my surprise, I met up with Jerry and Jack Cahill, both Missoula jumpers, along with two other smokejumpers who were already there, Eubanks and Lewis. There were six of us jumpers, two three-man crews, working together as cargo kickers . We were hired when the Agency needed more kickers to resupply General Vang Pao’s guerrilla troops. We got up every morning before five-thirty, loaded the airplane , and kicked cargo over Laos: fly in and drop in. Some flights we kicked ammunition and hardware from Takhli; other flights we kicked bags of rice from Vientiane. I was baptized right away, third or fourth flight. We were in the C-46, and Jerry was giving me an orientation, showing me where we were on the map. He’d say, “This Using a 150-foot rope a smokejumper lowers himself to the ground after landing in a tree. Later he will reclimb the tree to retrieve his parachute. [USFS 99-1505] W. E. Steuerwald, Lolo National Forest, Montana, 1966. 254 || Hog’s Exit area is okay but watch out over here. Here are the bad guys.” We made the drop and are flying away in the empty plane when ker-WHUMP! There’s a big hole in the wing the size of a saucer. Only three feet from my butt! That’s when it hit me that there were people down there who wanted to kill me. I was overwhelmed by that thought. After we got back to base, a couple of beers helped to settle me down. Daniels was real philosophical about it: “There’s nothing you can do if it’s the golden BB that’s got your name on it.” I kicked cargo over Laos for about two years off and on. The pilots that we flew with out of Takhli would get at least 250 hours of mountain...