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

Jerry "Hog" Daniels's skills as an outdoorsman and smokejumper in Montana made him an ideal candidate for covert CIA operations in Laos and his good natured will allowed him to gain acceptance among the Hmong people. This coupled with his exemplary work for the CIA made it even more puzzling when Daniels's body turned up dead in his apartment in San Francisco. Allegedly the victim of carbon monoxide leak, the body was shipped to his hometown in a casket suspiciously sealed by the U.S. State Department. Employing the same approach as in her previous work, Morrison (Sky is Falling) strings together an oral history through dozens of interviews with former CIA agents, Hmong, as well as Daniels's family and friends, in an attempt to offer both an assessment of Daniels's good deeds and an answer to his death. She succeeds in the former, recounting story after story of likeable goofiness, bravery, and good nature, while failing spectacularly at determining whether or not Daniels was the victim of a dark conspiracy. Morrison dedicates an inordinate amount of the book to intricacies of the traditional Hmong burial ceremony and other anecdotes, missing the obvious and enticing opportunity to analyze the data and develop a theory. Without any investigative work, Morrison's account of a rich news story is hardly noteworthy. (May)