Jerry Daniels

In 1975, as the communist Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese Army advanced on the Hmong base at Long Tieng, Daniels organized the air evacuation of Vang Pao and more than two thousand of his officers, soldiers, and their families to Thailand.

[4] Immediately after the departure of Daniels and Vang Pao, thousands more Hmong fled across the Mekong river to Thailand, where they lived in refugee camps.

The Long Tieng valley consisted mostly of a 4,400 feet (1,300 m) runway surrounded by a Hmong settlement of several thousand people.

[2][3][4] The Paris Peace Accords in 1973 ended U.S. direct involvement in the Vietnam War and restrictions on U.S. military aid imposed by the Lao government doomed the Hmong.

In April 1975, the United States rapidly began airlifting Americans and Vietnamese employees out of South Vietnam prior to the fall of Saigon to Communist forces.

Daniels was the only American still working full-time at Long Tieng and he organized the evacuation of Hmong from Laos to Thailand May 12–14, 1975.

Daniels and several American civilian pilots evacuated Vang Pao and 2,500 Hmong leaders and their families from Laos to northeastern Thailand where they were placed in hastily created refugee camps.

Daniels returned to Thailand to assist Hmong refugees crossing the Mekong River from Laos in large numbers.

Resistance to Hmong resettlement was overcome by the advocacy by refugee workers such as Daniels, Lionel Rosenblatt, Shepard Lowman, MacAlan Thompson, John Tucker, Pop Buell and many others.

He was in charge of a large and complex process of screening Hmong refugees to determine their eligibility to be resettled in the United States.

The Hmong did not have a written language so screening was done visually and verbally to determine a person's refugee status and eligibility for resettlement.

To comply with U.S. laws against bigamy, a single wife had to be designated by the husband and the other wives move out of the household and live separately.

[5] Hmong around the world have since claimed to have seen Daniels in Laos, the United States, and Europe after the time of his proclaimed death.