Ford served in the U.S. Army at Fort Bragg and in Orléans, France. Following an apprenticeship at the Overseas Weekly in Frankfurt, Germany, he became a free-lance writer in Durham, New Hampshire. He received a Stern Fund Magazine Writers' Award (1964) for his dispatches from South Vietnam, published in The Nation; a Verville Fellowship (1989–90) at the National Air and Space Museum to work with Japanese accounts of the air war in Southeast Asia; and an Aviation - Space Writers' Association Award of Excellence (1992) for his history of the Flying Tigers. He is best known for his Flying Tigers research, and for the 1967 Vietnam novel Incident at Muc Wa that became the Burt Lancaster film Go Tell the Spartans.
Ford is a resident scholar at the University of New Hampshire. He writes for The Wall Street Journal, Michigan War Studies Review, and Air&Space/Smithsonian magazine; maintains the Warbird's Forum and Reading Proust websites; and blogs on Daniel Ford's Blog. He soloed in a J-3 Piper Cub at the age of 68 and flew as a sport pilot until he turned 80.
Non-fiction
Looking Back From Ninety: The Depression, the War, and the Good Life That Followed (2021) ISBN978-1732230026
Cowboy: The Interpreter Who Became a Soldier, a Warlord, and One More Casualty of Our War in Vietnam (2018) ISBN978-1732230002
Editor: The Greater America: An Epic Journey Through a Vibrant New Country (1907, revised 2017) ISBN978-1544938301
Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942 (1991, 2nd edition 2007, 3rd edition 2016; translated into Chinese) ISBN978-0-69-273473-5
Poland's Daughter: How I Met Basia, Hitchhiked to Italy, and Learned About Love, War, and Exile (2013) ISBN978-1494729899
A Vision So Noble: John Boyd, the OODA Loop, and America's War on Terror (2010) ISBN978-1-4515-8981-8
Editor: The Lady and the Tigers: Remembering the Flying Tigers of World War II, by Olga Greenlaw (1943, revised 2002) ISBN978-0-595-22234-6
The Only War We've Got: Early Days in South Vietnam (2001) ISBN978-1479194728