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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Legacy of War: Helicopter pilot Jim Emch was the 85th Spokane County resident to die in Vietnam

Flying helicopters was Jim Emch’s dream. When he was 8, the Emch family attended Fairchild Air Force Base’s open house, where Jim had the chance to sit at the controls of an Army helicopter.

Some 10 years later, freshly graduated from Ferris High School, Emch enlisted in the Army. Eleven years later, he was the pilot of a different version of that same helicopter, a UH-1C Huey gunship, in Vietnam. Twelve years later, on July 29, 1970, when he had only days left on his tour of duty in Southeast Asia, Chief Warrant Officer Jim Emch was killed in a helicopter crash as he was teaching another pilot a particularly difficult maneuver.

His family was preparing for his return when an officer in a dress uniform and a chaplain showed up at his parents’ South Hill home. His sister Judy opened the door. She asked if her brother was hurt.

The officer wanted to speak to her parents, who weren’t there. Judy said she’d take them to her parents if they’d just tell her.

“What they said, I don’t remember,” Judy Emch Cleghorn recalled nearly 46 years later. But it didn’t matter, because she already knew.

So did her parents and her sister Janice, who were at a house the Emchs were building south of Spokane, when Judy, unsuccessfully fighting back tears as she clutched her 6-month-old son, arrived with the military team.

“It was horrible,” Janice Hamilton recalled recently. Their mother started screaming. Their father, John Emch, a B-17 pilot in World War II who spent about six months in a German prison camp after being shot down in a bombing run, put his head in his hands and sobbed – something neither daughter had ever seen him do.

On Aug. 4, 1970, Jim Emch’s body was flown home.

“He came home the day he was supposed to, except he was in the hold instead of the passenger cabin,” Judy said. She recalled being in downtown Spokane that morning, shopping for a dress for the funeral and seeing her brother’s picture on the front page of The Spokesman-Review.

Emch was the 85th Spokane County resident to die in the Vietnam War. By the time The Spokane Chronicle carried the story that afternoon, there was another about the 86th death – Army 1st Lt. Dennis Noble, killed by mortar fire.

Before American forces completely left Southeast Asia five years later, at least 92 fathers, sons or brothers from Spokane County would die in the war. It’s an imprecise number because the official rolls list a service member’s hometown when he enlisted, which might not be where his family lived when he died.

The notice of Emch’s death that day listed his parents, siblings and grandmother in Spokane, but didn’t have the many details of his military career. He received an Army Commendation Medal, a Bronze Star and a Distinguished Flying Cross, the last for providing cover and taking fire in his helicopter as a medical evacuation helicopter removed wounded troops from a battle zone. That information wasn’t always quickly available from the military at the height of the war.

Most details of the crash were withheld for years by the Army. The family searched for about 40 years, finally getting information from two other pilots Jim Emch was training that day. Judy’s son tracked them down over the Internet through an Army helicopter pilots association.

Judy and Janice remember their brother as someone who could always make people laugh. The siblings honor his memory on special birthdays by bringing a bottle to the cemetery, taking turns taking a shot, and pouring one out for Jim.

“I wonder, what would he have been, what would he have evolved into,” Janice said. “Sometimes, I’ll be driving down the road and see a Vietnam Veteran sticker, look in the car and think, ‘He’d be that old.’ I can’t wrap my head around that.”

If he’d come home, he’d probably still want to fly. He’d probably want to keep being a helicopter pilot, Judy said. He might be retired now, because he’d be 66 next month; although in his siblings’ minds, he remains forever young.

When Judy visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., she brought a photo album of Jim to leave in his memory and make him a person, not just a name carved in stone. When their younger brother Jack made that trip, he cut off the ponytail he began growing when they got the news of Jim’s death, and left it at the wall.

When the traveling wall came to the Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena in 1998, Judy, Janice and Jack, who has since died, went to read the names and ring the bell to toll the losses.

The nation may have been divided about the Vietnam War, Janice said, but Jim was proud to represent his country.

“I don’t want anybody to forget about these men,” Judy said. “Or the ones that are overseas now. They’re doing the same thing.”

When American troops were deployed to the Middle East in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Judy and her granddaughters tied hundreds of ribbons around the bushes in her Spokane Valley yard. She had bought ribbons to celebrate Jim’s return in 1970, but they never came out of the bag.

“I try to make people aware that there’s more to their freedom than just words,” Judy said.

A few weeks after her brother died, Judy said she came upon her normally stoic father crying. He said he wasn’t sure Jim knew that he loved him, because he didn’t think he ever told his son that. Of course he did, Judy assured her father – he knew you loved him and were proud of him.

After that John Emch never said goodbye to his children or grandchildren without giving them a hug, and telling them he loved them.