Labor Day Reflections:
Faith, Fire and 30 Years of Service
Firefighter Dave Koch
By: Chase Muro
At two in the morning, David Koch arrived at a scene he would remember for the rest of his life.
A car had been traveling along Highway 500 in Vancouver when it was struck head-on.
Inside was a 16-year-old girl.
Koch was still relatively new to the fire service. After investigators finished their work, the firefighters were called back to help remove her body from the wreckage.
Koch remembers her braided hair. He remembers how young she looked. He remembers lifting her from the car and placing her into a body bag.
“I can’t imagine what her family must have went through,” Koch said.
Thirty years in the fire service would bring many more calls.
Some were dangerous. Some were tragic. Some were so absurd that Koch and the other firefighters would laugh about them for years afterward.
But there were calls you never forgot.
For Koch, the question was how to remember them without allowing them to consume you.
His answer was faith.
“I always had a peace about me because I have a pretty strong Christian faith,” Koch said. “I always felt like God was telling me, ‘Hey, you can’t carry this with you.’”
Koch never forgot that girl.
He remembers the call as if it happened yesterday.
But somewhere over the course of his career, he learned there was a difference between remembering something and carrying it.
Finding the Fire Service
Koch grew up in Vancouver, Washington, and attended Hudson’s Bay High School.
When he graduated, he did not have his life mapped out.
Then his mother offered an idea.
Maybe he should become a firefighter.
“I’m like, it’s not a bad idea,” Koch remembered.
The suggestion stuck.
Koch enrolled at Portland Community College and began studying fire science. Eventually, the uncertain high school graduate found the profession that would become his life.
In May 1993, at 26 years old, Koch began his career with the Vancouver Fire Department.
He would stay for 30 years.
The department Koch joined was itself entering a period of change. In 1994, Vancouver Fire merged operations with Clark County Fire District 5, expanding the community its firefighters served.
Today, the department is one of the busiest in the region.
Koch would spend his career seeing that community from a perspective most people never will.
A firefighter meets people when something has gone wrong.
A fire.
A crash.
An overdose.
A death.
A decision someone wishes they could take back.
For 30 years, when people in his community called for help, Koch and his fellow firefighters climbed into an engine and went to meet them.
“It’s More Like a Big Family”
Ask Koch what people misunderstand about firefighting and he does not immediately talk about flames or rescues.
He talks about family.
“It’s not just a job,” he said. “It’s more like a big family.”
Every third day, Koch lived with his coworkers for 24 hours.
They ate together.
Slept under the same roof.
Trained together.
Watched football.
Teased one another.
Answered routine calls.
Then the alarm could sound, and minutes later those same people might be standing beside one another on one of the worst days of somebody else’s life.
Over enough years, coworkers became something more.
Koch said some became closer to him than members of his own family.
That brotherhood mattered because firefighters understood things about one another that were difficult to explain outside the station.
They knew what it was like to be awakened in the middle of the night.
They knew what it was like to see a child die.
They knew what it was like to return to the station afterward and somehow continue with the shift.
And Koch knew that not everyone processed those experiences the same way.
He remembers firefighters struggling with trauma. He remembers broken marriages. He remembers coworkers developing cancer. Most painfully, he remembers three firefighters who died by suicide.
“Good guys,” Koch called them.
Those are among the things he would never tell the young David Koch walking into the firehouse for the first time.
His younger self would have to discover the weight of the profession on his own.
But Koch also had something outside the firehouse helping him carry that weight.
He had God.
A Faith That Grew With Him
Koch's Christian faith began before his firefighting career.
He was around 16 when his sister, who was involved with Young Life, helped introduce him to Christianity.
The foundation was there, but Koch was still a teenager.
For much of the next decade, he did what plenty of young people do.
He skied.
He partied.
He enjoyed being young.
Eventually, however, he began wondering where any of it was leading.
“Man, this is going nowhere,” he remembers thinking.
At 26, around the same time he entered the fire service, Koch signed up for a Bible study.
Something changed.
He began reading the Bible not simply as words he knew, but as something he wanted to understand. He started thinking seriously about what being a Christian meant and what it required from the way he lived.
There was no dramatic overnight transformation.
“It slowly didn’t happen overnight,” Koch said. “I started changing my life in areas I needed to change. And that’s a process that’ll last to the day I die.”
That process followed him into the firehouse.
As the years passed and the difficult calls accumulated, Koch's faith became more than a set of beliefs.
It became somewhere to put the things he could not make sense of.
He went to church.
He went to Bible study.
He prayed.
And when he came home carrying memories he did not want but could never erase, he believed he could give some of their weight to God.
His faith did not make him immune to what he witnessed.
It gave him a way to live with it.
The Bible Engine
Koch was not alone in his faith.
During his time at Engine Nine, he worked alongside two men who left a lasting impression on him: paramedic Bob McComas and Captain Kevin Murray.
Both were older than Koch.
Both were married.
Both were strong Christians.
And both showed him something about what faith could look like when it left the pages of a Bible and entered the way someone treated another person.
The crew eventually earned a nickname.
“The Bible Engine.”
Koch did not even hear about the nickname until years later.
McComas had spent years as a medic before becoming a firefighter at 42. Murray was the captain, a man Koch remembers as deeply committed to his family, his faith and his profession.
“Just solid man of God,” Koch said of Murray. “Very professional. Always gave the job his best.”
One particular call showed Koch what that kind of faith could look like.
Two young boys had lost both of their parents.
There are calls firefighters can train for.
They can learn how to operate a hose, ventilate a building, drive an engine, assess a patient or respond safely to a fire.
There is no easy training for telling two children their parents are gone.
Koch watched McComas sit down with the boys.
He talked to them.
Then, before Child Protective Services arrived, McComas prayed with them.
“It was just an amazing situation,” Koch remembered.
For Koch, men like McComas and Murray made a difficult profession easier.
There were other Christians throughout the fire service too. Koch remembers Firefighters for Christ, where firefighters gathered for Bible study and sometimes identified people who needed help and went out to serve them.
It connected two important parts of Koch's life.
Faith was not simply about what happened inside a church.
Firefighting was not simply about putting out fires.
Both could be about serving the person in front of you.
Some Calls Make You Laugh
Not every memory from 30 years in the fire service carries that kind of weight.
Some are simply hilarious.
Around two in the morning one night, Koch's crew received a call about a man on a roof.
They arrived and pointed a spotlight toward the house.
There he was.
Drunk.
Naked.
On the roof.
The firefighters asked what he was doing.
The man explained that he was treating the moss on his roof with bleach.
That still did not explain the lack of clothing.
His reasoning was simple. He did not want the bleach ruining his clothes.
Eventually, the firefighters asked whether he could stand up and make his way toward their ladder.
He stood.
Then he rolled straight off the one-story roof and landed in the rhododendrons.
The comedy stopped for a moment.
Because the man was so intoxicated, the firefighters could not trust his ability to recognize an injury. They treated him as a potential neck or back injury, placed a cervical collar around his neck and secured him to a backboard.
The man responded by cursing at the people helping him.
Then the crew headed back to the station.
They laughed the whole way.
Decades in the fire service contained both kinds of nights.
On one, Koch might encounter a tragedy he would remember for the rest of his life.
On another, a naked man might fall off a roof into a bush.
Sometimes laughter was part of carrying the job too.
The People Along the Way
Then there was Flutter.
Flutter was not a firefighter, but everyone seemed to know him.
He had red hair, a large red beard and traveled around Vancouver on his bicycle. He visited fire stations and knew an astonishing amount about the department.
“He knew everything about our fire engines,” Koch said. “He knew about who the battalion chiefs were, you know, everything.”
When the engines pulled away from the station, Flutter would sometimes run alongside them, flapping his arms like a bird.
Hence the nickname.
He became a familiar face across the department.
Sometimes, Koch joked, Flutter seemed to know more about what was happening inside Vancouver Fire than the firefighters themselves.
Koch still sees him riding around Vancouver today.
Thirty years of service are not made entirely from major events.
They are built from thousands of ordinary encounters too.
Coworkers.
Captains.
Patients.
Families.
People like Flutter.
Some enter your life for a few minutes. Some stay for decades.
Each leaves something behind.
“Don’t Try to Be a Hero”
If Koch could walk into a Vancouver fire station today and find the young man who began the job in 1993, he knows some of what he would tell him.
Learn to work with different personalities.
Listen to your captain.
If you see something your captain cannot see, speak up.
Appreciate the job.
Give it your best.
Be good at whatever role you choose.
And one more thing.
“Don’t try to be a hero.”
It is a striking piece of advice from someone who spent three decades in a profession routinely described as heroic.
But Koch's career taught him that courage and recklessness are not the same thing.
He remembers entering an auto parts store around two in the morning as propane bottles exploded inside.
That made him nervous.
But firefighters were trained to assess risk. Over his career, Koch watched the profession become increasingly focused on safety.
A firefighter did not need to run blindly into a burning building to prove something.
The mission was to help people and make sure everyone on the crew went home.
Experience taught Koch something similar about life outside a burning building.
You do not always know everything.
Listen.
Pay attention.
Do your job.
Take care of the people beside you.
And understand that some things are bigger than you.
The Things You Cannot See
There is another lesson Koch learned over 30 years, and perhaps it is the one that connects his career and his faith most closely.
Do not be so quick to judge.
A firefighter walks into lives already in progress.
The person on the other side of the call might be experiencing homelessness.
They might be addicted to drugs.
They might be an alcoholic.
They might be belligerent.
They might have made decisions Koch would never make himself.
But by the time the fire engine arrives, Koch is seeing only one scene from a much longer story.
“I know they have a story,” he said. “And I don’t know what happened.”
Maybe that person grew up without a father.
Maybe they were abused.
Maybe they never had the stable family Koch had.
Maybe something happened years ago that helped put them in the situation they were in when Koch met them.
He could not know.
And eventually his Christian faith pushed him toward a simple conclusion.
Judgment was not his job.
“I’m not anybody to judge,” Koch said. “It’s not my place to judge anybody.”
That lesson did not apply only to strangers on emergency calls.
Koch remembers a firefighter he simply did not like.
He thought the man was arrogant.
Over time, however, Koch realized he was doing exactly what he had learned not to do with the people he encountered on calls.
He was judging someone whose entire story he did not know
.
So he tried something different.
He prayed for him.
It is a small detail from a 30-year career.
It might also say more about David Koch than any burning building ever could.
Everyone Has a Story
Today, Koch is retired and still lives in Vancouver.
At 59, he feels good.
He works out. He has spent much of his life skiing, sometimes dozens of days in a year. After recent knee procedures, he is learning that the mountains may need to look a little different as he gets older.
Maybe fewer risks.
Maybe fewer steep runs.
But he still wants to be up there.
After 30 years in the Vancouver Fire Department, retirement has also given him time to look back.
There were fires.
There were explosions.
There were sleepless nights.
There were ridiculous calls.
There were friends who became family.
There were people he lost.
There were strangers he met once and never saw again.
And through it all, there was a faith that began when he was 16 and grew alongside him.
The young Christian became a young firefighter.
The young firefighter became an experienced one.
And somewhere along those 30 years, the things Koch witnessed began shaping the way he looked at people.
For most of his career, he arrived after something had already happened.
He rarely knew what someone's life looked like the day before.
He certainly did not know everything that had happened in the years before that.
He simply met them where they were.
Sometimes on the worst day of their lives.
Maybe that is why the words “everyone has a story” mean something particular to David Koch.
Because he has seen how little we actually know about one another.
A firefighter can see the addiction without seeing the childhood.
He can see the anger without seeing the hurt.
He can see the mistake without seeing everything that came before it.
He can see a person at their worst and mistake that moment for the whole person.
Koch's faith taught him not to.
Thirty years of firefighting gave him plenty of opportunities to practice.
Every alarm sent him toward another person.
Every door opened onto another life.
Every person had arrived there somehow.
And after three decades of seeing people on days they would remember forever, David Koch came away believing that it was never his place to judge the whole story from a single chapter.
That part, he leaves to God.
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A Personal Note
Dave, thank you for sharing your story and for your 30 years of service to the Vancouver community. I especially appreciated hearing how your faith guided you through it all.
And thank you to Jadon for making this conversation possible.
God bless, Happy Labor Day, and Dave, I hope retirement brings plenty of birdies and very few three-putts!
Chase