Jim Hinds

In his professional life, Jim E. Hinds was a decorated combat veteran, career Army officer, diplomat, Defense Department policy developer, and arms reduction treaty negotiator. In his personal life, he was a loving husband and father, avid skier, fearless home-repairman, voracious reader (in at least two languages), frustratingly reticent memoirist, loquacious storyteller, impeccable dresser, and hair icon. Stoic yet empathetic, worldly yet unaffected, Jim was a role model to people of all ages. He passed away on July 6, 2025, surrounded by family at his home in Bend, Oregon.
Jim was born in Des Ark, Arkansas, in 1935. Like his older siblings, Jim was delivered at home by his father, Harold Hinds, an itinerant ranch hand and self-taught vet/obstetrician. At age five, his family moved to Montana in a Ford pickup converted into a motorized prairie schooner by his dad. They lived in the Chinook area, moving from one rustic dwelling to the next as Harold cowboyed and carried out other jobs for the Miller Brothers ranch. These were primitive structures with wood stoves, outhouses, and water pumps, where, as Jim told it, rodent control was frequently conducted with pistols. Jim achieved early academic success in the one-room school house he attended when the teacher let him move to the second-grade row because "there was nothing left to teach" him from the first-grade curriculum.
When Jim was eight, his family moved to Havre, where his father worked on the freight docks of the Great Northern Railroad. By freshman year, Jim was an accomplished trumpet player, taking first chair in the high school band and playing in statewide competitions. It was in band that he became friendly with a clarinet player new to the school, whom he described as "the prettiest 13- year-old anyone had seen." Joan Griffin, the aforementioned winsome woodwindist, asked Jim out to the Rainbow Girls Formal, which they attended on her fourteenth birthday. They would be together for the next 74 years.
After high school, Jim worked as a surveyor for the Montana highway department, where his experiences created not only fodder for epic stories, but also life lessons – the chief among them that an education was necessary to get ahead. He began taking correspondence courses with the intention of seeking an engineering degree at Montana State University in Bozeman. Meanwhile, Joan graduated high school and went on to University of Montana in Missoula. Jim followed his heart and joined Joan at UM, where he majored in math and minored in French. He scrounged his way through college, working nights at the Missoulian and loading Coca-Cola distribution trucks while eating questionably sourced deer and vegetables donated from Joan's sorority house. The two college kids got married in 1957 at Havre Methodist Church and honeymooned at Many Glacier. Jim joined Army ROTC to help pay his way through school, and to pursue the dream of seeing Europe.
In 1960, Jim's military career began in earnest with Ranger School and Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Shortly thereafter, Uncle Sam made good on his promise to send Jim and Joan to Europe. They lived in Aschaffenberg, Germany, where the weapons platoon leader and his wife had their first daughter, Shannon, and the first glimmerings of what would become a shared lifelong obsession with Germanic culture. Decades later, their children's spouses would understandably assume, based on the myriad tchotchkes in their home, that the family was of German descent, which was simply not the case.
After the first overseas stint, the family returned to the States, where Jim attended Field Artillery School in Oklahoma, and Joan launched her own mortar round in the form of baby Jessica.
In 1965, Jim served his first combat tour in Vietnam as an advisor embedded with South Vietnamese troops. His facility with language allowed him to quickly become fluent in Vietnamese, a skill that would come in handy 35 years later when he needed to give a speech at the wedding of his son and his son's Vietnamese-American bride. While Jim was in Vietnam, his family stayed in Missoula with Joan's mother. Jim returned to them with several combat medals including the Bronze Star, as well as a '66 GTO he had giddily ordered from a kiosk in Saigon.
The Army felt like Jim deserved a less perilous assignment after his year in the jungle, and so they had him teach ROTC at University of Montana for a couple years. It was during this time that his son Andy was born. Perhaps it is merely coincidence that Jim returned to Vietnam around the time Andy reached his "terrible twos." After a year at II Field Force HQ in Vietnam, Jim returned to Montana unscathed, and without having made any notable impulse purchases. He found, however, that Joan had bought a piece of land at Flathead Lake, and had concocted a plan to build a cabin there sometime in the future.
Upon Jim's return from Vietnam, the Army started directing his attention to the Cold War, sending him to Russian language school in Monterey, California, and then a master's degree program in Soviet Studies at University of Oklahoma at Norman.
Armed with his newfound expertise in Russian language and foreign policy, his next move was naturally to build that cabin at Flathead Lake. Perhaps a residual knack for engineering, summers working on farms and railroads, and building hooches in Vietnam gave him the confidence to construct a log cabin on a largely inaccessible hillside by a glacial lake while living in a tent with his family of five all summer long. In any case, he led a crew of family members including kids, aunts and uncles, and grandparents in dragging logs down the hill and assembling them with chainsaws and sledgehammers into what would become the family's vacation home base and continuous construction project for 53 years and counting.
As soon as the cabin was roofed in, Jim and his family moved to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which caused a lot of folks back home to ask his parents, "What did he do?" His parents were then compelled to explain that their son was in the Army Command and General Staff School, not the maximum-security military prison at the same address.
The next move for the Hinds family was to the idyllic Bavarian town of Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany, in which there was a tiny Army base that housed Ski Patrollers for the nearby American-run ski resort, and students at the Russian Institute. Jim was attached to the latter, although skiing would become a major passion for the rest of his life. The Russian Institute was meant to be a two-year assignment, wherein officers were trained to become experts in all aspects of the Soviet Union. Jim managed to parlay it into a four-year stint though, becoming a Director of Instruction, much to the delight of his family, who had grown used to the Alpine lifestyle and frequent European travels. The four years in Garmisch would be the longest the whole family would ever live together in one place, and thus one of the most cherished locations in their collective memory.
The next stop on the road to Russia was a yearlong "charm school" at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C., where future attachés and other high-level officers are trained in the finer points of international diplomacy and other things we are probably not supposed to know about.
In 1978, Lieutenant Colonel Hinds and the rest of the family moved into Kutusovsky Prospekt #14, a "luxury" apartment building for foreign diplomats in the heart of Moscow, which by American standards, would more likely be described as "Yikes." For two years, Jim worked at the U.S. Embassy Moscow as an Assistant Army Attache representing U.S. diplomatic and military interests and maybe taking some pictures of stuff the Soviets didn't want people to know about. Meanwhile the Hinds family adapted to their new reality, replete with hurdles (like no English-speaking high school or fresh vegetables), but also unique experiences that would enrich their lives immeasurably.
In 1980, Jim and his family returned to the U.S. where Jim would work on policy issues at the Pentagon under several administrations. Some of the notable projects he worked on were Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, aka "Star Wars" – often mocked as fantastical in its time, but prescient in hindsight–and arms reduction treaties such as Mutual Balanced Force Reduction. At this time, he rose to the rank of full Colonel and held the title of Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Jim retired from the Army in 1985 but continued working for the Department of Defense as a civilian. His final assignment in government was as a treaty negotiator after the fall of the Soviet Union. This was originally meant to be just few years of traveling back and forth to Europe for talks, but as the continent went through rapid changes, the scope of the negotiations broadened and required him to stay in Vienna for six years as the U.S. representative to the Conventional Forces Europe treaty, a major landmark in the end of the Cold War. Joan joined Jim in Vienna during this time, a fitting culmination to an era of international adventure together.
Perhaps Jim's most remarkable professional achievement was his complete retirement at age 59. Unlike many of his peers, Jim declared himself "self-unemployed" and resisted the siren song of think tanks, consultancies, and defense contractor positions. Instead, he and Joan spent some time looking for their forever home in the mountains of the western United States. Eventually they settled on Bend, Oregon, which offered world class skiing (priority number one), sunshine, a good bakery, and, although not on par with Vienna, enough arts and culture to keep them entertained.
Jim's retirement lasted for 30 years, during most of which he was able to embody the Bend lifestyle–skiing, mountain biking, canoeing and going on dates with his best girl. He and Joan spent a good deal of each summer at the Flathead Lake cabin, often joined by their children and grandchildren. They also continued to travel internationally: to France, Italy, and even back to Garmisch-Partenkirchen for a family reunion. When not skiing or biking, Jim spent much of his time reading, cooking, and making improvements on both the Bend house and the Montana cabin. In 2018, at age 82, he took on his last big construction project, the "Sky Cottage" on the property at Flathead Lake. While his son Andy did most of the carpentry, Jim plumbed and wired the structure, meant for overflow guests at the lake. As was the case with many daunting endeavors, Jim said of the intricate septic system he designed and installed for the remote structure, "It's too complicated for the professionals."
Jim is survived by his beloved wife Joan, his children Shannon Furniss (Jerry Furniss), Jessica Caudle, and Andy Hinds (Thao Tran), grandchildren Bobby Jahrig, Cody Jahrig, Jimmy Glidden, Chris Caudle, Madeleine Hinds, and Olivia Hinds, his sister Susie, and many nieces, nephews, and great grandchildren. He was an absolute legend and will be remembered and missed by them forever.