‘I’ve seen all that, done all that’

Jim Sprague of Lake Tomahawk, director of the American Legion Riders District 11, was drafted into the United States Army not long after his graduation from Wilmot High School in Kenosha County.

Before he was drafted, he worked briefly at American Brass in Kenosha.

“That was in May of 1965,” Sprague said. “I got drafted in the first part of November of 1966.”

Jim Sprague in early 1967 before he was sent to Vietnam.
(Contributed photograph)

Sprague did his basic combat training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., and his advanced individual training, or AIT, at Ft. Sill, Okla. 

“I spent five or six months at Ft. Sill and then got my orders for Vietnam,” he said. 

He was sent to Vietnam assigned to the 9th Infantry Division’s First Battalion, 11th Artillery Regiment.

Sprague was in fire direction control for the unit’s howitzers. 

“I was there when Tet went on,” he said, a reference to the attack on American forces in South Vietnam by elements of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong that began on Jan. 30, 1968 known as the “Tet Offensive.”

Asked about his experience in Vietnam, he was a little hesitant to respond. 

“Well, you’re fighting somebody and you’re killing somebody,” Sprague said. “It wasn’t the greatest.”

Following his return from Vietnam and having completed his two years in the Army, he got out. 

“We were supposed to go into the Army Reserve when we got back but everything was completely filled up,” Sprague said. “All the Army Reserve and everything else. I had two years of stand-by, you might say, but I never heard anything and I was finally discharged after two years.”

His job at American Brass was kept open for him and that’s where he spent the next nearly three decades with the company, retiring in 1996. 

Along the way, he got married on Oct. 17, 1970 and he and his wife, Eileen, had one child, a daughter. 

“I have two grandkids and one great-grandkid,” Sprague said. 

He and his wife bought a place east of Lake Tomahawk in 1980 and that’s where they’ve called home since his retirement in 1996. 

People looking down

Sprague, the son of a World War II veteran, said he joined the American Legion post in Silver Lake, about 20 miles west of Kenosha. 

“I joined right after I got out of the service,” he said. 

With he and his father working second shift at American Brass, Sprague said he wasn’t able to go to many Legion meetings “if any.”

“When I did go to something (Legion related), they’d say, ‘Who are you?’” he said. “I’d try to explain to them and they were like ‘Oh, you’re a Vietnam veteran’ and I’d say ‘Yeah, I am.’ I stayed with if for about two years and then dropped out of the Legion. I didn’t feel World War II veterans and Korean War veterans had very much to do with Vietnam veterans.”

That was the way it was for Sprague until his arrival in the Lake Tomahawk area in 1996. 

“I didn’t have a motorcycle at that time,” he said. “I had a motorcycle back in the 70s but didn’t have one when we moved up here.”

Sprague addressed the motorcycle ownership issue in 2005 after Legion members talked to him and that led to his membership once again in the American Legion. 

“The Legion Riders were around at that time and I joined in 2007,” he said. “Ive been with them ever since.”

Sprague felt different about being in the American Legion this time around. 

“When I was in the Legion down there in Kenosha, I talked to people in the POW/MIA (prisoner of war/missing in action) campaign there, did some stuff with them and tried stay with my own group of veterans because we weren’T accepted at all, really.”

In fact, Sprague said, at the time, that was the case with much of the general public toward Vietnam veterans at the time.

 “I wasn’t really proud of being a Vietnam veteran until I moved up here,” he said. “I was proud to be a veteran, don’t get me wrong, and I was proud to be a Vietnam veteran but it was the way things were then. People tended to look down at Vietnam veterans for quite awhile, even after the war was over.”

Things to help 

The American Legion Riders District 11 under Sprague’s leadership is active, appearing at area parades and other ceremonies and observances such as those at the Northwoods National Cemetery in Harshaw as well as conducting the annual Ride For Peanuts for Camp American Legion. 

The peanuts are for campers to feed chipmunks and squirrels that the camp’s “Chipmunk Crossing” near its main lodge is named for. 

In September, Sprague and other members of District 11 and the other 11 Legion Rider districts in the state along with members of the Sons of The American Legion donated nearly $30,000 toward construction of a new storage building at Camp American Legion. 

He feels it’s important that veterans that came after him, such as post-9/11 veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, are treated differently than he feels his generation of Vietnam war veterans were. 

“We try to do things to help the veterans of those wars,” Sprague said. “We were bound and determined that they weren’t going to be treated like we were.”

He said he hasn’t been on an Honor Flight for veterans who served prior to May of 1975, the closest being the Never Forgotten Honor Flight which originates from Central Wisconsin Airport in Mosinee. 

The flights are an opportunity for veterans to go to Washington, D.C. and tour the memorials there including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, also known as “the Wall.”

Sprague said he doesn’t intend to take an Honor Flight; he said his mother and father took him to Washington, D.C. as a child and decades later, he went with members of the American Legion Riders. 

“We rode there in 2010 for ‘Ride To The Wall,’” he said of the annual ride that started in 2007. “It was on Memorial Day weekend. They probably had 10,000 motorcycles.”

Sprague said the bikers rode from the Pentagon parking lot, past the White House and Capitol Hill before stopping at the Wall. 

“It was really deep,” he said of the visit to the Wall. “I feel like the guys who haven’t been there, let them go. I’ve seen all that, done all that.”

Sprague said when he got home from Vietnam in 1968 and got off the plane at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, “that was the last time I ever flew.”

“I just don’t feel I can get on a plane right now,” he said. 

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].