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GILBERT D. SPRAGUE

E. Iowan remembers airborne experiences in WWII

   COLESBURG --- With more than 600 parachute jumps to his credit, Gilbert "Buck" Sprague still remembers the sixth one like it was yesterday, not 60 years ago. That's why, despite three trips to Europe since World War II, Buck hasn't returned to Normandy's beaches, the site of the Allied invasion that was the turning point of the war in Europe.
   "I seen all I wanted that day when I went in," says Buck, now 80.
   He lives by himself in a small Colesburg home with a "Proud to be an American" sign on the front porch. Today he will march in a Memorial Day parade, either in nearby Edgwood or Guttenberg. He will pay tribute to his comrades on this day, and next Sunday he will think back to that early morning of June 6, 1944. It was D-Day, Buck was 20 years old and among 2,056 men of the 82nd Airborne, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, on their first combat airborne.
   "It felt like going through Hell" he says today. "I was pretty young to be going in the water."
   The early-morning sky was dark as the planes flew over the coast of France, but it lit up with anti-aircraft fire as one paratrooper after another leaped into battle with an M1 rifle and a field pack. Buck wasn't much different than the others who jumped that day, than many of the men and women who fought in World War II, than those who have fought in any war for their country.
   It was years earlier, 1938, when Buck, the youngest of 16 children on a Colesburg farm, had a falling out with his father, Frank, and decided to join the service. "Dad and I never got along," Buck says. "I went to agriculture school and I told him he wasn't feeding the cattle right. He hit me with a scoop shovel."
   Buck was only 15, lying about his age to fight for his country. When the Marines wouldn't take him --- Buck says he was color blind --- he became a paratrooper.
   He trained more than five years for war as Hitler's troops swept across Europe and as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He knew he'd be going somewhere, but he wasn't sure where. "I made five jumps, then overseas I went," he says.
   Buck was to help blow up a bridge. He never made it, at least on this day. On his sixth jump, on D-Day, shrapnel hit him in the mouth. It hit him in the leg.
   As he came to Earth, Buck quickly folded his chute and chucked his field pack. It was too heavy and in the way.
   He was greeted by German soldiers shooting at him. He fired back.

"I shot a few," Buck surmises. "I don't know how many. General (James) Gavin said you aren't supposed to count them. You're just supposed to knock them out."   As Buck's wounds worsened --- he received a Purple Heart --- he was rescued by a French couple. She sewed up his wounds and they hid him in the straw in their barn.
  A couple of days later, Buck met up with his outfit. He would serve the rest of the war in Europe. He would be come a jump master to train others to parachute. He would become an MP when the war was over. He would meet his wife, Frances, a Latvian woman who weighed just 78 pounds after surviving the Dachau concentration camp because she could speak eight languages. Since she later worked for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Buck served in his honor guard, the general signed their wedding papers.
   When Buck returned to Iowa, he carried boxing gloves as he approached his father. "I wanted to prove to my dad I could do it," Buck says about his service record. He asked his father, "You still want to take me on?" "Gilbert," replied his father. "I don't ever want to take you on. I never should have done what I did." His father showed him new respect.
   And after 22 years in the service, Buck farmed for a while and then spent 20 years as a guard at the Anamosa State Penitentiary, retiring in 2000. He and Frances had nine children, 23 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren. She died in 1975.
   One of Buck's three trips to Europe was for the 50th anniversary of D-Day. He wanted his return trip to be similar to his first one, but heart surgery prevented him from parachuting with other members of the 508th.
   So, Buck didn't reach the beaches at Normandy, although he ran into a woman who returned the jacket, helmet and knife he had left behind in that barn a half-century earlier.
   A couple of years later, in 1996, Buck jumped from a plane in Wisconsin. Three years ago he parachute jumped in Belgium. So, this December, at another reunion of the 508th, he plans to finally jump again at Normandy, even though he's not 20 any more,
   "I want to sky dive," Buck says. "The girls over there say I can't, but I want to try. "I'm not scared," he adds.
   "I couldn't climb a windmill. I could jump off it, but I couldn't climb it."
   So, he hopes, a plane will do the climbing and a parachute jump will close the door on 60 years of memories.

[The Gazette, Cedar Rapids, IA, 31 May 2004, Mon. Page 20]

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