Dublin graduate Jason Spruill has traveled all over the world with a military career, and enjoyed experiencing other cultures and meeting people from different walks of life. He’s retired now, but his open-minded pursuit of knowledge and experience continues. “I learned a long time ago that I can learn something new every day,” he said.
Spruill graduated from Dublin High School in 1997. One of his role models growing up, his neighbor Gerald Cook, encouraged him to go into the military, so Spruill joined the Air Force.
He served one term, and spent 90 percent of that time on various deployments in Saudia Arabia and other places, working in security and policing roles. The years he spent in the Air Force were at an interesting time in history, before 9/11 and after Desert Storm.
“When Al Qaeda and Bin Laden weren’t big names in the US, I already knew all these names and people, because that’s the area that I dealt with and that’s the people we were in combat with,” he said.
Spruill worked under multiple generals and met the secretary of defense, but his favorite part of being in the military was traveling. “I enjoy going places, and I learned very quickly that if you go to a different country, understand that you’re in their country and respect their cultures,” he said. “I had such a different experience than most people — I literally now have friends all over the world. I absorbed their culture, and so we just had a good time. Now I can pretty much travel anywhere to find somebody I know.” After his four years of service, Spruill was dealing with stress and anxiety disorder as a result of PTSD, and he decided to leave the military. “I never looked back,” he said. “I just took my career and went other places with it, stepped away from the military and decided that I needed to grow someplace else for a while.”
Spruill got married and moved to Arizona with his new wife, who was also in the military at the time. Spruill started searching for work in Tucson.
His first big job after leaving the Air Force was at Intuit, the Fortune 500 company that makes QuickBooks and TurboTax. He did call support for one of their business tax softwares, the Pro Series line.
“It was a really unique place,” he said. “It rated in the top 10 best places to work in the US, or it was at the time I was there. Every month we had a little party. They had a five star chef that was working in the cafeteria for us. It was just a totally different experience. They really took good care of us.”
Spruill left Intuit in 2007 to move back to Texas, specifically Wichita Falls. He and his wife got a divorce, and two years later he met Samantha, who would go on to be his current wife. Back in Texas, Spruill started working at a golf course as an irrigation specialist. After a few years there, he took a job for the City of Wichita Falls working as a water technician and mechanic.
“We have multiple different water purification systems that we use here,” he said. “We have reverse osmosis, we have three clarifiers and microfiltration, and so we had to work and maintain all of that equipment. We have two different locations and three different lakes that we controlled and had to get water from, plus the water towers. We climbed water towers to inspect them. So my day-to-day was all over the place, depending on what was going on with our system.”
Spruill has always been a good problem solver and enjoys taking things apart to figure out how they work, so the sometimes-difficult work was enjoyable to him.
“It was a lot of fun, because it was never the same day twice,” he said. “I loved every bit of it because I like random — I like something different, challenging, new, and that’s what it was every single day.”
In 2022, Spruill retired from the City of Wichita Falls, and now enjoys a quiet life. “I don’t do much,” he said. “I go for walks and ride my bike a whole lot. My wife works, and we have a cat, and basically I just relax most of the time.”
Spruill is grateful for the stable life he leads. Most of my life growing up was spent in a divorced household, and neither parent had much money,” he said. “We were pretty tight most of the time, and that was always a driving force that I always wanted to do better for myself. To look at myself now and see that I’m stable, I’m retired, I’m not going to have to want for medical care or anything else is a big deal to me. I’ve created this for myself.”
Spruill’s advice to Dublin graduates is to get out and travel. “Definitely go see the world,” he said. “Don’t be an American if you go travel — be a part of their culture, wherever you go, and you’ll have so much more fun.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email publisher@dublincitizen.com.