Rick Springfield has revealed that he believes he killed a man during the Vietnam War.
During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the Australian-American singer explained that his unlikely brush with combat began when his band traveled to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops.
According to Springfield, U.S. soldiers “wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home.”
“So as long as we had a couple of girls in the band, they would hire you, and you could tour Vietnam during the war zone,” he said. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
Springfield said he went into the experience with few expectations beyond earning a paycheck. “It was insane. I thought, ‘Oh, great. We’ll make money, you know.’ And, of course, we didn’t make any money. We spent it all at the PX, and we weren’t making much money anyway.”
What began as a gig entertaining troops quickly turned deadly when Springfield found himself caught in an attack. “We met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them, and we all got in the bunkers, in the perimeter bunkers, and I stayed in the radio shack, and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack. It was freaky,” he said. “This is before—you couldn’t do any of this now.”
The gravity of what happened didn’t sink in until the next day, when Springfield learned what one of his mortars had done. “The hardest thing for me was that I had thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody, and they came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one. You got one.’ And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know? That’s really kind of the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land.”
Springfield described the moments before he fired the mortar, saying the radio crackled with a warning about movement nearby before confirming there were no friendly troops in the area. “It was like the movies,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Hey, you want to throw some mortars down the tube?’ And it was John Wayne time, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”
Springfield said the youthful bravado of that night eventually gave way to a heavier reckoning. “I think it’s still there, you know?” he said. “It’s hard for me to kind of face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it’s distant, and it’s war. And I didn’t really have anything to do with it and didn’t really know what I was doing, but you know as a kid and playing, like I said, John Wayne. But it was... pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”
