Rick Springfield says he killed a man during the Vietnam War, decades before he became a rock star, after his band traveled to entertain American troops and he ended up in a firefight.
Springfield made the disclosure during an appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. The Australian singer said his band was hired to tour Vietnam in 1968 because U.S. soldiers “wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home,” and bands with female members could get booked to perform in the war zone.
“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,” Springfield said. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
He said he took the job expecting nothing more than 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.”
The tour turned into direct combat when Springfield’s band spent the night with soldiers who came under 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,” he said. “It was freaky. This is before – you couldn’t do any of this now.”
Springfield described the moment before he fired as feeling scripted. “It was like the movies,” he said, recalling that a radio warning came in about movement nearby, followed by confirmation there were no friendly forces in the area.
“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.”
He didn’t learn the outcome until the next day. “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.'”
Springfield said the weight of that moment has stayed with him ever since. “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.”
Looking back, he said the bravado of youth has given way to a harder reckoning with what happened. “I think it’s still there, you know? 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.”
