Rocker Rick Springfield recalled this week how, as a teenager, he performed for U.S. forces in Vietnam and killed a Viet Cong attacker — haunting him to this day, that he “was responsible for the end of a life.”
The Australian singer-songwriter became an ‘80s superstar with his megahit “Jessie’s Girl,” but in 1968 he was an unknown 17-year-old musician who had traveled to Southeast Asia to entertain American troops at the height of the Vietnam War.
Springfield, 77, recounted that harrowing experience on an episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” posted on Tuesday. He said he was staying at a U.S. Navy encampment in the Marble Mountains near Da Nang in when they suddenly came under attack.
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“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,” he recalled. “And we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.”
In the heat of the moment, Springfield said he was haphazardly loading a launcher and “could have easily lost a hand.”
“It was like the movies,” he told Rogan. “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.”
But what began like a scene from an action film gave way to the cold, hard realities of war.
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“I’d 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.
“That’s really the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land,” he said, saying that it feels like it happened to “another guy” in“another place.”
Rogan asked, “How long did that sit with you for?” and Springfield said the experience has never left him.
“I think it’s still there,” Springfield replied. “It’s hard for me to 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.”
Springfield also vividly recalled how unpopular the war was with the Americans fighting it in Vietnam.
“All the ones I met were, ‘Dude, I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t know what I’m doing here,’” Springfield remembered.
