Rick Springfield Reveals He Killed a Man While Entertaining Troops During Vietnam War

Decades after the Vietnam War came to an end, Rick Springfield revealed he inadvertently killed a man while entertaining troops during the conflict.

On the Joe Rogan Experience, Springfield detailed the Vietnam War tour, noting that 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 explained. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”

The “Jessie’s Girl” hitmaker noted the experience was an “insane” way to make money. “Of course, we didn’t make any money. We spent it all at the PX (post exchange), and we weren’t making much money anyway,” he pointed out.

However, things turned “freaky” when Springfield was attacked.

“We met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them,” he recalled. “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 then noted, “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.”

Speaking about what happened before he fired the mortar, Springfield said it was “like the movies” as he heard a radio warning that there were no “friendlies” in the area.

When asked if he wanted to “throw some mortars down the tube,” Springfield noted, “And it was John Wayne time, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”

The music legend noted that the situation is still something that he continues to recall even decades later. “I think it’s still there, you know?” he shared. “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,” he added. “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.”