Rick Springfield has opened up about a wartime mortar strike he says killed a man during his band’s 1968 tour of Vietnam.
The “Jessie’s Girl” singer, 77, detailed the experience during a recent appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Springfield explained that his Australian group had traveled to the war zone to entertain American troops, a gig that became possible because the 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 added on the podcast. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
Springfield admitted he had entered the situation with purely practical motives. “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 entertainer said the tour took a violent turn when his group connected with U.S. Soldiers and spent a night in their perimeter bunkers. “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,” Springfield noted. “This is before – you couldn’t do any of this now.”
The aftermath brought the heaviest burden. “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 gave Rogan a fuller picture of how the attack unfolded. “It was like the movies,” he recalled. The radio had crackled with a warning about movement nearby, followed by confirmation that no friendly forces were 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.”
The singer said his youthful grasp of the moment as something out of a war film eventually collapsed into something far more difficult to carry.
“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,” Springfield explained. “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.”
The Australian musician went on to become a Grammy-winning pop star and actor, though this marks one of his most unvarnished public reflections on a chapter that predated his fame. The podcast conversation surfaced a memory he said has remained unresolved across decades.
