Rick Springfield had a harrowing experience that cost a man his life while touring with the troops during the Vietnam War.
“The closest occidental country was Australia. So the G.I.s wanted to see 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,” the singer, 77, said during the Tuesday, September 8, episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
Springfield explained that he performed in Vietnam around 1968 and 1969, which was in the midst of the conflict. The war began in 1955 and lasted for 20 years.
At one point during the tour, Springfield ended up bunking with some of the soldiers for an evening, and an attack occurred.
“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,” he said. “And I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.”
The “Jessie’s Girl” musician claimed that a message came through the radio warning them that there was movement nearby and there weren’t any allies in that 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 said of the attack.
Springfield confessed that he learned that his action cost a man his life.
“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,'” he recalled. “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.”
The Grammy winner admitted he still feels guilty about what happened in Vietnam.
“I think it’s still there, you know? It’s hard for me to kind of face [the fact] that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it’s distant, and it’s war,” he reflected. “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.”
