Eighties rocker Rick Springfield made a shocking confession on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast this week, revealing he killed a Viet Cong soldier while visiting Vietnam to perform for U.S. troops.
In 1968, more than a decade before he shot to fame with “Jessie’s Girl,” Springfield was a little-known 17-year-old musician who traveled to Southeast Asia to entertain American servicemen during the Vietnam War.
The Australian singer-songwriter, now 77, told Rogan he was staying at a U.S. Navy encampment near Da Nang when the base suddenly 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,” he recalled. “And we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.”
Springfield recalled struggling to load a mortar launcher, admitting he “could have easily lost a hand” in the process.
“It was like the movies,” he said. “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.”
Springfield said he dropped a mortar down and was told the following day that it had hit someone.
“They came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one! You got one!’” he recalled.
“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.”
Asked by Rogan how long he had carried the experience with him, Springfield said: “I think it’s still there.”
“It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life,” he said. “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 recalled the unpopularity of the war among the American troops stationed 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,’” he remembered.
The “Love Somebody” and “Don’t Talk to Strangers” singer wrote about the Vietnam incident in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night.
“That was a war situation but it is still something that to this day sends a shiver down my spine,” Springfield wrote, calling it one of his deepest, darkest secrets.
Springfield’s big breakthrough came 13 years after his trip to Vietnam, in 1981, when he released the album Working Class Dog. Its lead single, “Jessie’s Girl,” became a huge international hit, reaching No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S.
That same year, Springfield landed the role of Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital, a role he would reprise intermittently on the long-running soap opera until 2013.
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