Rick Springfield Says He Killed a Man During Vietnam War

Rick Springfield says he killed a man during the Vietnam War, a memory he admits is “pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”

Springfield was only a teenager in 1968 when he accepted a gig entertaining U.S. troops stationed in Da Nang. The pre-fame rocker saw it as an opportunity to make money, but things took a scary turn during his stay.

“We met these [soldiers], and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them,” Springfield recalled in a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. “I stayed in the radio shack, and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.”

Springfield said it initially felt “like the movies,” as he heard officers radio that there were “no friendlies” in the area.

READ MORE: Rick Springfield’s ‘Jessie’s Girl’: 15 Facts You May Not Know

“So they said, ‘Hey, you wanna throw some mortars down the tube?’” he remembered. “And it was John Wayne time. I was a young kid. I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I said, ‘Oh, yeah! Let’s fire a gun!’ So I threw the mortars down, around five or six mortars. I could have easily lost a hand.”

Rick Springfield Still Haunted by Vietnam War Incident: ‘It’s Pretty Heavy’

The next day, Springfield was given some unexpected news.

“I’d thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” he explained. “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 the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land. It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”

READ MORE: How Rick Springfield Broke Through With ‘Working Class Dog’

Springfield admitted the weight of that incident remains with him now, decades later.

“I think it’s still there,” he said. “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. But I was a kid, and playing, like I said, John Wayne. But it’s pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”