Long before “Jessie’s Girl” and General Hospital, Rick Springfield spent several months performing for troops in Vietnam. During that trip, the then-teenage musician found himself caught in an attack — and claims one of the mortars he fired killed a man.
Springfield revisited the harrowing experience during a new appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. In 1968, at age 19, he traveled to South Vietnam with Australian band MPD Ltd., performing for troops while based out of Saigon and Da Nang. Springfield said what he initially imagined might be an easy way to make some money quickly became considerably more dangerous as the band traveled through an active war zone.
During one overnight stay at a Navy encampment near Marble Mountain outside Da Nang, the base came under attack. Springfield was in the radio shack while his bandmates sheltered in perimeter bunkers. After soldiers confirmed there were no friendly forces in the area, Springfield said he was invited to load mortars into a firing tube.
“It was John Wayne time,” Springfield recalled, explaining that as a teenager he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. He fired roughly five or six mortars during the attack. The next morning, soldiers told him one had struck a Viet Cong fighter.
“The hardest thing for me was that I’d thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody,” Springfield told Rogan. He said the knowledge has remained difficult for him to process nearly six decades later.
Springfield has spoken about his time in Vietnam before. In a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he recalled spending nights at military encampments and firing weapons alongside soldiers, calling the decision to tour the country as a teenager “a very, very stupid thing to do.” He also said his mother noticed a “haunted look” in his eyes when he returned home and that he jumped at a car exhaust.
Watch Springfield discuss his experience in Vietnam on The Joe Rogan Experience below. The Vietnam conversation starts around the 15:00 mark.
