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Long before Rick Springfield became a rock star and heartthrob, he found himself caught in the Vietnam War.
Springfield revealed he made a split-second decision that he said ended another man’s life and has haunted him ever since during an appearance on the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. The Australian singer explained that his unlikely brush with combat began when his band traveled to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops during the war.
According to Springfield, the U.S. soldiers “wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home.”
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Rick Springfield recalled the haunting Vietnam War experience that began when his band traveled there to entertain American troops. (Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)
“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. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
Springfield said he went into the experience with few expectations beyond earning a paycheck.
“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.”
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During an attack, Rick Springfield said he fired a mortar after being told there were no friendly forces nearby. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
What began as a gig entertaining troops quickly became deadly serious when Springfield found himself caught in an attack.
“We met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them, and we went 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 gravity of what happened didn’t fully sink in until Springfield learned what one of his mortars had done.
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He later learned the mortar had struck a man, a moment he said has stayed with him for decades. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
“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 went on to give Rogan a more detailed account of the attack and the moments before he fired the mortar.
“It was like the movies,” he recalled. According to Springfield, the radio crackled with a warning about movement nearby before delivering a stark confirmation – there were no friendlies in the area.
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Rick Springfield admitted he still struggles with the reality that his split-second decision contributed to the end of another person’s life. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
“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 his youthful understanding of the moment from the Vietnam War eventually gave way to the painful reality of what he had done.
“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.”
