Singer Rick Springfield has claimed that he killed a man while on tour in Vietnam during the late 1960s, recounting the experience on a recent episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience."
Springfield, then 18, described the tour as a dangerous undertaking, stating that his group spent approximately four months in the war zone. He initially joined the tour with the expectation of earning money, but the experience quickly shifted to one of survival.
During the podcast, Springfield detailed an incident where his group, while bunking with soldiers, came under attack. He recounted following orders to fire mortars, stating, "I threw the mortars down, about five or six mortars, which I could have easily lost a hand." The following morning, he was informed that one of the mortars had struck a Viet Cong member.
The musician explained that the weight of his actions did not fully register until after the event. "The hardest thing for me was that, um, I’d thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody," he said. "That’s really the, kind of, the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land."
Springfield told Rogan that the memory remains with him. "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 and I didn’t really have anything to do with it and didn’t really know what I was doing," he added, describing the reality of it as "pretty heavy."
