Musician Rick Springfield, known for his 1981 hit "Jessie's Girl," has disclosed in a recent interview that he believes he killed a man with a mortar bomb at age 18 during a tour in Vietnam. Springfield shared the account on "The Joe Rogan Experience," detailing the traumatic experience that has stayed with him for nearly six decades.
Springfield and his band traveled to Vietnam in 1968 to perform for American soldiers, staying for approximately four months. He described the trip as initially driven by a desire to make money, but it quickly became perilous. "It was insane," he recalled of the experience. "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."
During their stay, Springfield and his bandmates became close with soldiers and stayed overnight with them. When their location came under attack, Springfield found himself in a radio shack and began throwing mortar bombs from within. "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, and we got attacked, and I'm throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack."
He recounted the aftermath of the attack. "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!'" Springfield expressed that this event remains a difficult memory. "And that was... it still has a place... hard place to land in me, you know."
Springfield, born Richard Lewis Springthorpe in Australia, was a member of the pop rock group Zoot from 1969 to 1971 before launching a solo career. He stated that he finds it hard to reconcile the reality of his actions, acknowledging responsibility even amidst the chaos of war. "But you know as a kid and playing, like I said John Wayne, but it was pretty heavy when you know, when I think about the reality of it."
The Vietnam War, which informally began in the early 1950s, saw formal U.S. troop deployment in 1965 with the objective of preventing the spread of communism. The conflict concluded with the U.S. withdrawal in 1973, and Vietnam became a communist nation in 1975. The war resulted in an estimated three million deaths, including 58,000 American soldiers.