“It was like the movies,” he told Rogan. “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.”
Rick Springfield appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Photo / Joe Rogan Experience
The aftermath, however, had a lasting impact. Springfield said soldiers later informed him that one of the mortar rounds he had fired had struck and killed someone.
“I’d 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 recalled.
The singer said the experience remains difficult to process, despite the passage of time.
“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.”
Rick Springfield was in Vietnam to entertain troops. Photo / Rick Springfield
Springfield said the incident feels as though it happened to “another guy” in “another place”.
He also told Rogan that many of the American troops he encountered questioned why they were fighting in Vietnam at all.
“All the ones I met were, ‘Dude, I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t know what I’m doing here’,” he remembered.
The musician has previously written about the incident in his 2010 memoir Late, Late at Night. In the book, he described the episode as something that still “sends a shiver down my spine”.