{"id":596828,"date":"2026-09-11T06:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T06:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/596828\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T06:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T06:30:09","slug":"rick-springfield-tells-joe-rogan-he-killed-a-man-with-a-mortar-in-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/596828\/","title":{"rendered":"Rick Springfield tells Joe Rogan he killed a man with a mortar in Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"
\u201cIt was like the movies,\u201d he told Rogan. \u201cThey said, \u2018Hey, you want to throw some mortars down the tube?\u2019 And it was John Wayne time, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn\u2019t really understand what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rick Springfield appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Photo \/ Joe Rogan Experience<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody, and they came in the next day and said, \u2018Hey, you got one. You got one\u2019,\u201d Springfield recalled.<\/p>\n
The singer said the experience remains difficult to process, despite the passage of time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s still there,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it\u2019s distant and it\u2019s war and I didn\u2019t really have anything to do with it and didn\u2019t really know what I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rick Springfield was in Vietnam to entertain troops. Photo \/ Rick Springfield<\/p>\n
Springfield said the incident feels as though it happened to \u201canother guy\u201d in \u201canother place\u201d.<\/p>\n
He also told Rogan that many of the American troops he encountered questioned why they were fighting in Vietnam at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the ones I met were, \u2018Dude, I don\u2019t know why we\u2019re here. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing here\u2019,\u201d he remembered.<\/p>\n
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 \u201csends a shiver down my spine\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt was like the movies,\u201d he told Rogan. \u201cThey said, \u2018Hey, you want to throw some mortars down…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1135,2837,127731,156,692,78,2435,3375,5158,294192,111,139,69,49241,100734,19761,312,27607,6642,2044,3460,2317,6149,102],"class_list":["post-596828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-australian","tag-during","tag-entertaining","tag-entertainment","tag-he","tag-in","tag-joe","tag-killed","tag-man","tag-mortar","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rick","tag-rocker","tag-rogan","tag-says","tag-springfield","tag-tells","tag-time","tag-troops","tag-vietnam","tag-war","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}