Rick Springfield said this week that as a teenager entertaining U.S. troops in Vietnam, he dropped mortars during an attack and was later told one of them killed a Viet Cong soldier.
The “Jessie’s Girl” singer, now 77, recounted the story on “The Joe Rogan Experience” episode posted Tuesday. NBC News and WFAA reported he was about 17 or 18 in 1968 when an Australian band was hired for a roughly four-month tour playing for American GIs, sometimes on truck beds and at firebases under incoming fire.
Springfield told Rogan the group stayed overnight with Navy troops at an encampment near Da Nang, around Marble Mountain. He said he slept in the radio shack while bandmates were in perimeter bunkers. When the camp came under attack, he was told to throw mortars down the tube. “It was John Wayne time, you know?” he said, according to WFAA. “I’m a kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”
YouTube: https://t.co/h6vBdRbHpA
— Rick Springfield (@rickspringfield) September 8, 2026
The next morning, he said, someone told him, “You got one.” Billboard reported he still struggles with that news. “It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it was distant, it was war, and I didn’t really have anything to do with it, didn’t really know what I was doing,” he told Rogan, NBC News reported.
Springfield has described the tour before as playing in a war zone, including shows that were cut short by incoming rounds. He has not claimed he was a soldier. The account is his recollection from the podcast; it has not been independently documented in official after-action reports cited in the coverage.
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