Daniel Wolfram
The “Jessie’s Girl” singer opened up about the surreal story on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
Thirteen years before “Jessie’s Girl” made him famous, Rick Springfield was just a teenage guitarist trying to make some money. He flew to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain U.S. troops.
The 1980s rock star tells Joe Rogan the unbelievable story about how his gig in Vietnam turned into a traumatic episode that would change his life.
He killed a Viet Cong soldier.
Under fire in a radio shack
While Springfield was staying at a Navy base, the camp came under fire from the enemy. Springfield took cover inside a perimeter bunker.
“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,” Springfield recalled on the podcast.
“And we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack.” He admitted he “could have easily lost a hand” in the chaos.
John Wayne moment
The then-young guitarist felt like he was part of a Hollywood production. “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.”
The next morning brought unexpected news. “They came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one! You got one!’” he remembered.
Springfield said the experience felt like it happened to “another guy” in “another place.” “That’s really the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land,” he said. Asked how long the memory remained, he replied: “I think it’s still there.”
Facing the past
Springfield may have turned 77, but the singer admits the incident still haunts him.
“It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life,” he told Rogan. “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.”
Springfield also remembered how the American soldiers were fed up with the war. “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 recalled.
Here is the full interview with Rick Springfield on The Joe Rogan Experience
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