Rick Springfield recently opened up about a haunting chapter from his past. During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he revealed that he killed a man during the Vietnam War. The singer recounted the experience from 1968, when he traveled to Da Nang to entertain U.S. troops stationed there.
Springfield explained how his band ended up touring a war zone in the first place. He described the unusual circumstances that got them the gig and the financial reality that followed.
“So as long as we had a couple of girls in the band, they would hire you, and you could tour Vietnam during the war zone. It was pretty insane,” Springfield said. “We were there for about four months. It was insane. 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.”
He then described the night things took a dangerous turn. He and the band stayed overnight with soldiers they had befriended and ended up caught in an attack on the perimeter bunkers.
“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. It was freaky. This is before – you couldn’t do any of this now.”
Springfield went on to describe the moment he learned the consequences of his actions. He explained how that knowledge has stayed with him ever since.
“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.’ And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know? That’s really kind of the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land.”
He compared the surreal nature of the experience to a scene out of a film. He reflected on his mindset as a young man at the time.
“It was like the movies. 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.”
Springfield closed by acknowledging that the weight of what happened has never fully left him, even decades later.
“I think it’s still there, you know? It’s hard for me to kind of 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, but you know as a kid and playing, like I said, John Wayne. But it was… pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”
The revelation offers a rare, personal look into a lesser-known period of Springfield’s life, long before he became a household name in music and television. The full story behind that tour paints an even starker picture of just how far removed it was from a typical morale-boosting gig.
Springfield’s Vietnam stint took place with the Australian outfit MPD Ltd, a band he joined as a teenager years before launching his solo career. The group’s four-month run took them through Saigon, Da Nang, remote firebases, and areas close to the DMZ. This placed them squarely in some of the most volatile territory in the country at the time.
The tour was far from a sheltered entertainment circuit. It exposed the band to the full brunt of the war. They were rocketed, shot at, and mortared on multiple occasions. The attack Springfield described to Rogan actually unfolded during a stay at a Navy encampment near Marble Mountain, just outside Da Nang.
Springfield has said he was told there were no friendly forces in the surrounding area before he was invited to help fire mortars during the assault. The following morning, soldiers informed him that one of his rounds had struck and killed a Viet Cong fighter. This detail lines up directly with the account he later gave on Rogan’s podcast.
Springfield has reflected on the surreal calculus behind why an unknown band from Australia ended up performing in an active combat zone in the first place. “As long as you had a couple of girls, that’s what the GIs wanted to see, so we unwisely agreed to go over there and play,” he said. This underscores just how casually the arrangement was made despite the danger that awaited them.
