“It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”

Rick Springfield says it’s ‘hard’ to process his memory of killing man in Vietnam: ‘Didn’t really know what I was doing’

“It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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September 10, 2026 3:03 p.m. ET

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Rick Springfield in Los Angeles on July 24, 2023. Credit:

Paul Archuleta/Getty

- Rick Springfield toured Vietnam with a band when he was 18.

- The musician killed a man while staying overnight with a group of Navy officers outside of Da Nang.

- “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.

Rick Springfield is still haunted by his time in Vietnam.

The “Jessie’s Girl” singer reflected on his four-month music tour in an active war zone — including the incident in which he killed a man — in an interview on *The Joe Rogan Experience*.

When he was 18, Springfield played guitar for a group hired to entertain American GIs in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. The musicians stayed overnight with Navy troops at their encampment outside Da Nang, with Springfield sleeping in the radio shack and his bandmates crashing in the perimeter bunkers.

“We got attacked. And I’m throwing mortars down the frickin’ tube of the radio shack,” Springfield recalled. “It was freaky. This was before — you couldn’t do any of this now.”

Rick Springfield circa 1973.

Michael Putland/Getty

The singer said that the experience was “like the movies,” as he heard a radio message saying that the Americans detected “movement” near the encampment. “They said, ‘No, no friendlies there.’ So they said, ‘Hey, you wanna throw some mortars down the tube?’” he remembered. “And it was John Wayne time. I was a young kid. I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I said, ‘Oh, yeah! Let’s fire a gun!’ So I threw the mortars down, around five or six mortars. I could have easily lost a hand.”

Springfield didn’t learn the full consequences of his actions until the next morning. “I’d thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” he explained. “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 the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land. It still seems like years ago, another guy, another place.”

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The musician hasn’t fully processed the experience in the 50-odd years since. “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. But I was a kid, and playing, like I said, John Wayne. But it’s pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”

Rick Springfield in New York City on Dec. 31, 2025.

Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty

That wasn’t the only time that Springfield’s Navy acquaintances brought the band into the action. “We actually went up on a mission in an apache helicopter too, ‘cause they said, ‘You guys wanna come?’” he remembered. “And we’re all like, ‘Yeah!’ But it was pretty hairy.”

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Springfield said that the officers he met were confused about why they were deployed to Vietnam in the first place. “All the ones I met were just like, ‘Dude, I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t know what I’m doing here,’” he recalled. “All of them, while they were fighting.”

He added, “It was a bad war, for sure.”

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