Rick Springfield Reveals He Killed A Man In Vietnam
Rick Springfield sat down with Joe Rogan for a wide-ranging two-hour conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience this week, and the 77-year-old Jessie's Girl singer shared one of the most startling stories of his remarkable life.
Springfield was 18 years old and performing with his Australian band MPD Ltd. for US troops in Vietnam in the late 1960s when the base came under attack.
He was pulled into a combat situation and helped American soldiers load mortars to fight back against the attackers. One of those mortars, he told Rogan, killed a Vietnamese soldier.
"That was a war situation but it is still something that to this day sends a shiver down my spine," Springfield said.
The Vietnam episode is part of a life Springfield has written and spoken about candidly for decades, a life that also included a suicide attempt at 17, a rope that snapped, decades of depression and one of the most successful pop rock careers of the 1980s.
He won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for Jessie's Girl in 1981. He is 77, still touring, and apparently still carrying the weight of a mortar fired on a Vietnamese base more than 55 years ago.
