Singer-songwriter Rick Springfield has spoken about killing a man during a visit to Vietnam in 1968. Springfield, who was 18 at the time and a member of the band Rockhouse, had been hired to entertain American troops and spent four months in the country.
“We had befriended some Navy guys at Marble Mountain, which is outside Da Nang,” Springfield tells Joe Rogan. “They wanted connection with home, so they’d take you into the tents, and we’d play Hendrix and get stoned, and even though we’re Australian, there still was a connection there.”
Springfield goes on to say that his band stayed overnight with the soldiers when their encampment was attacked by Viet Cong guerrillas, and he was invited to “throw some mortars down the tube.”
“It was John Wayne time, you know?” says Springfield. “I mean, as a young kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing. I said, ‘Oh, yeah! Let’s fire a gun!’
In his 2010 autobiography Late, Late at Night: A Memoir, Springfield describes the action.
“There’s a loud whump as each mortar takes flight, then a shower of lethal red-hot sparks and blistering metal as it lands and erupts in the brush,” he writes. “A radio call comes in requesting a change of trajectory, so I drop more mortars down the tube and watch them detonate, alarmingly close to us. We stay up all night. How could we sleep?”
The following morning, Springfield was told that one of his mortars had hit a Viet Cong soldier.
“Everyone is jumping around and slapping me on the back,” Springfield wrote in his memoir. “I feel sick. Thinking of it now, I still do. All in all, not a real good day for anyone.”
“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,” he tells Rogan. “But it’s pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”
(LouderSound)
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