Australian rocker Rick Springfield opened up about the trauma of being told he had killed a Viet Cong soldier while performing for U.S. troops as a teenager during the Vietnam War.
In a Sept. 8 episode of the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, the "Jessie's Girl" singer, 77, recounted staying at a U.S. Navy encampment in the Marble Mountains near the city of Da Nang when they suddenly came under attack. Springfield said he and several others took shelter overnight while he stayed in a radio shack.
"And we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack," he told host Joe Rogan.
Springfield, then a 17-year-old unknown musician, said he did not fully comprehend what he was doing in the moment, which Springfield said felt
"like the movies." Looking back, he believes he "could have easily lost a hand" while loading a launcher.
"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. I said 'Oh yeah, let's fire a gun,'" Springfield said. "I'd 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!'"
Rick Springfield says that moment has never left him
Even 50 years later, Springfield said he has not fully recovered from that harrowing experience.
After Rogan asked him how long he had sat with that trauma, Springfield responded: "I think it’s still there," and that he feels that experience happened to "another guy" in "another place" instead of him.
"That was one thing I brought back with me that I really couldn't find a place for that to land," 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... It's pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it."
He said his mother recalled when he returned home after four months and that he jumped when a car backfired and that his "eyes looked kind of haunted."
Springfield discussed his overseas experience in his 2010 memoir, "Late, Late at Night," where he wrote, "That was a war situation but it is still something that to this day sends a shiver down my spine," and said the experience was one of his deepest, darkest secrets.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rick Springfield says he killed someone during Vietnam War at just 17
