Rick Springfield Says He Killed a Man During His 1968 Vietnam Tour: "It's Hard for Me to Face"

Rick Springfield just shared something on the“Joe Rogan Experience”that most people would never say out loud. The“Jessie’s Girl”singer says that while touring Vietnam with his band in 1968 to entertain American troops, he fired a mortar that killed an enemy fighter. Soldiers told him the next day,“Hey, you got one.”

The band spent roughly four months overseas, a gig arranged partly because troops wanted to see women who reminded them of home, and Springfield says they didn’t make much money. During an overnight stay in a radio shack inside a base perimeter, an attack broke out, and he says he helped throw mortars. The memory, he told Rogan, is one he still can’t fully process.“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.”

It’s a jarring contrast: the voice behind one of the biggest pop hits of the 80s describing a moment of combat nearly sixty years ago. Springfield is far from the only entertainer who toured Vietnam, but he may be one of the few willing to talk about what it cost him. So we want to hear from you: does a revelation like this change how you hear an artist’s music?