Rick Springfield is recalling an experience from his teenage years that has stayed with him for nearly six decades.
During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the Australian singer/songwriter, now 77, revisited the time he traveled to Vietnam at 17 to perform for U.S. troops. While staying at a Navy encampment near Da Nang in 1968, Springfield says the base came under attack and he ended up helping fire mortars from a defensive position.
At the time, Springfield said he was too young to fully understand the gravity of what was happening around him. The next day, he was told that one of the mortars that he had fired had killed a Viet Cong fighter.
Decades later, the memory is still difficult for him to process.
“I think it’s still there,” Springfield told Rogan, explaining that he struggles with the knowledge that he was involved in the death of another person, even though it happened during wartime and he had little understanding of what he was doing at the time. “It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life.”
Springfield also remembered the soldiers he encountered as being deeply conflicted about the war. Many, he said, questioned why they were in Vietnam and what they were doing there.
The experience is one Springfield also detailed in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night. He wrote that despite the distance of time, the memory still “sends a shiver” down his spine.
The Vietnam trip came more than a decade before Springfield would become a household name. In 1981, he broke through with Working Class Dog, his fourth studio album, which spawned his signature hit “Jessie’s Girl.” The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in September 1981 and remains his lone No. 1 on the chart. That same year, he first played the role of Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital and he acted on the long-running soap opera through 2014.
Watch the full podcast with Springfield and Rogan below.