Rick Springfield reflects on killing a man during trip to entertain troops in Vietnam. “It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life”
Musician Rick Springfield has spoken publicly about killing a Viet Cong soldier while in Vietnam in 1968, a formative and traumatic experience from before his career took off. At the time an 18-year-old member of the Australian band Rockhouse, Springfield had been sent to entertain American troops and ended up directly involved in a firefight, an episode he has now revisited in a conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan.
Springfield explained that his band had grown close to US Navy personnel stationed at Marble Mountain near Da Nang, bonding over music during his four-month stint in the country. When the servicemen's camp came under attack by Viet Cong guerrillas one night, he was invited to fire mortars, later recalling the intensity of the experience in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night. He was told the following morning that one of his mortar rounds had killed an enemy soldier, an outcome he says he struggles to reconcile with, given how naively he had approached the situation as a teenager caught up in the moment.
- Rick Springfield says he killed a Viet Cong soldier in Vietnam, 1968.
- He was 18, in Vietnam entertaining US troops with his band Rockhouse.
- He fired mortars during an attack; told next day he'd hit someone.
New here? Start with this
Musician Rick Springfield has spoken about a violent episode from his youth, long before he became a well-known singer and actor. In 1968, aged 18, he was touring Vietnam with his Australian band, Rockhouse, to perform for American troops during the Vietnam War, a conflict in which US and allied forces fought communist Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese forces.
While stationed near American servicemen at a base close to Da Nang, Springfield became caught up in a night-time attack on the camp and took part in returning fire. He later learned he had killed an enemy soldier, an experience he wrote about in his 2010 memoir and has now discussed again in a conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan.
The story matters as a personal account of how a young civilian entertainer was drawn into direct combat, and how that experience has stayed with him decades later, offering a rare, first-hand perspective on the human impact of the war beyond official military accounts.