A teenage performer caught in an attack
Rick Springfield, the Australian singer-songwriter who became an '80s star with the hit Jessie's Girl, has recounted how he killed a Viet Cong fighter while performing for U.S. troops in Vietnam as a teenager. In 1968, at age 17, he was an unknown musician who had traveled to Southeast Asia to entertain American forces during the war. He described the episode on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience that was posted on Tuesday.[S1]
Springfield, now 77, said he was staying at a U.S. Navy encampment in the Marble Mountains near Da Nang when the position came under sudden attack. He remembered meeting the troops there and getting along well with them, then spending the night in the perimeter bunkers. He said he stayed in the radio shack and, when the attack began, threw mortars down its tube.[S1]
He described loading a launcher in the confusion and said he could easily have lost a hand. Comparing the scene to a movie, he recalled that someone asked whether he wanted to throw mortars down the tube, and he said that as a young kid he did not really understand what he was doing.[S1]
The aftermath and a lasting memory
What had begun like an action film gave way to the realities of war. Springfield said that after he threw a mortar, it hit somebody, and the next day people came and told him he had got one. He said that was the one thing he brought back with him that he could not really find a place for, and that it feels as if it happened to another guy in another place.[S1]
Rogan wanted to know whether the episode had lingered with him, and Springfield answered that it never went away. He explained that the memory remains with him, and that he struggles to accept his part in ending someone's life — despite the distance involved, the fact that it happened during wartime, and his sense that he had no real connection to it and no understanding of what he was doing.[S1]
Springfield further remembered how little support the conflict had among the American troops serving in Vietnam. According to him, every soldier he encountered expressed confusion about their presence there and their purpose. The performer behind Love Somebody and Don't Talk to Strangers addressed the Vietnam episode in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night, noting that even though it occurred in a combat setting, the memory still makes him shudder today.[S1]
