The Vietnam War was a brutal time for everyone involved. And for many, that time is still haunting them. Rock singer Rick Springfield is finally opening up about the way he was impacted.
Videos by Suggest
During a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, the Australian singer said that he spent time in Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops. He said he had no expectations for the tour other than making some money.
“It was insane. I thought, ‘Oh, great. We’ll make money, you know.’ And, of course, we didn’t make any money. We spent it all at the PX,” he explained.
But soon, he found himself confronted by the reality of performing in a war zone.
“We met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them, and we all got in the bunkers, in the perimeter bunkers, and I stayed in the radio shack, and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack,” he said.
But for Springfield, the gravity of the “freaky” situation became real once he learned what his actions had done.
“The hardest thing for me was that I had 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.’”
“And that still has a hard place to land in me, you know? That’s really kind of the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land.”
The “Jessie’s Girl” singer said at first, the whole attack felt “like the movies.” But then the truth brought him back.
“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,” he said. “And I didn’t really have anything to do with it and didn’t really know what I was doing. But it was…pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”