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Rockstar Rick Springfield has made a haunting confession about his time in Vietnam.
The American-Australian musician shared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast that he took a man's life, and the decision has haunted him ever since.
When did Rick Springfield kill a man?
Springfield revealed that the shocking incident happened when his band travelled to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops during the war.
According to the singer, the US soldiers "wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home".
"So as long as we had a couple of girls in the band, they would hire you, and you could tour Vietnam during the war zone," he added. "It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months."
The entertaining gig turned into something terrifying when Springfield found himself under attack.
"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."
"It was freaky," Springfield noted. "This is before – you couldn't do any of this now."
The singer shared that he did not realise what had happened until he learned what one of his mortars had done.
He said, "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.'"
Going into a more detailed version of the attack, Springfield recalled, "It was like the movies".
According to Springfield, the radio crackled with a warning about movement nearby before delivering a stark confirmation, there were no friendlies in the area.
"They said, 'Hey, you want to throw some mortars down the tube?' And it was John Wayne time, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn't really understand what I was doing."
Springfield said his youthful understanding of the moment from the Vietnam War eventually gave way to the painful reality of what he had done.
"I think it's still there, you know?" he said. '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," Springfield explained.
The 77-year-old added, "And I didn't really have anything to do with it and didn't really know what I was doing, but you know as a kid and playing, like I said, John Wayne.
"But it was… pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it."
