Rick Springfield has told Joe Rogan that a mortar he fired during the Vietnam War killed a man, and that nearly six decades later he still has nowhere to put it.
The singer was a teenager in an Australian pop band when he spent roughly four months touring the country for American troops in 1968. On a new episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, he described an overnight stay at a US Navy encampment near Marble Mountain, outside Da Nang, that turned into a firefight — and the conversation the following morning that has stayed with him ever since.
“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,'” he told Rogan. “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.”
A pop band, a paycheck, and a war zone
The trip was never meant to be dangerous. Springfield said the bookings existed because homesick servicemen “wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home” — and that the commercial logic was as blunt as that sounds.
“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 said. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”
He went for the money, and came home without any. “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, and we weren’t making much money anyway.”
Consequence reports that the band was MPD Ltd., the Melbourne group Springfield played in years before Zoot, before “Jessie’s Girl,” and long before General Hospital. They were based out of Saigon and Da Nang and moved through an active war zone to reach the men they were booked to entertain.
One detail the coverage does not agree on is how old he was. Fox News and NBC News describe him as 17 at the time; Consequence puts him at 19. Springfield was born in August 1949, which would have made him 18 for most of 1968 and 19 from that August onward.
The night at Marble Mountain
By Springfield’s account, the band stayed overnight at the encampment and got on well with the men stationed there. When the base came under attack, his bandmates went into the perimeter bunkers and he ended up in the radio shack.
“We met these guys, and we really got along well, and we stayed overnight with them, and we went 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.
He told Rogan the radio carried a warning about movement nearby, then a stark confirmation that there were no friendly forces in the area. The soldiers asked whether he wanted to help.
“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.”
Consequence reports he fired five or six rounds before the attack ended. “It was freaky,” he added. “This is before — you couldn’t do any of this now.”
Not the first time he has told it
The Rogan appearance is not a first disclosure so much as the widest audience the story has ever reached. Springfield described the Vietnam trip in a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview, calling the decision to go as a teenager “a very, very stupid thing to do.” In that account he said his mother noticed a haunted look in his eyes when he got home, and that he flinched at the sound of a car exhaust. He returned to it in his 2010 memoir Late, Late at Night, writing that it was a war situation but still something that sent a shiver down his spine.
What is different this time is how little distance he takes. The circumstances offer him several exits — he was a kid, it was a war, he was handed the round by trained men who told him the area was clear — and on the podcast he lists them all and then refuses to stand behind any of them.
“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. 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.”
It is a strange thing to sit under the catalogue. The man who wrote one of the most purely joyful singles of the early 1980s was, at eighteen or nineteen, in a radio shack outside Da Nang being congratulated for a kill. He turned 77 last month. The full episode is out now, and the Vietnam conversation begins around the fifteen-minute mark.
