Rick Springfield has spent most of his life in the spotlight, first as a chart-topping singer, later as an actor on General Hospital. But this week, he shared a story that has nothing to do with fame. During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, the seventy-seven-year-old said he was just seventeen when he traveled to Vietnam in 1968 to perform for U.S. troops near Da Nang, and that while he was there, the base came under attack.
Springfield says he helped fire mortars from a defensive position during that attack. The next day, he was told that one of the mortars he fired had killed a Viet Cong fighter. He told Rogan that it’s hard to face the idea that he was responsible for the end of a life, and that the memory is still with him after all these years. He first wrote about the experience in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night.
His story is a reminder that the Vietnam War reached everyday people in ways we don’t always hear about, and that those experiences don’t just disappear. Springfield went on to become a household name with“Jessie’s Girl”in 1981 and a long run on General Hospital, but he says this chapter never really left him. Do you know someone who served in Vietnam and carried their own story quietly for years?
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Ava Hart
Ava Hart is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.
