Rick Springfield Reveals He Killed a Man Firing Mortars in Vietnam at Age 19

Rick Springfield has opened up about a wartime experience that has stayed with him for nearly six decades. In 1968, at just nineteen years old, he was touring South Vietnam with the Australian band MPD Ltd. when a Navy encampment near Marble Mountain outside Da Nang came under attack. Soldiers invited him to load and fire mortars after confirming no friendly forces were nearby, and he fired about five or six rounds.

The next morning, he learned that one of those rounds had hit a Viet Cong fighter. Springfield first shared the story in a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, where he called touring Vietnam as a teenager a very, very stupid thing to do. Recently, he recounted the experience on The Joe Rogan Experience, saying the memory has never faded.“The hardest thing for me was that I’d thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody,”he said.

For a man best known for upbeat’80s hits and a beloved role on General Hospital, this story offers a different side entirely. It’s a reminder that the people behind our favorite songs carry real, heavy chapters. What’s one thing you’ve learned about a celebrity you admire that changed how you saw them?