Australian rock star Rick Springfield says a mortar he fired during a 1968 attack in Vietnam struck and killed a person, an experience he told Joe Rogan still weighs on him decades later.

Springfield, the singer and actor best known for his 1981 hit "Jessie's Girl" and a long career in pop and rock music, made the disclosure during an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He described traveling to Vietnam in 1968 as part of a band hired to entertain American troops during the war, a trip he said lasted roughly four months and left him with a burden he has carried ever since.

The account is Springfield's own. No independent confirmation of the incident appears in any official record cited in the interview, and key details, the identity of the person struck, the specific base or province, and whether Springfield had any authorization to handle military ordnance, remain unanswered. What is clear is that Springfield, now in his mid-seventies, chose to describe the event publicly and in detail.

A teenager in a war zone, throwing mortars "down the tube"

Springfield told Rogan that his band secured the Vietnam gig because it met a simple requirement: female members. As Fox News reported, Springfield explained the arrangement bluntly:

"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. It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months."

The soldiers, Springfield said, "wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home." He recalled thinking the tour would be a payday, only to discover the money vanished at the PX, the on-base general store, almost as fast as it came in.

During one stop, the band stayed overnight with a group of American soldiers at a position ringed by perimeter bunkers. Springfield sheltered in a radio shack. Then an attack came.

"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."

Springfield said the radio confirmed no friendly forces were in the area before he fired. The soldiers had invited him to participate. He accepted.

"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."

"Hey, you got one", and a weight that never lifted

The next day, soldiers delivered the news. Springfield recounted their words simply: "Hey, you got one. You got one." A mortar he had fired struck someone. Springfield described the moment as the hardest thing he brought home from Vietnam.

"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 did not identify the person who was struck, whether a combatant, a civilian, or what nationality. The soldiers' phrasing treated it as a battlefield tally. Springfield treated it as something else entirely.

"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."

Springfield went on to say the guilt has never fully resolved. He acknowledged the circumstances, distant, wartime, a teenager who didn't grasp the stakes, but did not use them as an excuse. Celebrity health crises and personal revelations have drawn public attention in recent months, including when Pawn Stars' Rick Harrison opened up after emergency bypass surgery. Springfield's confession carries a different gravity.

"I think it's still there, you know? 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."

He summed up the entire Vietnam experience in a few words: "It was like the movies." But the aftermath was not. "It was... pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it," he said.

Questions the podcast didn't answer

Springfield's account raises several questions that neither he nor the interview addressed. He did not name the band he traveled with. He did not say whether he had ever received any military training or whether anyone on the base formally authorized a civilian entertainer to operate a mortar tube. He did not say whether he had disclosed the incident publicly before this podcast appearance.

The identity of the person killed, if in fact the mortar was fatal, a characterization that rests entirely on Springfield's own framing and the soldiers' shorthand, is unknown. The specific base or province in Vietnam where the incident occurred was never mentioned. Stories of musicians and deadly encounters surface periodically in American culture, as seen in the recent passing of the NYPD's legendary "Hip-Hop Cop" Derrick Parker, who spent years investigating violence tied to the music industry. Springfield's story sits in a very different context, a war zone, not a crime scene, but the intersection of fame and death carries its own lasting weight.

None of these gaps diminish the emotional force of Springfield's account. They do mean the story stands, for now, as one man's recollection, vivid, specific in some places, vague in others, and unverified by any independent record.

Springfield was a teenager in 1968. He went to a war zone to play music and make a few dollars. He came home with something no amount of gold records could quiet. That he chose to say it plainly, without dressing it up or explaining it away, is the part worth noticing.