Rick Springfield Makes Stunning Confession: ‘I Was Responsible for the End of a Life’

Rick Springfield is a household name thanks to his role as General Hospital‘s Noah Drake and his 1981 Grammy-winning smash “Jessie’s Girl.” But on the September 8 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, the 77-year-old opened up about a far darker chapter of his past: taking a man’s life during the Vietnam War.

What makes the story especially striking is that Springfield wasn’t in the country as a soldier — he was there as a performer. Back in 1968, while based in Australia, he was recruited to entertain American troops stationed in the war zone.

“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,” the Californication alum recalled. “It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months.”

He described the night everything changed to host Joe Rogan. “It was a Navy encampment on the beach, and I was in the radio shack, and the band members were in the perimeter boxes,” he explained. After being told there was “movement” in the area and “no friendlies,” he was asked an unexpected question.

“They said, ‘Hey, you want to throw some mortars down the tube?’ And it was John Wayne time, you know,” he recalled. “I mean, as a young kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”

“I had thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” Springfield said. “And they came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one! You got one!'”

Decades later, the weight of that surreal night still lingers. “I think it’s still there, you know?” he admitted. “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.”

The Ricki and the Flash star has touched on the experience before — he wrote about his time entertaining troops in his 2010 memoir, Late, Late at Night,