Rick Springfield says a wartime mortar strike still haunts him decades later

Long before he became a chart-topping rock star, Rick Springfield says he fired a mortar in Vietnam that he believes struck and killed a man — a moment he says he has never fully come to terms with.

The Australian singer, known for hits such as “Jessie’s Girl,” told Joe Rogan that his band traveled to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain troops, a booking he entered with modest expectations. “Oh, great. We’ll make money, you know,” Mr. Springfield recalled thinking at the time, adding that the tour ultimately paid little.

The trip took a darker turn when Mr. Springfield’s group bunked overnight at a Navy encampment that came under attack. Mr. Springfield said he ended up in a radio shack firing mortars after being told no friendly forces were nearby. “It was like the movies,” he said of the chaos.

It wasn’t until the next day, according to Mr. Springfield, that soldiers told him his mortar had struck someone — the basis for his belief that he killed a man, though it is Mr. Springfield’s account rather than an independently confirmed casualty.

“The hardest thing for me was that I had thrown a mortar down, and it had hit somebody,” he said, adding that the moment is “really kind of the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn’t really find a place for that to land.”

Mr. Springfield, who was a young musician at the time, said he didn’t grasp the gravity of what he was doing in the moment.

“It was John Wayne time, you know,” he said, describing his youthful mindset before adding that the memory now carries a heavier weight: “It was pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”