Long before he became the “Jessie’s Girl” singer and 1980s heartthrob, the Australian musician’s band travelled to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops. Soldiers “wanted to see, you know, girls that reminded them of home,” Springfield said. “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.”
He went mainly for the paycheck. “I thought, ‘Oh, great. We’ll make money,’” he recalled. “And of course we didn’t make any money. We spent it all at the PX, and we weren’t making much money anyway.”
By 1968, the Vietnam War was grinding through one of its most violent years. Even bases that felt relatively safe could come under fire after dark. The Tet Offensive earlier that year had made it brutally clear that no tidy front line existed. Into that landscape still came civilian entertainers, small bands hired to give soldiers a few hours that felt like home.
The trip turned deadly when the group stayed overnight with soldiers they had befriended. During an attack, Springfield was in a radio shack on the perimeter. “We all got in the bunkers… and we got attacked, and I’m throwing mortars down the freaking tube of the radio shack,” he said. “It was freaky. This is before – you couldn’t do any of this now.”
He described the moment as “like the movies.”
The radio warned of movement nearby and confirmed there were no friendlies in the area. Someone asked if he wanted to drop 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.”
The next day delivered the news that has never fully settled. “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.’”
“And that still has a hard place to land in me,” Springfield said. “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.”
Now 77, he said the heaviness of it remains.
“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. But it was… pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”
The comments came on the Sept. 8 episode of Rogan’s podcast, days after Springfield drew attention online for a youthful-looking performance in Tennessee.
You can listen to the entire interview for free on iHeart:
