New: Joe Rogan was in total shock when musician Rick Springfield admitted that he killed someone when he was 18 years old: “It’s hard for me to face that I was responsible for the end of a life.” CONTEXT: This wasn't Springfield serving in the military. Before he became the Grammy-winning star behind “Jessie’s Girl,” he was a teenage Australian guitarist playing in a band that traveled through South Vietnam performing for troops. Springfield has actually been telling versions of this story for decades. In a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview, he recalled staying overnight at military encampments and, during one attack, being in bunkers with soldiers shooting and firing mortars. More than 30 years later, he gave an even more detailed account: his band was staying with U.S. personnel at Marble Mountain near Da Nang when the base came under attack. Springfield said he ended up standing at a mortar tube and dropping live rounds toward an enemy position. The setting itself was very real. U.S. military histories document Marble Mountain repeatedly coming under enemy rocket and mortar attack during the Vietnam War. And the teenager firing those rounds would eventually become one of the defining pop stars of the 1980s, winning a Grammy for “Jessie’s Girl” in 1982. SPRINGFIELD: “The hardest thing for me was that I had thrown a mortar down and it had hit somebody.” “They came in the next day and said, ‘Hey, you got one. You got one.’ I was a young kid. I didn’t really understand what I was doing.” IMPORTANT NOTES: That distinction matters. Springfield didn't see who was hit and independently verify that he killed someone. He says the soldiers told him afterward that one of his rounds had hit a Viet Cong fighter. But even after more than half a century, he still talks about the event as though the moral weight belongs to him. Which leaves a pretty extraordinary question: How much responsibility should an 18 year old civilian carry for a killing after trained soldiers handed him live ammunition in the middle of a war zone and told him where to fire?