Rick Springfield has sensationally claimed he accidentally killed a man while in Vietnam to entertain American troops during the war.

The 77-year-old singer told Joe Rogan on his podcast the tragic accident occurred when he and his band went to Vietnam in 1968 to perform for American soldiers: with the girls in the band helping to “remind (the soldiers) of home”.

They were out there “for about four months”, with Springfield calling it an “insane” way to make money, as he went on to recall one incident when he got caught up in a “freaky” attack.

“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,” he said.

“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’.”

Springfield went on to say the tragedy is still hard for him to accept.

“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,” he said.

“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 it was… pretty heavy when I think about the reality of it.”

Springfield also told Rogan that being involved in the attack had initially felt like he was in “the movies”, as he recalled hearing a radio airing a warning stating tat there were no “friendlies” in the area.

He was then asked if he wanted to “throw some mortars down the tube”, and added: “And it was John Wayne time, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”