Snoop Dogg’s Father Received a Purple Heart After Getting Shot in Vietnam 4 Times

Snoop Dogg’s road to stardom wasn’t paved in gold. The rapper overcame a tumultuous early life to become the hip-hop icon he is today. Now into the 2020s, Snoop Dogg carries a reported net worth of $150 million. But before the rapper was born, his father was fighting for his country during the Vietnam War, a conflict that left him with four gunshot wounds.

Snoop Dogg spent his childhood mostly raised by his mother

Although his father was a part of his life, Snoop Dogg didn’t grow up with his dad in the house. Instead, he was raised mostly by his mother. Despite her best efforts, young Snoop Dogg eventually fell in with the wrong kids in his neighborhood, joining a gang.

As the rapper told The Howard Stern Show in 2018, this led her to throw him out of the house at age 17. Soon thereafter, Snoop Dogg was arrested and did a few years in jail. It wasn’t until he got out that he decided to pursue music and crossed paths with Dr. Dre.

Although he ran afoul of his mother as a youngster, Snoop Dogg looks back knowing that she did everything she could, he said, to guide him without a consistent father figure around at the time.

Snoop Dogg once recounted his father’s time in the Vietnam War

During that same interview with host Howard Stern, Snoop Dogg opened up about his relationship with his dad. The pair have since become much closer than they were during the rapper’s childhood.

And Snoop Dogg detailed to Stern what his father told him about his time in the Vietnam War, including getting shot four times. “[My father] told me when he got to Vietnam, the life expectancy for a Black male was 16.4 seconds,” the rapper told Stern.

“They would send those Black guys to the front line to deal with the Vietnamese, and what about what’s behind them? These racist white guys who were really not used to being around Black guys … and have a gun in their hands. So when the firing jumps off, you’re getting shot at from the back and the front.”

Snoop Dogg remains a supporter of caring for veterans

Remarkably, Snoop Dogg’s father was actually shot twice during his first tour and then later sent back, where he received two more gunshot wounds. Add that to the racially fueled tensions the rapper described to Stern, and it’s easy to see why Snoop Dogg is such an ardent supporter of caring for veterans like his dad, as he’s explicitly stated on Twitter.

In fact, Snoop Dogg holds his father’s service in such high esteem that he plans to title his biopic, From Vietnam to Death Row, in his honor, he told Power 105’s The Breakfast Club radio morning show (via Hip Hop Wired). Although word on that project has been minimal, Snoop Dogg continues to maintain a stable Hollywood career, most recently appearing in Netflix’s 2022 vampire film Day Shift opposite Jamie Foxx.