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gky: Will you tell me about the incident with Captain Timson?

RK: Huh?

gky: Can you tell me about the incident with Captain Timson?

RK: Yeah. Well, he came into the tent and sat next to me and kept saying ask him this, ask him that, what did he say, you know. What Captain Timson wanted was for me to say "What's your name?" And let's say he says the name is Rusty Kimura. "His name is Rusty Kimura." Ask him how old he is. "How old are you?" "I'm twenty-two." "He says he's twenty-two." I said, "I can't interrogate that way. That's not the way we were taught to interrogate." I said, "I can't do that. The way I interrogate, I can interrogate in fifteen minutes everything I want to know, I want from him. I know what's needed." So I kicked him out of the tent. The order says no one can come into the tent unless I say so. Joe, back in division headquarters, he refused to let a lieutenant general come into the tent. And later on when he told me about it we sort of grinned and laughed about it.

gky: So, what happened with, when you ran into Captain Timson later? Was he real mad about the...

RK: Yeah. Well, I told him, I told him in his tent. He had a large tent, but he had a partition like that drape, for example. But the tent is like this, right? So it's all open up there, and even if it wasn't open, the people on the other side, two sergeants, could hear everything I was saying. And I came into -- these are two artillery sergeants that I was interrogating, and there's a, the top sergeant in the whole battalion was in the next side, and the next higher ranking sergeant was with him. The highest ranking sergeant is called sergeant major, and his assistant was a master sergeant. When I was telling Captain Timson off, you could hear a pin drop because they were listening on the other side. I told Captain Timson, "When I'm interrogating, I don't want anybody coming and bothering me, so you stay out of my, if I may use the word, goddamned tent. You stay out of my tent." And they were listening. And then I walked out and he never ever came into a tent again. Nobody ever came into a tent, into my tent.

gky: But, you know what is sort of amazing, later you came across some information that was going to be helpful, and Captain Timson listened to you.

RK: Well, whatever information I got, whether he believed it or not, he had to act on it, because if he did not act on it and my information happened to be true, well it's his neck, you know. See, for example, I tell him they're going to attack tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock and he does nothing about it, and 160 men up there on that little knoll are massacred, then it's his neck because I gave him the information that they're going to be attacked, but he didn't act on it. So he would have to act even if he didn't believe that an attack would occur.

gky: What months were you on Bougainville?

RK: Huh?

gky: When were you on Bougainville, what year and month?

RK: Oh, I was there from October of '44 till spring of, May of...

gky: '45.

RK: '45, yeah.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.