<Begin Segment 5>

gky: Can you tell me about when you interrogated the two prisoners together?

RK: Yeah, that's, those were the artillery sergeants. That's when I had just told Captain Timson to stay out of my tent. The artillery prisoners were there waiting for me. I had, I thought I had completed interrogating them, and that's when I went into Captain Timson's tent to tell him that I'm very disappointed in this interrogation because I haven't gotten what I thought I could get and I don't know why. Today, I can't recall why, but, and he, since he and I were at odds, he agreed with me and said, "Yeah, it appears to me that the interrogation was a failure," or whatever he said. So I walked back into the tent and I told the sentry, the guard, I says, "Take them back to the," -- what's the name, stockade -- "the prisoner's stockade." So they started to get up and the one, there's like a ping pong table there and the folding chairs, and they were sitting together. The one, the closer one had a gauze bandage around his knee with a blood clot, looked like dried blood. I said, "How'd you hurt your knee?" He said, "I fell." I was standing about seven, eight feet away from him. "How'd you hurt your knee?" He says, "Well, I fell off of a bridge." And I thought right away, "Bridge." Well, I know what kind of bridges they have around Bougainville there. They're big log bridges like this about 60 feet high, trees, they chop them down then they'll take an ax and flatten one, the top part and threw it over this ditch. The ditch is only about four, five feet deep, but they're perpendicular and all rocks, and a tank wouldn't be able to make it. They'd have to make a regular bridge for a tank to go over it. But anyway, they didn't need any bridges for tanks, so they just needed it for soldiers, for us infantrymen to cross. There are many of those bridges. Well, I shouldn't say many, but there's several. Anyway, they're very slippery because they're green trees. If anyone falls, and all the rocks don't seem to be nice smooth rocks, they're all sharp pointed rocks. And I had my own name for them, I said, "Lava rocks" -- not that I know what lava rocks look like, but I always thought lava rocks were sharp, pointed rocks. The big ones, boulders, you know, they're so sharp that if anyone fell even four feet, they're sharp enough to cut the sides of your boots, the leather. Anyway, to shorten this story a little bit, I said, "Well, if you hurt your knee..." I sort of bluffed them pretending, acting as if I already knew where they're guns were located. See, we had been trying to knock those guns out for a long time. They had been firing at us every night, never during the day. They were probably running out of ammunition. But anyway, I said, "It must have taken you quite a while to walk from the bridge to where your guns are located." He said, No, I walk normal." I said. "Well, how long? How many minutes did it take you to walk from the bridge to your unit?" He says, "Oh, it was about 10 minutes," and he looks at his friend for confirmation. And the other guy said, "Yeah, about 10 minutes." So I got, I went right next door to Timson again and got what they call aerial photograph, and all I could see is the tops of the trees, you know, dense jungle. But I saw a little pencil line and I thought that must be the trail. And right alongside of it, about an eighth of an inch wide strip, that's the Laruba River. That's a large, wide river, quite a river. I called these four Australian soldiers in who were always together. They're the ones that ride in the jeep, go around picking up the documents and bringing them to me, or they'll pick up a prisoner. We never had more than two. Always one or two.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.