NEAR VANGOU, JULY 3: AN ARMY MEDICAL STATION
"I am a Japanese colonel," said Dugan, in Japanese, "and my name is Tamazawa. Here is my card from the camp. They say that I am psychoneurotic and that I cannot work. It is not true. I can work when I do not have arthritis. But I must be treated. I am a Japanese colonel. I am entitled to the care due prisoners of war. I admire the Soviet Union. I have been very much impressed by the great progress which Russia has made. All I ask is that you get me a private room in a hospital for a few weeks and allow me to select an orderly from among the Japanese enlisted men in the camp. I will be glad to write propaganda for the Great Soviet Union. I admire the Great General Sutarin. But I must have medical treatment first—" and he went on babbling in Japanese.
"Does he know Russian?" asked the Soviet medical officer.
"Speak beautiful Russian," said Dugan in very bad Russian.
"Did you have this arthritic condition before the war?" asked the doctor. Dugan just looked blank.
The infantry captain in charge of the camp said rapidly in Russian, "He only knows a few words, Comrade Doctor. That's the way he's been ever since he revealed his true identity as a colonel. Talking all the time. Trying to run the camp. Disorganizing the other men. Bragging. But nothing subversive, nothing political. He even draws horrible Japanese pictures of Comrade Stalin all over the camp and writes under them in Russian, 'Greatest Man in World.' Do you think he is faking it, Colonel? He looks like a fake to me, Comrade Doctor, but fake or not, he is an awful nuisance."
"What did you do?"
"I disciplined him a couple of times."
The doctor grew stern. "How?"
The camp officer blushed. "Hung him up by his thumbs for two days and then the medical orderly said he might lose them, so I took him down. The thumbs are all right, now."