"Yama ... Yama ... Ya-ma-shita. What the hell is that?" yelled one of his drill sergeants during the first roll call of Marine Corps Officer Candidate School.

The Hawaii-born sansei - a third-generation Japanese American - dismissed the remark as part of the "controlled stress" that comes with the territory in the Marine Corps. Like the glossy recruitment catalog read: " . . . make or break. Go or no go. It's where you ... and we ... find out if you've got what it takes to be an officer of Marines."

Yamashita was sure he had what it took. He'd proven himself a leader before, as student body president and captain of his high school football team. Now, fresh out of Georgetown University law school, he was ready to put all his talent and skills to work serving his country.

In 10 weeks, he told himself, he'd be commissioned a second lieutenant in one of the world's elite military outfits. He wanted it bad. Ten years older than most of his fellow candidates, he had trained all summer and fall in bulky combat boots under the hot Hawaiian sun, the words of his recruiter knocking around in his head: "If you want to make it through OCS, it's all guts, baby."

Funds Being Raised for PBS Documentary on Yamashita The Honolulu Advertiser May 6, 2002 Some 10 years in the making, a documentary chronicling Bruce Yamashita's historic legal battle with the U.S. Marine Corps is nearly complete. If all goes well, "A Most Unlikely Hero" will be ready for broadcast on PBS sometime this fall. What is needed is another $25,000 for closed captioning and other technical requirements. While at Officer Candidate School in 1989, Yamashita, originally from O'ahu, was the target of repeated racial taunts. Two days before graduation, he and three other minority candidates were dropped from the program. Among the reasons given for his disenrollment, the Marines cited Yamashita's low scores in a subjective leadership evaluation. Yamashita appealed on the grounds that he had been singled out because of his race. In 1992, his legal team won the right to review OCS records and was able to find a pattern of discrimination against minority candidates. The case was settled in 1993, and Yamashita received a commission as a second lieutenant a year later. "The case got a lot of support in the community and from politicians, and it resulted in some landmark changes at the Marine Corps level," said Steve Okino of Honolulu, who is spearheading the project. Okino said valuable lessons "came out of that whole process." Okino said the documentary is intended to remind people of those lessons. He said the issues raised by Yamashita's case are particularly relevant after the events of 9/11 led to discussions of diminishing civil liberties. The project is sponsored by the Matsunaga Charitable Foundation, with financial and in-kind support from the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Honolulu Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Harburg Foundation and others. A Web site — www.unlikelyhero.org — provides further information about the project and a form for making donations.

"Yeah, I understand guts," the former star high school tailback had replied with quiet assurance.

The next morning, after completing the medical exam, Yamashita, sporting crisp, newly issued cammies - his camouflage uniform - was jogging out of the red brick Marine headquarters to join his platoon when he heard his Master Sergeant, K.M. Runyun, bark: "Nani o shiteiru-omai! [Hurry up!] What's your name?"

Yamashita responded in Japanese, hoping the sergeant was just joking with him. But Runyun persisted, continuing to speak to him in Japanese. Unamused, Yamashita responded - in English.

"You speak to me in Japanese! " ordered Runyun, who continued to address Yamashita in Japanese throughout his training.

Standing in a chow line later that day, Yamashita's 5-foot, 7-inch frame was jolted to attention by the voice of another sergeant, Leland W. Hatfield, booming behind him.

"Hey, you speak English?" the sergeant bellowed, silencing the mess hall packed with a fresh class of candidates.

"Yes, Sergeant Instructor," a stunned Yamashita replied.

"Well, we don't want your kind around here," Hatfield said. "Go back to your own country."

The words knifed through Yamashita. He stood silent for what seemed an eternity, knowing all eyes of "Charlie" Company Qsome 150 officer candidates - were upon him.

As his training proceeded, says Yamashita, the only American of Japanese ancestry in his class, no single day passed when he wasn't either the butt of an ethnic joke or the target of racial taunts. In fact, even in this "weeding out" process famed for its intense razzing of recruits, the race baiting was conspicuous to many others.

Despite the racial harassment, Yamashita appeared to be passing all academic and physical tests required of prospective officers. But only two days before graduation, Yamashita and four other officer candidates - all but one of them minorities - were called before the Battalion Review Board and "disenrolled"Qwashed out of OCS. The board told Yamashita the reason was "unsatisfactory leadership" -- a grade based largely on peer evaluations.

Two days later, at an exit interview with Marine captain Victor Garcia, Yamashita protested his mistreatment, saying he "did not appreciate all the derogatory racial remarks that were made to me."

In the ensuing conversation, Yamashita says, Garcia misled him into thinking such behavior was consistent with Marine Corps policy. He recalls Garcia arguing, "with a hint of pride," that he had been subjected to racial insults himself, called "taco head" and "Taco Bell." "But I made it," the captain concluded.

Asked to provide specifics of his mistreatment, Yamashita declined, believing it would be futile. The Marine Corps later argued that Yamashita's failure to provide a written account of his harassment "prevented OCS from doing a timely investigation."

His dream of becoming the first U.S. military officer in his family dashed, a confused and shaken Yamashita returned to Honolulu.

The 36-year-old Yamashita, who still maintains his OCS-style crewcut, was prepared to accept harsh treatment. But nothing in his experience prepared him for the racist abuse his officers heaped on him.

"I can run faster, do better in academics, clean my rifle better," he says. "I can press my cammies better. But I can't change my ethnicity."

Yamashita, the youngest of five children, was raised in a middle-class community of Honolulu called St. Louis Heights. The racially diverse climate of Hawaii in the 1960s and '70s, where his friends, teachers and coaches were of many ethnicities, was a world apart from Quantico.

His Samoan football coach came from one of the poorest parts of town, yet regularly invited his players over for lunch at his mother's house.

In Hawaii, such slang terms as Portagee (Portuguese), Buddhahead (Japanese), Haole (white), Yobo (Korean) and Pake (Chinese), used in a vernacular context, do not carry the heavy pejorative connotations of stateside slurs, he adds.

"You grew up with all kinds of people," he says. "When you're living in that kind of community and you make jokes about other ethnicities, they seem less harmful."

Officer Candidate School was Yamashita's wake-up call to racism, mainland style. "I had never encountered anything like that in my life," he says. "What made it even worse was that you're in that environment where you want to blend in. You want to be an American."

On his occasional Sunday off at Quantico, Yamashita recalls, he would call home and tell his parents OCS was a "nightmare," but never mention the racial harassment.

"It would have broken their hearts," he says quietly. "Their whole lives were spent fighting this stuff. Being second- generation Japanese Americans - fighting the war, the fact that they rarely spoke Japanese, always English, the fact that they always buy Chevrolets, never Japanese cars, their education.

"Their generation was about assimilation to a large extent," says Yamashita. "And they did it kodomo no tame-ni, for the sake of the children."

Yamashita's 71-year-old mother, Pearl, is an associate professor at the University of Hawaii's College of Education; his father, Paul, 81, is a retired bridge engineer for the state. Like many nisei - second generation Japanese Americans Q Yamashita's parents never forgot the discrimination they endured following the Japanese military attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Though sheer numbers prevented the mass internment that occurred on the West Coast, the Japanese in Hawaii came under intense scrutiny. Community religious and civic leaders were rounded up and shipped to mainland internment camps. Japanese-language schools were shut down. Nisei were dismissed from their posts in the Hawaiian National Guard and barred *om joining the armed services.

As the war intensified, the nisei were belatedly permitted to form combat units. More than 10,000 volunteered, creating the all-Japanese American 100th Battalion and 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Sent to the European front, the 442nd became the most decorated fighting unit in U.S. history.

Yamashita's uncle Daniel served with the 442nd in Italy. In 1944, he was wounded while fighting German troops in the Battle of the Arno River and received a Purple Heart for his bravery.

"As far as I'm concerned, the price has been paid by my grandparents and my parents," says Yamashita. "For me to go to this school and be told 'You're less of an American' or 'You don't belong here' is b.s."

Before OCS, Yamashita spent four years as a young expatriate in Japan. After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1980, he headed to Tokyo determined to become proficient at speaking Japanese and "become more international."

He took a job editing English correspondence for a small trading company, living as a sarariman (Japanese salaryman), rising at 6 a.m. six days a week and commuting two hours into Tokyo by train. He shared a dormitory room with the company's 55year-old manager, Tadashi Iwata, his guardian and mentor. In return, Yamashita cooked meals, bought beer and performed assorted household chores for him. "I was his slave," recalls Yamashita. But "he was looking out for me, going to bat for me. He was like my dad."

Mastering Japanese was one thing; learning the subtle nuances of Japanese culture proved another matter. "I was making cultural mistakes left and right," says Yamashita. "It was a nightmare."

He remembers initially greeting the 70-year-old president of his company with a big American "Hi! How are you?" -- making sure to establish good eye contact.

"He was very offended by that and people let me know," Yamashita recalls. "Iwata-san took me aside and said, 'All you're expected to do is bow. And don't look at his eyes; keep looking down."'

Another faux pas was leaving his ohashi (chopsticks) sticking up in his bowl of rice or soba. "That's like death," he explained. "They do that at funerals. I never knew that."

After a year, Yamashita quit the company and started Yokomeshi Shimbun, a newspaper geared to students of Japanese. Written in simple kanji (characters) by foreigners like Yamashita, the articles ranged from interviews with Akebono, Japan's Hawaii-born champion sumo wrestler, to investigative pieces on Sunya, a Tokyo ghetto. The paper was a hit, particularly among Japanese who wanted to know what foreigners thought of Japan.

"I saw myself as an ambassador," says Yamashita. "Japanese saw me as an American and would ask me about America. So you try to put on a good face and try to bridge the gap."

In 1984, Yamashita returned to the States to study law and international relations at Georgetown University. During his final year there, several friends at the School of Foreign Service urged him to join the military. On a Christmas break, Yamashita returned to Honolulu and, on the recommendation of a Marine recruiter, called up Maj. Ernie Kimoto.

Kimoto, then a lawyer based at Fleet Marine Force Pacific- Camp Smith in Oahu, was winding up a distinguished 20 years of service that included commanding a 240Marine combat unit in Vietnam in 1969 and serving as senior staff Judge Advocate at Camp Butler in Okinawa in the early '80s.

Over lunch, the two talked Marines. Kimoto liked what he saw - "a homeboy interested in serving his country." Beyond that, he saw a bright, mature man about to earn degrees in law and international relations - certainly a change from recent college grads Kimoto was accustomed to counseling.

"Bruce was unusual. He wanted something different," recalls Kimoto, 47, now a staff lawyer in the Hawaii attorney general's office. Yamashita had been high school student body president and captain of his varsity baseball and football teams. He also was elected to serve as a delegate at the state's Constitutional Convention.

And another Asian officer surely couldn't hurt Marine statistics, according to Kimoto, who counted only 20 Asian active duty officers in the Marines' 1988 bluebook. "I was looking at this as a new frontier for Bruce," says Kimoto.

By graduation, Yamashita's mind was made up. He turned down the Army JAGQ Judicial Advocate General, because it "was just a two-week orientation before you're shipped out." With the help of Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, he secured a special age waiver to enter the 140th Class at Officers Candidate School. At 32, he was 10 years older than most recruits.

"Maybe it's this macho football part of me, but I wanted to earn my stripes," said Yamashita. "Most people might just go the fastest route, but I found the Marine Corps challenge very attractive."

Kimoto was shocked when, nine months later, he got a phone call from Yamashita.

"As he described his experience, my feelings evolved into real anger and disgust," recalls Kimoto, who had just retired from the Marines. "I was surprised that the Marine Corps in this day and age could do such a thing. I'm proud of being a Marine, but the way they treated Bruce is inexcusable."

Kimoto believes that Yamashita's commanding officer lost control of his subordinates. "Once the sergeants realized they could get away with the harassment, it grew," he says. "It's insidious. They began a campaign of slurs. If the leaders of the platoon don't think a candidate is going to make it, the message is passed on to the others."

Yamashita didn't consider protesting his treatment during training. "You're not thinking about your civil rights and fairness ," he says . "You're just trying to survive ."

He says he never knew when a sergeant might shout him down, ridicule him for his Japanese heritage or flag him with an "unsatisfactory evaluation," the equivalent of a high school demerit. He ended up with a platoon-high 32 "unsat evals," ranging from deficiencies in military basics, such as an untidy uniform, to an integrity violation, which he claims was trumped-up.

On the P-T (physical training) field the first week, one sergeant tagged him with the name "Kawasaki-Yamaha- Yamashita" rather than addressing him as "Candidate" Yamashita. The Marines later claimed the sergeant was dyslexic. Another sergeant called him "Kamikaze Man."

In Yamashita's third week, a sergeant, Melvin Brice, turned to him while lecturing the platoon in the squad bay, their barracks.

"Eh Yamashitee, were Japan and Russia ever at war during World War II?," Brice asked.

"I think they were, sergeant instructor," Yamashita replied.

"No way. You know why, Yamashitee?" said the sergeant, nose to nose with the recruit. "Because we kicked your Japanese ass. That's why."

That was far from the end of it. On several other occasions, he recalls another sergeant, E.F. Carabine, yelling, "Yamashita, quit bowing . . . This is America, man."

In his sixth week, Sgt. Runyun approached Yamashita while he was waiting in line for lunch. "Sorry, Yamashita," he said, "but we have no tea or sushi here." It was one of the few times Runyun spoke to him in English.

The same week, a fellow officer candidate, Edward O'Brien, approached Yamashita, who was cleaning his rifle, to ask: army?"

"Because, O'Brien, I'm an American," Yamashita found himself explaining.

Later, recalls Yamashita, "I thought, to this guy that I'm an American - this is not good."'

Until OCS, "the fact that I was bicultural, bilingual was a real positive," he says. people. It goes back to competitiveness. This is what America needs."

But at OCS, "I experienced the backlash," he says. "It can make dreams not come true."

In the three months after his discharge, Yamashita struggled with self-doubt and humiliation. He resumed his law career, passing the bar and going into private practice as a criminal defense attorney. The Corps' rejection hurt him deep inside, but he didn't challenge it.

Then, one day, Al Goshi, a friend who was a West Point graduate, told Yamashita that racial remarks were strictly forbidden at Army OCS. Acquaintances and friends who were officers in the Army, Navy and Marines said much the same thing.

Spurred on by their outrage, Yamashita decided to act. In January 1990, he sent a letter to Corps Commandant General Alfred M. Gray protesting the racist treatment he had received at Quantico . "It tainted the way I was viewed and evaluated by the staff and fellow candidates and thereby prevented fair judgement of my leadership ability," he wrote.

A preliminary inquiry concluded the Corps was not guilty of racial discrimination. In a response to an inquiry on Yamashita's behalf from Sen. Inouye, the sole Asian American in the U.S. Senate, Gray wrote that "Mr. Yamashita is looking for reasons outside of himself to fault . . . "

But Yamahita kept up his fight. In October 1990, he filed appeals with the Navy Discharge Review Board and the Naval Board for the Correction of Naval Records, charging that the persistent racial harassment by his superiors resulted in his poor leadership scores. The Marine Corps, which falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Navy, reopened its investigation.

Finally, Yamashita began to get vindication. A lO-month probe by the Navy's Inspector General verified most of the egregious incidents. There were "some rather crude remarks made based on his ethnicity," said Chief Warrant Officer William Wright, a Marine Corps spokesman. "It was determined that they were uncalled for and the commandant of the Marine Corps issued a formal apology."

"There are often times in training when high stress is acceptable," Wright added. "However, to use one's gender, to use one's racial background or ethnic background, is unacceptable. The Marine Corps will simply not tolerate it."

Along with the apology, the Marine Corps offered Yamashita the chance to retake the officers' course. He refused, saying he had all but completed the program the first time.

Seeking to clear his record and be reinstated as an OCS graduate, Yamashita pressed on with his appeal, finally getting a hearing before the Discharge Review Board in November 1992.

There was "a tacit agreement among the officers and the drill instructors," said Clayton Ikei, Yamashita's attorney. "The drill instructors would harass and the officers would permit it."

The board, however, ruled that it lacked the authority to determine if racism was critical to Yamashita's disenrollment. That decision is pending before the Asst. Secretary of Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, who can either accept the Review Board's interpretation or request a new hearing.

Another appeal is pending before the Board for the Correction of Naval Records. While Yamashita is not hopeful about this appeal, he must exhaust the administrative review process before he can sue the Marine Corps in U.S. Claims Court for reinstatement and back pay.

The circuitous path, explained Ikei, is based on a U.S. Supreme Court case (Chappell vs. Wallace, 1983) involving five black sailors who filed suit in U.S. District Court in San Diego claiming they were discriminated against by superior officers. The Supreme Court said that because the military has administrative procedures to address such claims, military personnel were exempt from the procedural safeguards a civilian has under the Title VII Civil Rights Act.

But Ikei, who has handled discrimination cases for 20 years, argues that the military administrative process is ineffective and badly in need of re-examination.

"If Bruce had been a civilian, under the present law he would be entitled to reinstatement, back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages," as well as a jury trial, Ikei says.

Yamashita's struggle, covered extensively by the Hawaiian news media, has struck a powerful chord among the islands' politicians and Asian American groups. In April 1991, the Hawaiian legislature sent Congress a resolution demanding his reinstatement, punishment of offending Marine sergeants and other remedies. Sen. Inouye is also continuing to pursue the matter. In October 1992, a statutory amendment written by Inouye was passed by Congress requiring the Defense Department's military schools to certify in that "appropriate measures have been taken to publish and enforce regulations" prohibiting racial discrimination.

The National Pacific Asian Bar Association also decided to back Yamashita after its former president, ex-Marine Hoyt Zia, learned of the case.

"It was like deja vu," recalls Zia, who has since moved from San Francisco to Honolulu. pretty much what happened to me at Officers Candidate School in 1975 - that same sort of racism and insensitivity to Asian American issues."

"My nickname was Candidate Kung Fu," says Zia, who served his 31/2 years at the 155 Battery in Okinawa, and 29 Palms in Southern California. Zia's platoon commander, however, overheard the slurs and made the offending sergeant "stop it and apologize."

Nevertheless, Zia noted that most Marines teaching at OCS had recently returned from Vietnam and routinely referred to the Chinese, Vietnamese or Japanese as "Chinks, or gooks, or Japs, or Nips or slants." One instructor opened a class with this memorable ditty: 'We wonder where the yellow went, when we dropped napalm on the Orient."

In the high-stress, survival-of-the fittest environment of OCS, attacks on ethnicity amounts to an unfair disadvantage, explains Zia. "Let's say the amount of stress the Marine Corps is allowed to put on people is the equivalent of a 60pound pack. If you throw in race - as in Bruce's case - it adds another 10 pounds to the pack. He's got a heavier burden to shoulder."

Yamashita says the harassment was most harmful during peer evaluations, which were the basis of his leadership grade. Every three weeks, candidates in each squad were asked to rank and critique their peers. The criteria: With whom would you most want to go into combat?

"Because Bruce was taunted more, lectured to more by the sergeant instructors, it was going to affect his peer ratings. There's no doubt about that," says Ron Catipon, a Filipino American in Yamashita's platoon who was also disenrolled from the course.

"They tell you to conform," says Catipon, who testified for Yamashita at the November Review Board hearing. "Everybody is supposed to wear the canteen on the same side, store gear the same way. You're suppose to blend in as a group thumb, it can affect the way you look at them."

Catipon recalled an incident he says typified Yamashita's treatment. The platoon was lined up at attention in the squad bay receiving a lecture by Staff Sergeant Brice. "Bruce and I were standing at the front. In the middle of the lecture, he turns to Bruce and asks him point-blank: 'Do you know who Ultra Man (a Japanese cartoon character) is?' It was completely off subject and it took Bruce by surprise. I think he said, 'No, sergeant instructor . . ."'

"At that point, the sergeant instructor just continued as if he had never asked the question. When you're at attention, you're not supposed to break rank, but everyone was laughing," says Catipon, adding that the recruits weren't disciplined for the violation.

For his part, Sen. Inouye has a powerful personal reason for refusing to let the matter die. Call it a blood debt. "My brothers in the 442nd Regimental Infantry Combat team fought and died with the conviction that spilling our blood would improve the way of life for future generations," Inouye said recently. "I could not, and would not, let their sacrifice be for naught."

At a time when the Pentagon is contending with a number of hotly contested issues, including whether gays should be allowed to serve in the military and the sexual abuses that came out in the Tailhook scandal, Yamashita's case raises the specter of institutional racism - not only against Asian Americans but also African Americans and Latinos.

Despite a 1948 federal law desegregating the military, minorities remain grossly underrepresented at officer levels. African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities currently make up 10 percent of Marine Corps officers, while filling 31 percent of enlisted ranks. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up just 1.2 percent of Marine officers and 1. 5 percent of the enlisted, although they are 2 .9 percent of the overall U.S. population.

The Japanese American Citizen's League has stoutly supported Yamashita in his struggle, providing moral support, publicity, and legal counsel by Honolulu attorney Ikei. In conjunction with Yamashita's case, it also commissioned a study of the Marines"'disenrollment" patterns. Between 1982 and 1990, the JACL study found, minority candidates in the Officer Candidate School course were "disenrolled" at a rate of 41 percent, as opposed to 34 percent for white candidates. In Yamashita's class, the 140th OCS, 60 percent of the minority candidates were "washed out," in contrast to 28 percent of whites.

The Marine Corp has admitted "there are some big differences between disenrollment of white candidates and non-white candidates," says Marine spokesman Wright.

At his Nov. 19,1992, Review Board hearing, Yamashita presented the study's findings, indicating that between 1982 and 1990, the Marine Corps Officer Candidate Schools demonstrated a "pervasive, persistent pattern of discrimination against minority officers candidates."

Col. William Reinke, Yamashita's commanding officer, had the worst record among the four officers who headed OCS during the eight-year period, according to the study. For the five classes under Reinke, minority disenrollment was 17 percent higher than for whites.

The statistics, provided by the Marine Corps under the Freedom of Information Act, "destroy any pretense about Mr. Yamashita receiving fair and equal treatment in OCS," said Honolulu JACL President William Kaneko. "The data show that there was statistically little or no chance for Bruce to be commissioned because the system was stacked against him and every other minority candidate for almost a decade."

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr. has since formed a panel to examine the role of race in officer recruitment and attrition at OCS. The panel's report is expected this month. "The Quality Management Board will not deny that Mr. Yamashita's case had something to do with its creation," says Marine spokesman Wright.

Back at Quantico, the sun had already set when Yamashita finally left the Battalion Review Board after being discharged and made his way back to the squad bay.

He dragged his exhausted body across a set of railroad tracks. Dejected and confused, with tears welling up in his eyes, Yamashita paused to sit on the curb facing the red brick headquarters . It was one of the few solitary moments he'd had during the grueling 10 weeks.

Back in the squad bay, one of the sergeants, upon learning of Yamashita's disenrollment, ordered the platoon to line up in formation and give Yamashita an "Urah! ," the Marine cheer of solidarity.

"That's when I broke down," Yamashita says. "I got from those three 'Urahs' what I had expected officially from the Marine Corps. It was a tremendous feeling of satisfaction that someone realized that this guy had taken a lot of s*** --and never quit. Maybe, in a roundabout way, it was an acknowledgement of the injustice."