<Begin Segment 26>

MN: I'm gonna move forward a little bit, just because of the time, but I wanted to ask you, in 1990s when the Japanese American National Museum was gonna put Bruce Yamashita in as part of the, the soldiers exhibit, and he had filed a lawsuit against the Officer Candidate School, Marine Officer Candidate school, and you were very outspoken about that. How did you feel when actually Bruce won that lawsuit?

RW: Well, I don't think he won the lawsuit, okay? And I haven't really given it much thought anymore as to what he's doing. People have asked me in the past what's he doin' now, and I don't know. I know he got his rank and he's got promoted, but I heard he asked for discharge, or he got out. And I just feel that he had his intentions, but I don't think they were the right intentions. He said he had met an officer in the Marine Corps, an officer had talked him into joining the Marines, and then he said, "I think it would be a good opportunity to meet people and to travel, so I joined the Marines." Well, you don't join the Marine Corps to meet people and travel. You can do that in the navy, but you can't do that in the Marine Corps they train you, their first thing that they train you is to protect yourself in combat and to protect your fellow Marine. The fellow Marine's life is more important than yours. Then your occupation in the Marine Corps is second. If he's gonna be a lawyer in judge advocate's office, he can do that, but he has to be a Marine first, okay? And they really stress that. A Marine is trained to fight and to protect themselves from getting killed and protect their fellow Marine. That's why there's a camaraderie of Marines. I can see a guy on the street and he'll see my shirt and say, "Hey, Semper Fi. You in the Marines?" "Yeah. Oh yeah," and you talk and you're friends. It's just that everybody knows there's a big camaraderie.

There's this guy that was killed in Afghanistan and he, his family said that he told them that, "I'm sorry, I have to go back to, back to Afghanistan." They said, why? You already went. You don't have to go. "I have to go back for my fellow Marines." That's what it's all about, and so Yamashita joined for the wrong reason. He used this reasoning of being prejudiced, but I know a lot of Marines that were officers in the Marine Corps. Dave Miyoshi was a captain in Vietnam. Cliff Ishii, Reverend Cliff Ishii was a Marine officer. In the late '50s when I was bowling at the Old Vogue Bowl downtown L.A., that's quite a while back, there were two young Marine officers standing there watching, I think they came to see somebody they knew. So there's been a lot of Marine officers and they all went through a lot. They went through something that's kind of questionable, but Miyoshi went through it being dressed as a Viet Cong and stuff like that. Some people chastise him for that, but I don't. He took it. But if you don't learn to take that stuff, if you get captured, say you were in Vietnam, you got captured and you got no chance once they start, once they start punishing you. You got no chance to not say, "Oh, I'm here by mistake," this and that. [Interruption] My last comment is if somebody wants to have the camaraderie and the pride of being a Marine, you have to earn it. You can't just expect 'em to give it to you and then you go around saying you're a Marine. It doesn't work that way. And I'm not saying there's anything more special, but they train you in such a way that you really respect other Marines. You got to earn that right. I don't have anything against him. I'm not sure if that's the right way to go to sue the Marine Corps for something like that.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.