Marines Make Lawyer a Captain, Admit Racism in His ’89 Dismissal

WASHINGTON — Almost five years after Bruce Yamashita was insulted, abused and kicked out of Officer Candidate School, the Marines have admitted blame and made him a captain in the Marine Corps Reserve.

Yamashita, 37, a Washington attorney of Japanese ancestry, said Monday that the military’s recognition that racial harassment played a role in his 1989 dismissal, two days before graduation, was “very, very important. It’s something that the Marine Corps has just been ignoring.”

Assistant Navy Secretary Frederick F. Y. Pang, in a letter to Yamashita last month, said he had determined that “the racially insensitive treatment to which you were subjected by individuals at OCS contributed to an environment which may have compromised your ability to succeed.”

Pang said Yamashita would have achieved the rank of captain by now had he not been dismissed from OCS.

Yamashita said his instructors at OCS attacked him with racial slurs, threw garbage cans at him and lifted him up and threw him to the ground. They also forced him to wear a dirty uniform to a review board, he said. He was discharged from the school on grounds of “leadership failure.”

The Marine Corps initially denied Yamashita’s claims of discrimination but in 1991 issued a formal apology, but no commission, after a further inquiry confirmed incidents of racial harassment.

In May, 1993, the Corps offered him a commission as second lieutenant, but Yamashita rejected that as not taking into consideration the four years he had lost fighting the case.