In the summer of 1943, twenty-two-year-old Warren Tsuneishi was trying to finish his BA at Syracuse University when a letter arrived from his older brother Hughes. Hughes was training with the U.S. Military Intelligence Service Language School at Camp Savage in Minnesota and recommended that his younger brother volunteer to do the same. "The Nisei in the infantry are being put into a unit called the 442nd," Hughes warned, using the Japanese American term for someone born to parents who had emigrated from Japan. "They are going to be cannon fodder."

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At Camp Grant in Illinois, twenty-four-year-old Norman Ikari had also heard about the new 442nd Regimental Combat Team, all Nisei except for the officers, and was intrigued. The recently promoted technician was restless at his comfortable, low-level lab job and felt the war was passing him by. Norman's kid brother Bob was already in the new outfit; Norman decided to volunteer for a transfer.

By the next summer, Warren Tsuneishi was an army private in the Pacific, translating crucial Japanese operational orders and documents. Japanese-language intelligence work was hardly headline stuff—for security reasons among others—but Tsuneishi would later earn a Bronze Star for his contributions at Leyte and Okinawa.

And Norman Ikari, who took a demotion to private when he joined the 442nd, was lying in a hospital bed after both his legs were shattered by enemy bullets east of Pisa. He would be awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart: one of 18,000 decorations, including 3,600 Purple Hearts, awarded over twenty months to some 3,000 original and 6,000 replacement members of the 442nd, known as "Go For Broke."

In many ways, some of them unsettling, the diverse experiences of these two men epitomize the achievements, struggles, and sacrifices of the 33,000 Japanese Americans who served in the armed forces during World War II.

Sitting in his Maryland study recently, surrounded by memorabilia including his Purple Heart, Norman Ikari, who retired two decades ago as a health scientist administrator at the National Institutes of Health, explains an important distinction of the time: "Issei [first-generation Japanese immigrants] could not become citizens. The immigration laws forbade it. If you were Japanese, the only way to be a citizen was to be born here. A Nisei like me."

When Norman Ikari was born in Seattle on February 17, 1919, his father, Shinichi, had lived there for six years after emigrating from northern Japan. His mother, Maki, also from the north islands, arrived in 1917. They'd left behind their first two sons, who came to Seattle after Norman—originally called Saburo, meaning "third son"—was born. Soon the Ikaris had two more sons and a daughter.

Both of Norman's older brothers finished high school in Seattle and became acculturated, but of the two, George was the bigger maverick: an artist, a movie projectionist, a motorcyclist, he invented games and learned to fly a plane. Their American wanderlust led Willy and George to scout for better opportunities for the family. In 1930 they found one in Montebello, east of Los Angeles. Norman recalls, "That is where I first encountered racial discrimination."

His brothers rented a house on the western edge of Montebello Park, but when the family arrived, white neighbors told the Ikaris' landlady they wouldn't put up with Japanese. The Ikaris quickly found another house across the park.

Norman was all-American, Nisei style. His favorite subjects at high school were biology, chemistry, and English. He went out for basketball, handball, and track, was president of the Japanese Club and a Merit scholar, and was named Senior Patrol Leader of the Japanese troop of Montebello Boy Scouts. "But when I graduated [in 1936]," he explains, "family finances were very tight, so college wasn't worth thinking about."

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