Shiro Amada

Ensign Shiro Amada (シロー・アマダ) is the main protagonist in Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. He primarily pilots RX-79(G) Gundam Ground Type. After the unit was severely damaged in combat, his Gundam was repaired and re-classified as RX-79(G)Ez-8 Gundam Ez8.

Personality & Character
Shiro is a very optimistic and enthusiastic person. Although a soldier of war, he always viewed his service as a educational experience foremost. At first, Shiro had the mentality of all idealistic soldiers: eager to eliminate Zeon. His sense of thinking was driven from witnessing Zeon's dropping of the Side 2 space colony on Earth, a unforgivable act to propelled him to a military career. However, after his fateful encounter with Aina Sahalin, a Zeon soldier he fell in love with, his thoughts began to change.

As he witnessed war during his command of the 08th MS Team, his idealism began to fade and eventually developed a mutual belief with Aina to understand the enemy and to reconcile for peace; however, it was only met with criticism by his own superiors (men driven the need to win at all cost); his disgust with the war and the Federation's unsavory tactics would cause friction with the brass. In the battle against Apsalus III, Shiro was officially MIA/KIA. Using his death to his advantage, he no longer had loyalties to the Federation and took the chance to vanish in a isolated pocket of the world to be with Aina and raise their yet-to-be-named child as a family.

Skills & Abilities
As a Federation soldier, Shiro has been trained in various disciplines, including: war tactics, unarmed combat, use of fire arms, MS piloting, limited MS repair skills, and spaceship piloting. He has good leadership qualities as those under his command all have a deep level of respect for him. After the war, due to his injuries, he lost his left leg. Unwilling to return to the Federation military, he never had medics supplement his leg with a prosthetic leg to help him walk.

Beginnings & Joining the Federation
Shiro was present at his homeland, Side 2, during the initial Zeon G3 poison gas attacks on the colonies in the first weeks of the One Year War, witnessing all of the fellow colony inhabitants die horribly around him, Shiro saved himself only because he was lucky enough to wear a sealed space suit. Witnessing this wanton civilian death filled Shiro with a deep hatred for the Zeon, and everything they stood for.

Shiro, who was already serving in the Earth Federation Forces at the time, entered into officer training school, and after graduating he was handed a transfer to Earth to take command of the Kojima Battalion's 08th Mobile Suit Team in South-East Asia.

En route to Earth the transport that Shiro is on intercepts a distress signal from a damaged GM. Shiro decides to go out in a measly RB-79K Ball Type K to rescue it. He is able to save the GM pilot, Terry Sanders Jr., and destroy the Zaku, although in the process his Ball was critically damaged. Shiro escaped from the damaged Ball just before it exploded and found that the pilot of the Zeon Zaku had escaped as well.

Shiro followed the enemy pilot to the ruined hulk of a sunk Magellan battleship where the two engaged in a shootout with their sidearms, and after tackling the Zeon pilot Shiro discovered that it was a woman. Noticing that she was wounded, Shiro aided her and the two devised a plan to alert their respective allies and make it out of the battleship alive. After the two escape the young Zeon woman tells Shiro her name is Aina Sahalin, and from then on the two young pilots' fates would be intertwined.

08th MS Team
When he arrives on Earth, Shiro, Michel Ninorich and Terry Sanders Jr. join up with the rest of the 08th Team, composed of veteran Karen Joshua, and sonar navigator Eledore Massis. Shiro would be given the Ground-type Gundam unit 081 as his personal mobile suit. Full of boundless enthusiasm and naïve idealism, Shiro is initially regarded by his teammates as a hopeless lightweight, and taunted with names such as "Commander Newbie". Shiro tells his team there would be one rule on the 08th Team: that everyone would come back alive.

After a few missions, Shiro gradually hones his skills as a pilot and earns the trust of his fellow 08th Team pilots, and even the trust and co-operation of the jungle gueraillas that operated in the area. However Shiro's relationship with Zeon pilot Aina leads to trouble, and an eventual court martial, when it is discovered she was the pilot of the dangerous Apsalus mobile armor.

Although he was acquitted of all charges, suspicions of Shiro being a traitor were still heavy among the soldiers of the Kojima Battalion. However, at the crucial battle to destroy the Apsalus III and capture Zeon's mountain fortress Shiro deserts the Earth Federation Forces to save Aina, and Captain Isan Ryer ordered him to be executed upon capture. But Shiro and Aina's combined efforts destroyed the Apsalus. Both of them disappeared as Shiro's Gundam Ez8 fell into the volcano with the exploding Apsalus.

Shiro Amada was listed as MIA after the battle, but his remains never turned up in the wreckage of the Ez8. Unbeknownst to the Earth Federation Forces, Shiro survived the battle, but not without paying a high price: he lost his lower left leg.

After the war, Michel and Kiki Rosita later find out that Shiro and Aina had started a new life in a small log cabin hidden deep in the mountains of southern Asia, with Aina bearing his child.