About 80 people used to attend meetings of the Association of Filipino Veterans of Orange County, but 25 is a good turnout these days. Memorial Day has become an increasingly significant holiday for these veterans, whose losses mount each year.

Only 50,000 of an estimated 400,000 Filipino World War II veterans survive. But demoralization, as much as time, has taken a heavy toll because natives of the former American colony who fought with the U.S. Army are still not eligible for the same benefits as other World War II veterans.

"We did everything the same as the people in the U.S. Army," said Fortunato C. Rivera, 79, founder of the local Filipino Veterans Association, who served as a corporal with the 14th Infantry Regiment, a guerrilla unit organized on American orders to resist the Japanese from 1942 to 1945.

"Yet after the war, we were classified as different. When our services were not needed anymore, we were not worth anything."

President George W. Bush pledged last week to extend benefits to Filipino veterans like Rivera, part of a package of rewards offered to the Philippines for cooperating in the current war on terrorism. But veterans like Rivera, who has campaigned for equal treatment since 1992, have heard similar promises before.

"Bush's words sound inspiring, but we have heard a lot of that from officials," said Rivera, who became a U.S. postal worker after moving to Anaheim in 1972. "But there are always reasons these things don't happen."

Bush is offering full benefits only to the 13,000 Filipino World War II veterans living in the United States, not the 37,000 survivors in the Philippines. The plan, which must pass Congress, would cost more than $60 million a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Extending full benefits to the veterans in the Philippines would cost $352 million a year. Congress cut off benefits such as education and home loans for Filipino veterans in 1946, when the Philippines received independence. Some benefits have been restored in recent years, such as limited disability and military burial rights.

"This is a case where justice delayed is justice denied," said Tagumpay Nanadiego, 83, a retired brigadier general now living in Orange who headed the Philippine Embassy's veterans affairs office in Washington, D.C., until 1999.

Nanadiego said he began receiving $47.40 a month in 1988 for disabilities he sustained as a prisoner of war, a survivor of the Bataan "Death March," which killed up to 11,000 Americans and Filipinos. He now gets $103 a month for the diabetes, arthritis and strokes that he said doctors attribute to the malaria, hunger and tuberculosis he endured as a POW.

"We were fighting under orders of the Americans," he said. "Imagine suffering so much and then learning later that you're segregated from the other people who are returning home as heroes."

In 1941, Ramon Alcaraz was commissioned as an officer in the Philippine Commonwealth Army under U.S. Army Forces in the Far East. He earned a silver star in combat for shooting down three Japanese planes. He captained torpedo boats that protected Gen. Douglas MacArthur's retreat as the Japanese invaded the Philippines. He survived a Japanese prison camp and joined the Philippine resistance, fighting until MacArthur's return.

But when Alcaraz moved here in 1975, he learned that he didn't qualify for a veteran's home loan because Filipinos who fought in the war were not considered U.S. veterans. "We joined willingly out of gratitude for what we called Mother America," Alcaraz, 88, said. "This was a betrayal of trust by the Americans." Alcaraz rose to the rank of rear admiral in the Philippine Navy but fled to California after running afoul of President Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted in a 1986 popular uprising.

Photographs in Alcaraz's hillside home show him wearing a West Point-style uniform as a cadet at the Philippines Military Academy, posing with presidents of the Philippines and shaking hands with President Eisenhower.

He became a U.S. citizen and made a comfortable living in Orange County as a real estate investor. But he continues to campaign for benefits for his fellow veterans, testifying twice before Congress and joining protests outside the federal building in Los Angeles.

"I don't need the compensation," he said. "I'm living comfortably. But I'm fighting for my poor comrades who are waiting to die. Why were their services disregarded? Why hasn't anything happened?"