Asians are often puzzled by Asian-Americans. It's as if the Asian, seeing an Asian-American, says to himself: "You look like me but you don't talk like me and you certainly don't think like me."

As with European-Americans, Asian-Americans lose touch with the old country, its language and customs and culture, sometimes in two generations and surely in three generations in America. When a Japanese-American who is a third-generation American can't say much more than "good morning" in Japanese, that confounds the Japanese.

Exceptions, however, have been Filipino-American soldiers in the Hawai'i Army National Guard who have been serving in the southern Philippines, where they have helped the armed forces of the Philippines in their battle against Muslim insurgents and terrorists. The Americans have found that their Filipino ancestry has been a clear advantage.

Sgt. Domingo Manog, a medic in the 29th Infantry Brigade, said: "It's been a real plus. We understand their culture and most of us speak Tagalog and some speak another Filipino language."

(Tagalog is the national language of the Philippines but more than 150 other dialects are spoken in that sprawling archipelago.)

Most Filipino-Americans in this National Guard unit are first-generation Americans, having been born in America or having come to the U.S. with their immigrant parents as young children. Thus many still speak a Philippine language.

Sgt. Lesley Pasion, a rifle squad leader, said the 30 men in his platoon provided security around a camp in which 400 to 500 U.S. Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force special operations forces are posted to train the armed forces of the Philippines in counterinsurgency and counterterror tactics.

Pasion said sometimes they stood guard as sentries, at other times they mounted roving patrols on foot or in jeeps. Under their rules of engagement, the Americans were to support the Filipinos, not engage the insurgents themselves.

"But we knew," Pasion said, "they were out there."

Staff Sgt. Alex Duldulao, a supply sergeant, said that he often helped organize and move convoys that required him to work closely with the Filipinos. Being a Filipino-American, he said, made the work much easier.

Another element in favor of the Filipino-Americans: They are serving in an allied country with long ties to the United States. In contrast, Japanese-Americans who spoke Japanese and served in the U.S. Military Intelligence Service during World War II were up against a fierce enemy.

During the fighting in the South Pacific, Japanese-Americans were sometimes asked to go into the Japanese lines or caves — unarmed — to try to persuade Japanese soldiers to surrender. That was made even more tense because Japanese-Americans often spoke Japanese with foreign accents.

One such Japanese-American agent, asked how scared he had been, gave an answer not fit for public print.

A subplot: Many of the Filipino-American immigrants in Hawai'i, California, and elsewhere in the United States came from the northern Philippines where the local dialect is Ilocano. The Philippine forces often post Ilocano-speaking soldiers in the southern Philippines in an effort to prevent southern Filipinos who might be insurgents from infiltrating their ranks.

That gives Ilocano-speaking Filipino-Americans an added connection with their Philippine counterparts, Duldulao said.

On the other hand, it meant that Filipino-Americans serving in the south had little chance to visit cousins in the northern Philippines. Even Spc. Glenn Ponce, a rifleman preparing for his first visit to the Philippines, doubted he would get to Manila, from which his family had come.

"It's just too far," he said, "and we won't get that much time off."

Occasionally, the civilian occupations of the National Guard troops allow them to bring to bear other skills while serving in the Philippines. Pasion is a customs inspector, Manog a police officer, Duldulao works as a welder, and Ponce is a painter on construction sites.

The U.S. military unit to which the soldiers from the 29th Infantry Brigade will be attached when they return to the Philippines shortly is the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines. The task force advises on logistics, engineering, and maintenance, and trains in tactics.

The U.S. and Philippine forces also engage in medical programs and humanitarian projects such as building schools.

The task force operates in Mindanao, the main island in the southern Philippines, and occasionally on the islands of Jolo, Basilan, and Tawi-Tawi, the island next to Malaysia. That island chain provides "rat lines" along which terrorists pass among the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The mission of the Philippine armed forces is to disrupt and eventually shut down the terrorists.

Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.