"They should be encouraged that the VA is very much on their side," Benson said. The key, he added, is starting with the Defense Department to get the process rolling.

The Defense Department official said her department is working closely with the VA to provide that agency with information about decades-old tests, many of which until only recently were classified. Some of the information the departments need is hard to come by.

"The investigation at Dugway is not done," said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, Defense Department Military Health System director of strategic communications.

All of the unclassified testing has been identified, and most of all of those names are collected, he said this month. "They are really just getting started with the classified testing, so it may be a year before that work is done," he said. "There's no way to estimate how many tests or how many people."

Kilpatrick said that if there is a "preponderance of evidence," or a 50 percent chance or more, that a claim might be connected to military service, that person will get help through the VA.

But at least a few former soldiers say they feel like lab rats again, giving the government what it wants but getting little in return.

A chemical-weapons race

As of this past June, the U.S. Force Health and Readiness Programs counted 10,500 veterans who may have been exposed to toxic chemicals during more than two decades of tests, which government officials say are no longer conducted on humans.

The tests during the 1950s and 1960s came after the world had already seen the horrors of chemical warfare. The U.S. government estimates there were 90,000 deaths and over 1 million casualties during World War I from chemical agents. By the end of WWII, the U.S., Russia and Germany were fully engaged in a race to develop the nastiest types of chemical and biological agents they could find to use against their enemies.

"As part of this accelerated program, experiments used service members as human volunteers to determine the effects of chemical agents, as well as to develop therapeutics and prophylactics," Defense Department officials now admit on their new Web site.

Real health problems, regardless of whether they are proven to be service-connected, are not going away for soldiers who were part of the tests at Dugway and elsewhere.

Bunn, 64, doesn't figure the Defense Department or VA will come through for him, but he's trying, hopeful he'll get the benefits he thinks he deserves.