Also not mentioned in Del Rosso's letter is a six-week assignment Tetro says he's reluctant to mention because it brings trouble whenever he does. But he says he was sent to spray chemical and germ weapons in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War.

"We took canisters of them on gunboats up the river to test them. I set them off at predetermined locations." He said he had the understanding that other personnel would monitor and measure their effect.

The only monitoring devices he said his ship carried were some petri dishes on the deck.

The United States, however, had signed treaties agreeing not to use chemical and biological arms. For that reason, Tetro says former shipmates have warned him not to discuss it and said they won't either. He says he brings it up only to try to help prove for his VA disability claims that he was exposed to such agents.

Tetro said the mission required boats designed to go 50 miles per hour with the ability to skim on as little as 6 inches of water, powered by engines in both front and back. Only three of the special-mission boats were made, he said. Two of the boats and three-member crews were used in the operation.

Tetro also says he helped transport some special operations soldiers into Laos and Cambodia on the boats.

He said the spraying rig used would send the agent far from the ship — and that he and others wore no special protective clothing. "Dungarees, T-shirts, shower shoes and tank helmets were the uniform of the day," Tetro said.

Other Project Shad participants contacted by the Deseret News either said they had no knowledge of such an operation or said they would not discuss details of any specific operation because of vows of silence they had taken.

Smith, however, said when Tetro told him of the assignment in later years, he tried to find references to the boats he mentioned — and did find mention of their use in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and how they were loud but so fast the enemy often didn't have time to target them.

The Deseret News has requested documents that might verify Tetro's story about missions into Cambodia and Laos. Dugway identified documents that possibly respond to those missions and sent them to the Pentagon, which has had them under possible declassification review for months, following the Deseret News' Freedom of Information Act request for them.

ENDINGS

By all accounts, Dugway's navy disbanded by the early 1970s — and sailors who had served with it "were given heavy-duty security debriefings and told never to talk about it. I am still under that commitment," said Jack Alderson of Ferndale, Calif., who commanded five tugboats assigned to the project.