Bartling said if the winds, air pressure and temperature were just right, everyone would be up by 4 a.m. and assemble on a test grid by dawn. Then a jet would fly in close to the ground and make a run while spraying something over the volunteers.

"We were always told it would never hurt us, that this stuff won't hurt you," Bartling said.

Human test subjects

He watched the planes bank left or right and then up after their runs, noticing that the spray valves did not shut off right away. Bartling still wonders who or what was downwind — and what the damage might have been — in areas where the spray was released after the planes exited.

After the planes left, observers would wait and then approach men stationed at least about 30, 50 or 150 yards apart.

"I would talk to them and say, 'Hey, how you feeling? Can you see alright? Are you feeling any pain?"' Bartling said.

He only recorded station numbers, never any names. Their answers weren't always friendly.

"They might tell you, 'Kiss my butt' or 'Give me your damn gas mask' or 'Get the hell out of here, I'm not doing this anymore,"' Bartling said. "That wasn't a fun time."

Bartling can recall one distinct smell out on the test grid after one of the tests: freshly mowed hay. But there were no hay fields. What that smell was, Bartling isn't sure.

Bartling's long-smoldering questions relate to those tests and an infamous incident in 1968, after he was out of the Army, when a nerve-gas accident killed 6,000 sheep in nearby Skull Valley. Some of the more than 2,700 pounds of nerve agent sprayed from a plane in March of that year drifted off base, killing sheep and reportedly harming humans who said that they experienced nervous-system related illnesses.

Bartling wants to know what the test was for that killed the sheep, how many humans might have been harmed and what else, or who, was downwind.

"They didn't do them just for fun," Bartling said about open-air tests at Dugway. As for the dead sheep, he added, "My big question is this: Who was in the test grid or what was in the test grid to do the test spray? They're not going to spray (nerve) agent just for nothing."

Seeking answers

Because of that 1968 sheep incident, he'd like to know more about what was sprayed from those planes he watched eight years before the 6,000 sheep died.

Bartling heard last month about a new Web site designed by the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs for people who knew about or took part in military experiments that involved exposing humans to chemical and biological agents. The site went live Sept. 17.