Dugway spokeswoman Paula Nicholson said that about eight years ago, Defense Department officials visited the base to gather information about old tests that took place there. She was told that the department provided the VA with names of people who had taken part in tests either at Dugway or elsewhere. Since 2001, she has received about five calls from veterans who thought they might have been injured in a service-related incident.

"They thought they had been, quote, 'bitten' by some kind of chemical," Nicholson said in a phone interview.

Nicholson has a Defense Department contact to whom she referred those callers. She also has a 2002 department document that has answers to questions about tests that took place in six states and three countries.

Nicholson said the base hasn't conducted any open-air field tests of actual chemical or biological agents since 1969. She said only simulated materials are now used in outside tests at Dugway.

"We do not do any testing with agents unless it's in a laboratory," she said.

Dugway's mission today is to test equipment designed to protect troops in a chemical or biological attack and to test detection devices that might warn of the presence of those materials. The base, billed as the "nation's chemical and biological proving ground," also tests methods of decontamination.

Bartling said he doesn't have any health problems now that he connects to his Dugway experience. In fact, he doesn't even use the VA for the five pills he takes for his heart.

"I'm not going to blame anything or anybody I don't know," Bartling said.

Bartling isn't holding his breath on getting any new information from anyone linked to the new Web site. What really "burns my tail," he said, is that troops didn't have a choice back in 1960, and if anyone had asked questions, "they wouldn't tell you the damn truth anyhow."

And they — the military and government — won't be held liable for anything, Bartling said.

"I understand needing tests," he said. "I don't understand not being accountable for a man's life afterward."

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com