It was not a pleasant reunion. The host had his oxygen tank and medication handy, in case his heart beat out of control. One guest arrived in a wheelchair, crippled by a neurological disorder. And another showed up explaining how he suffers from lymph nodes swelling in hot weather.
"I could have cried," recalled Jean Hulet upon seeing her husband's former friends at the meeting of Dugway Proving Ground retirees. Her spouse died about 20 years ago of cancer. "I knew those men when they were 30 years old. To think the military would do that to their employees."No one is certain whether military testing inflicted health problems and death on former Dugway workers. But the group of retired civilian test workers and their families who met in April would like to find out.
Futile search
But so far their search for clues has turned up little or nothing. The military either lost their files or never made a record or their experiences at Dugway.
"When I was working out there, I felt they took pretty good care of us. But evidently they didn't," said Gerald Vowles, who worked at Dugway from 1952 to 1985, and has been unable to walk the past three years because of a multiple-sclerosis-type disease for which his physicians can't find an exact cause.
After several months of requests and after enlisting the help of his state legislator, Vowles finally received a medical file from Dugway. But there was one problem. "They said from 1955 to 1972 there is nothing in my record. Everything was gone," Vowles said. It was during that time that Vowles was vaccinated against the deadly doses of biological agents and nerve gas he would be exposed to while washing down testing equipment.
"Some of those shots made me sick," he said.
His concerns are similar to those aired recently by Persian Gulf veterans, who claim the Army's experimental vaccinations or enemy chemical weapons have brought on a variety of mysterious illnesses collectively known as gulf war syndrome.
Howard Yerke was inoculated against Q-fever in 1969 before he worked on a test using the germs carrying the deadly disease. But two weeks later his arms swelled to the point that he couldn't put his shirt on. After Dugway doctors lanced the wound, it took six months to drain.
"I have records saying I received a classified shot, but to this day they have never told me what it was," said Yerke, whose underarm glands swell in hot weather. "I was told unofficially by the doctor who lanced it that it was Q-fever and if I got another (shot of it) it would probably kill me."
Stolen files?
Jeanne Hulet tried in vain to get workers' compensation after her husband's cancer death. Dean Hulet worked extensively with a cancer-causing decontaminant at Dugway. But his medical records mysteriously disappeared from his private physician's office. His widow and his former doctor still believe someone from the Army stole the file to cover up its widespread use of the decontaminant.
"I have no other explanation," said Dr. Alan P. Macfarland, now retired and living in Salt Lake.
"Maybe they bribed an employee" to destroy Hulet's records, he said.
One Dugway retiree who copied his files before he retired was Earl Davenport. He was sprayed in the face with a nerve agent stimulant, which the Army has since stopped using after research showed it could cause cancer. Davenport said his health declined rapidly since the accident, forcing him to take early retirement.
But poor documentation of the accident, of past inoculations and exposures to small doses of other chemical and biological agents has resulted in the Department of Labor denying his compensation claim.
Breaking silence
For what the Army says are security precautions, Dugway workers never talk about their work. And these retirees have obediently remained mum until recently. Davenport broke the code of silence a few weeks ago when he spoke to the Deseret News. Most recently he testified before a congressional committee, investigating similar experiences among Persian Gulf veterans who became ill after receiving vaccinations against enemy chemical agents and later found no records of the inoculations.
After the Deseret News published Davenport's story in April, he said several former colleagues called him to express similar troubles. They gathered at Davenport's home in April to discuss their problems.
"I felt healthy after seeing those guys at my house. It was sad," recalled Davenport, who suffers heart and lung problems. As they shared their problems they came up with a list of 29 former workers who were ill or had died.
Their stories have been aired on ABC News and Davenport said another national network has contacted him. They plan to keep talking to anyone who will listen, hoping the government takes notice and helps piece together a medical history that may determined what health problems were caused by work at Dugway.
"It's not that we want to get rich, but if I am having a problem I would like them to help me," said Yerke.
No records, no help
Without adequate records of the shots workers received or dosages they were exposed to during tests, physicians can't verify workers' compensation claims. "The medical opinion is the deciding factor because we look at cause-and-effect relationship" in determining a claim, said Tom O'Melia, acting director with Department of Labor's regional office in Denver. "The more information an employee can gather, the better his chances are."
Dugway officials say they can't speak for past record-keeping practices, but spokeswoman Melynda Petrie said military inspectors regularly check the files now at the remote post in Utah's west desert to ensure they are accurate, current and complete.
"There is no situation where information is withheld from an employee," she said, referring to charges by some retirees that Dugway stonewalls and deliberately delays requests for old records. "We respect anyone's right to information. We don't necessarily believe their claims, but we certainly try to help."
But Petrie acknowledged retired workers will run into problems on old records. She explained that she understood a fire destroyed many older files stored in a large government warehouse in St. Louis. And if the fire doesn't stymie the request, the seemingly interminable wait for records will.
"It's a very time-consuming and not always productive excercise to get their files from St. Louis," she said.
Records not enough
Documenting exposures to actual agents and simulants, however, is just part of the problem retirees face in proving work at Dugway caused their illnesses, said Dr. Creed Wait.
Wait, a Tooele internist who has seen up to 100 patients who have worked either at Dugway or the chemical arms storage complex at Tooele Army Depot, said he has studied the health affects of nerve agents, attended seminars and talked with military physicians, searching for clues to Vowles' and other patients' ailments.
"The Army has done very careful testing on long-term effects to single exposures to nerve agents," he said. "But the question of whether or not there is significant consequence of multiple smaller exposures has not been examined as carefully.
"There is a possibility that some individuals may have significant medical consequences to multiple small exposures to toxic nerve agents, but basically the answer to this question isn't known."
He said exposure to small doses of agent appears to affect a minority of patients. Why some are affected and others are not is not known. "I'll have a 75-year-old retiree come in and he's as strong as a horse. Then another will be ill. The answer to that is tough," Wait said.
But the question shouldn't be ignored, he said.
"It wouldn't be overly difficult for (the government) to give a retrospective review of employees who worked with nerve agents over the past 30 years," he said.
No such research is being done, said Lt. Col. Jeff Davies of the Army's Medical Research, Development, Acquisition and Logistics command.
But he noted that bids are being accepted for research into the human health effects of low-level exposure of chemical and biological agents. Congress has set aside $1.2 million for the study, which will focus on the possible use of chemical and biological warfare agents on allied troops in the Persian Gulf War.