Now the Tucson veteran is finally getting a chance to say, "I told you so."

Now the VA says they likely are suffering from exposure to toxic chemicals during their tours of duty.

A new VA report recommends spending $60 million in the next four years to study the health effects of the pesticides, anti-nerve-gas pills and other neurotoxins that military personnel encountered overseas.

It also says the government should stop funding research that proposes stress as the main cause of Gulf War illness.

The report, released in mid-November by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans Illnesses, urged the government to act quickly so that the lessons learned could be used to better protect the health of troops now serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I don't know how to say it any simpler than 'I told you so,' " said Amedia, a 50-year-old retired master sergeant from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

The panel was appointed by VA Secretary Anthony Principi in 2002 to review existing research and make recommendations to improve treatments for Gulf War vets. Principi immediately agreed to set aside $15 million for a year of new research.

Amedia said the new VA report "is basically saying the same thing that myself and other veterans have been saying for the last 13 years."

Amedia served in the military from 1974 to 1994, including a Gulf War stint as a linguist on intelligence-collection aircraft from D-M's 41st Electronic Combat Squadron.

In April, he appeared on ABC's "Primetime Thursday" with Diane Sawyer, describing how he sought medical care outside the VA system and spent more than $5,000 to try to ease his symptoms.

Amedia has long maintained that most of his physical problems - including fatigue, muscle pain, loss of balance, irritable-bowel syndrome and short-term memory loss - were caused by toxins in military vaccinations or in the pesticides used to fumigate warplanes.

Pepe Mendoza, a spokesman for the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System in Tucson, said the local veterans hospital does all it can to help the Gulf War veterans in its care.

"They get the best that we have to give them," he said.

Since 1991, he said, nearly 850 Gulf War vets have gone through the doors of the Tucson facility - many with symptoms linked to Gulf War illness. He couldn't say exactly how many, because the VA does not have a special category for those patients.

Nationwide, he said, more than 100,000 veterans have undergone voluntary medical screenings to become part of the national Gulf War registry, a VA effort aimed at cataloging their symptoms.

The recent VA report said up to one-third of Gulf War vets "experience a multisymptom pattern of illness, over and above rates experienced by veterans who did not serve" in the war.

The 140-page report did not focus on the performance of individual VA hospitals. It found that both the VA and the Defense Department have fallen short at the national level.

Among the findings:

• A "substantial proportion" of Gulf War veterans have symptoms not explainable by stress or psychological problems. In fact, blaming combat stress makes little sense because the Gulf War was so short that most vets didn't see much war-related death and trauma.

• Many symptoms - such as memory loss, dizziness and loss of balance - point to damage to the central nervous system consistent with exposure to hazardous substances.

• Some troops were exposed to multiple toxins during the war, including pesticides, nerve gas or the anti-nerve-gas pills the military made them take during deployment. Tens of thousands of troops likely were exposed to low levels of the nerve gas sarin when Iraqi weapons stockpiles were destroyed by American forces.

• Smoke from oil well fires and dust from depleted uranium weapons also should be investigated further as possible sources of health problems.

• The fact that some troops got sick and others didn't may be due to differences in individual tolerances to toxins or different levels of toxic exposure in different areas.

• The full impact of toxic exposure may not be known for years. Gulf veterans - even those who are not sick now - should be closely monitored over time for cancers and other health problems, and their children should be watched for birth defects.

The committee also found that the VA and the Defense Department have hindered the progress of research into Gulf War illness.

The Defense Department, for example, initially downplayed the idea that chemical exposure could be making Gulf War veterans sick, the report noted. And "contrary to regulations," the military logbooks detailing nuclear, biological and chemical exposures in the Mideast were destroyed after the war, it said.

The military also was criticized for failing to keep accurate records of the vaccinations and anti-nerve-gas pills dispensed during the war. The Pentagon responded that it since has made strides in improving its record-keeping.

The VA also was faulted for repeatedly doing studies that focused on combat stress as the likely cause of Gulf War illness - even after it should have been apparent that such research was not relevant and was not improving the health of affected veterans.

To Ralph Armijo, a Tucson veterans benefits counselor who helps local veterans file VA disability claims, the situation is maddeningly familiar.

"This is déjà vu," he said, recalling the battles Vietnam veterans faced to have their health problems taken seriously after exposure to Agent Orange. The U.S. military used the toxic herbicide in the 1960s to kill tree foliage and farm crops in order to deprive the enemy of food and hiding places.

For decades, the government said it couldn't prove that Agent Orange, which contained the cancer-causing chemical dioxin, was making veterans sick.

Today, the VA recognizes that several forms of cancer, and some birth defects in the children of Vietnam veterans, are linked to some degree to Agent Orange exposure.

Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a Maryland-based advocacy group, said the U.S. government has a history of being slow to respond when troops suffer health problems after wartime deployments.

"You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to look back over the last 50 years and see a pattern of obfuscation when it comes to telling the truth about what happened" to service members exposed to radiation, chemicals and other hazards, Robinson said.

"It's incredibly frustrating for these veterans and their families," he said. "Families can break apart. Some people lose their livelihoods and become homeless. Some just give up."

Amedia, who draws a disability pension from the VA, said that even if the agency makes changes, there is no way to adequately compensate gulf veterans who suffered.

"There's been so much damage done to the bodies of these veterans over the years because of lack of treatment that there's no way you can go back and make it right," he said. "No one can give us back the last 13 years of our lives."

• Contact reporter Carol Ann Alaimo at 573-4138 or calaimo@azstarnet.com.