By James Hannah
The Associated Press

DAYTON, Ohio - The chemical alert sounds, and Staff Sgt. Dennis Hitzeman scrambles to put on protective overalls, a jacket, a hood, boots, gloves and mask.

He estimates he repeated that scenario up to two dozen times when he served in Kuwait for five months with the Ohio National Guard's 269th Combat Communications unit out of Springfield. At times, temperatures were as high as 110 degrees.

"At first it's kind of panicky," said Hitzeman, 30, of Fairborn. "You realize this is for real. The whole rest of the world comes to a stop when you get an alert like that."

Researchers around the country are trying to devise more sensitive and reliable equipment to detect chemical attacks: chemical fingerprinting in Connecticut, a "sniffer" on a drone in New Mexico, a laser beam in Utah, and optics in Dayton.

One way the Army detects chemicals on the battlefield is by shooting a laser beam into an area and using a receiver to read the wavelengths of light that are given off. Certain wavelengths indicate certain chemicals.

The laser technology is bulky, difficult to transport and can detect chemicals up to only about five miles, said Margaret Kosal, a chemist with the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California.

Messages seeking comment and information on the research were left for the Army, which responded by providing a short fact sheet on its laser detectors.

At the University of Dayton, researchers are trying to make the receivers more sensitive by converting the laser signal, using optics, to a telecommunications wavelength.

Changing the signal would enable the military to take advantage of sophisticated detectors, amplifiers and fibers developed by the telecommunications industry.

"If the receiver lets us extend the range for a given laser energy, then we can use a smaller laser to get the same range," said Peter Powers, associate professor of physics at the university. "And what now is a truck-mounted system may become a backpack-mounted system."

Marine reservist Eric Vershure, a graduate student who rejoined the research after serving a month in Iraq last year, also recalled putting on the uncomfortable and cumbersome protection.

"We're driving down the road for hours with this stuff on, not having any idea whether it's real or false," he said of one alert.

The soldiers would have quickly realized it was false, had they had a portable detector instead of having to rely on field commands from miles away, Vershure said.

Chuck Bennett, a physics professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville who has done optics work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said a telecommunications wavelength would allow faster analysis of chemical agents.

"The advantage of doing that is you get data rates at Internet speeds," Bennett said.

Although chemical weapons have not been used on U.S. soldiers in Iraq - most of Vershure's alerts were drills - searches for such chemicals continue. Before the war, the United States asserted that Iraq had World War I-era mustard gas, as well as the deadly nerve agents sarin, cyclosarin and VX.