What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas

Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by notdrunkatall on Thursday June 13, 2013 @10:08AM (#5874085)

I had to go through the gas chamber in basic training, and we were essentially made to remove our masks and breathe some of the tear gas in. Let me tell you: it's not fun. There is no resisting the urge to cough and choke, your eyes water up, and all you can think about is getting out of the cloud.

It does have one positive side effect, however: it cleans out your sinuses like nothing else I've seen. :)

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Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by baha_man on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:28AM (#5874562)

I heard that some people are pretty much immune to CS gas, the only reference I can find online is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ACS_gas#Immunity

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Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by jandrewrogers on Thursday June 13, 2013 @12:07PM (#5874789)

People who are repeatedly exposed to CS tend to rapidly build up a tolerance. Anecdotally, this has been observable both in myself and many other people.

A large part of the effectiveness is also psychological. When people first experience CS they tend to overreact and experience secondary symptoms not created by the CS. After a couple exposures, you know what to expect and CS becomes more of a nuisance than something to fear. You don't intentionally walk into a cloud of CS but you can kind of shrug it off if you do.

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Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by gjulianm on Thursday June 13, 2013 @10:59AM (#5874376)

May I ask what kind of training was that?

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Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by ef4 on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:36AM (#5874592)

US military recruits are typically exposed to tear gas as part of their training on "NBC" threats (nuclear/biological/chemical).

A major point of the exercise is to instill trust in your gas mask and your ability to use it correctly.

When I did it, we put on our gas masks, entered a little building full of gas, stood around a bit feeling the tingle on our exposed skin, then one-by-one were told to take off the mask and try to say something (I think it was our name and rank), then run out.

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Re:What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas by xradionut on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:05AM (#5874409)

Every branch of the service has done tear gas exposure for decades. Speaking from my experience in the service, it sucks. (But it's not as stressful as fire fighting or damage control simulators...)

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