Met an ex-army sergeant in a bar.

The other week I had a late afternoon/early evening meeting at the art school, so I stuck around to hit up a couple (new) restaurant bars and do work there.

At the 2nd - it had only been open a week, that's how close I'm getting to finally getting to every bar in the city! - there was one other patron, a younger done-up (white) woman in a funky black fluffy coat, who was very, very talkative with me and the bartender.

The woman was a self-confessed "Jack" Mormon, and had been a sergeant in the army.

She said she entered the army to challenge herself, but it took her a while to realize how fucked up it was.

She said the moment for her was when she had to teach a class, and her and all the other sergeants had to draw lots, and she got the "testing for chemical weapons" unit to teach.

For that unit, you had to train team members what to do if they were on a mission and suspected that chemical weapons had been used, but had nothing with which to test the air.

According to the unit, the person in charge had to determine who was the team's 'weakest link', instruct them to hold their breath and take off their gas mask for a minute, and then have them put it back on and observe them for another minute to see if they had skin reactions from exposure to the air.

Then, if they didn't, the next step was for the team's 'weakest link' to take off their gas mask for a minute and actually breathe the air the entire time, and then have them put the mask back on and observe them to see if anything in the air affected their breathing.

I asked her if they couldn't just all stay in gas masks the entire time, but she said that the gear was heavy and would dehydrate you quickly, so if you were on a tight mission that was the only way to go.

After detailing all of that, she said some people are in the army and decide to stay there forever, and the other half are people like her who at some moment are like "What the fuck am I doing in here?" and then leave without ever looking back.