Title: Charms

General Information about Item:

Customary Folklore: Superstition

Language – English

Country of origin – America

Informant Data:

Brandon Henthrone is 27 years old and from Southern Missouri. He currently lives in South Carolina. His military experience started when he was 18 years old when he joined the Navy Seals. He became a Coremen in the navy after that and has been doing combat medicine since then. He had one combat deployment in the middle east.

Contextual Data:

This superstition was presented in the line of duty to Brandon.  He was kicked out of a vehicle for consuming these charms, and he was informed by the person that kicked him out that the charms were known to be dangerous.  This superstition also involves a fear of getting killed in combat, which is a common theme among military superstitions.

Item:

Charms: Consuming charms candy that can be found in an MRE(Meal Ready-to-Eat) is believed to put you and those around you in danger.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

Brandon: Every combat vet knows, charms, charms are bad juju man. Charms get you blown up. Charms get you shot. Charms are the worst things ever. If you come in contact with charms, anything, throw it away, get it as far away from you as possible. I legitimately…so when I heard about it, I just got to division, I was this E3, didn’t know anything, I was out in the field, and they were like, you know, I had just opened up an MRE(Meal Ready-to-Eat), legitimately it had the charms candies in it; I was like, “ah dude these things are awesome.” One of the sergeants literally Spartan kicked me out of the truck because he was like, “you do not know how bad those things are for anybody”. What made it worse, what truly made me believe in them being very superstitious and very bad was the fact that on our trip back, we had 3 maybe 4 trucks break down out of the 8 trucks that we had. All of the trucks were perfectly PM’d, everything was great, but it came down to it, and they were like it’s the f**king charms. They were like doc you f**ked everything up so that’s why I say charms are the devil, and that is probably the only superstition that I truly believe in. Probably really the only one that me personally have heard of. I’ve only experienced what the Marines have experienced, and charms is, to me, the only one that’s out there.

Cole: What is like a charm physically?

Brandon: So charms…have you ever had a Blow Pop?

Cole: Yeah

Brandon: So that is made by the company…if you look on a Blow Pop, it says charms, but inside an MRE, there is these little jelly candies, they don’t put them in there any more, but back in the day they used to. They were little red, yellow, purple candies, and they tasted really good, they really did but they brought bad juju to you. So I did my best to stay away.

Informant’s Comments:

He says this is the only true superstition he believes in because he witnessed the superstition working first-hand.

Collector’s Comments:

This is another example of a superstition that results in the threat of being killed.

Collector’s Name: 

Matt Girouard

Tags/Keywords:

Charms, Superstition, Military, MRE, Meal Ready-to-Eat