Tag Archives: Gear

Gear and Appearance Perfection

Title: Gear and Appearance Perfection

General Information about Item:

Customary Folklore: Superstition

Language – English

Country of origin – America

Informant Data:

Cory Green is a 26 year-old male from St. Albans, Vermont. He is now located in Boston and is attending Northeastern University. He joined the Navy in July of 2008 out of high school to be a hospital Corpsman. He did boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. From 2009-2011, he was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan where he worked in the ER and ICU doing basic hospital medicine. In 2011, he transferred to first Marine division to be an infantry corpsman where he specialized in combat medicine and combat trauma. Finally, in 2013 he transferred to Portsmouth, New Hampshire where he worked in family practice and eventually, got out of the military.

He joined the Navy because he was 3-sport athlete in high school, and his grades weren’t the best. He also didn’t feel mature enough for college. His dad suggested the Navy as the best option for him. Cory is 6th generation Navy. He felt that corpsman had the best opportunities for real-life experience and jobs outside of the Navy.

Contextual Data:

The military focuses on rigorous following of regulations, and Cory experienced this from various higher ranking officers.  They drilled into their head that if this gear and appearance perfection was not achieved, they would be killed in combat.  The military often uses the threat of death as a motivation for behaving a certain way.

Item:

Gear and Appearance Perfection: The soldiers were expecting to follow all grooming and gear regulations, and if they did not, it was believed they would be killed.

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

Transcript of Associated File:

Cory: If you didn’t shave for like a day or something, when you’re in the middle of no where in Afghanistan and you got some staff sergeant yelling at you for not shaving, and following the Marine Corps’ regs(regulations) like that led to complacency, which led to someone getting blown up so you always had to have your boots bloused…like we had this gunny yell at us one time because we were in the middle of Afghanistan in like December time, 20 degrees out and just came from the drill field, and his biggest priority was to make sure we were following regulations when it came to having our boots bloused, shaving every morning, packing our gear, lining it up correctly, and no beanies on past when the sun was up even if it was 20 degrees because those kind of small things led to bigger issues, which for some reason led to all of us getting killed, but it never really happened. But, that was one of the small superstitions that we had.

Informant’s Comments:

The general line of thinking of this superstition is that if you do not follow the regulations down to the minute detail, that means you are not paying attention, and this will ultimately get you killed in combat.

Collector’s Comments:

The reality is that grooming your beard will not have an effect on whether you are killed or not, which makes this a superstition.

Collector’s Name: 

Matt Girouard

Tags/Keywords:

Regulations, Grooming, Gear, Perfection, Navy, Military, Superstition