Welcome to my first installment of “Don’t Be That Guy,” a series dedicated to preventing preparedness-minded people from becoming the caricatures that the media—or what’s left of it—have made of us.
Let’s kick this off with a creature familiar to any Army or Marine infantryman or member of the special ops community—the Geardo. It rhymes with “weirdo,” and for good reason.
So, what’s a Geardo?
A Geardo is the soldier who routinely blows a whole bunch of his pay, every pay period, on a bunch of stupid tactical gear he doesn’t need. He either sees some spec ops guy in the FOB (or in the pirated movie he’s watching on his laptop) sporting some piece of gear, or he sees it advertised in a magazine, and he just has to have it.
If you see a company clerk strutting around with a Navy SEAL knife (for opening those packages of mom’s cookies from home), Kevlar mesh gloves (because paper cuts are a bitch), and a collapsible riot baton (in case he gets mobbed for the aforementioned cookies), you’ve met a Geardo. This cartoon from a fellow who was deployed to Iraq sums up the phenomenon quite nicely.
So what does this have to do with prepping and survival? A lot, actually. There’s stuff that looks cool, and there’s stuff that you actually need in your situation. They are not one and the same—they rarely are.
If you commute three miles to your job, and you live in the Arizona desert, you almost certainly don’t need a collapsible hand saw for your get-home bag. Same goes for that high-speed snakebite venom extraction kit if you live in Alaska, where there are no venomous snakes outside of a zoo. Analyze your particular situation and purchase—or don’t purchase—accordingly. Anyone who says that you can buy survival peace of mind is a liar who wants to exploit your fears to line their pockets.
You’ll always need to eat and drink—when in doubt, put your money there. You probably don’t need a special forces dump pouch.
The cover art for this article is from the old Army comic strip “Pvt. Murphy’s Law,” drawn by Mark Baker.