 An important rule is you can never have enough medical gear. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we are back with another edition in our Minuteman Gear series. This one is a little bit weird because this is not an item that not necessarily everybody needs, but someone in your fire team or squat or whatever you're calling it or however big it is should probably have this. After you get over about, I don't know, four, six, eight guys. Somewhere in there, if you're over that number, for sure if you're over eight guys, one of the guys in your crew should probably be carrying one of these. And what that is is a, I'm gonna call it a squad level or a fire team level medic bag. We're not gonna go over into delineation of roles or anything like that right now, but basically in your fire team of four guys or more, at least one of you should be the designated medic and have some kind of medical training. Go ahead and send them to a Dark Angel medical class. Huge fan of that. I've taken their class and it's massively, massively helpful. So somewhere on your team needs to be that guy. And what that means is in part, they need to carry more medical gear than everyone else. Everyone on your team should have an IFAC. Your IFAC, your individual first aid kit is for you, right? That if you get shot, we're gonna pull from your IFAC. I'm not giving you my IFAC. My IFAC is for me. Your IFAC is for you, right? So you put in your IFAC, whatever you want to save your own life. That's what those are for. So if you get hit and your medic guy comes over to you, the very first thing he's gonna do is pull out your IFAC and use that to save your life, right? Now, someone in your crew should carry a bag that has more stuff in it than just the IFAC. It should have more of the same items and then some additional items which we're gonna talk about here. But the theory here, remember, mission drives the gear train. The theory here is that you have more items in case someone's IFAC doesn't cover it, right? There's like a multiple injury scenario and they just don't have enough actual life-saving equipment in their IFAC. That's one. Two, remember, this is an American Minuteman setup. So we're thinking, America has been invaded by the communists and they're everywhere and you need extra medical equipment and maybe that's not even for your fire team. Maybe that's because you go through a town and someone got hurt and you're able to provide some aid there. You're able to provide some additional medical assistance to those people, those non-combatant civilians that gained you goodwill or whatever and that's just a helpful thing to have. So it's additional IFAC-like items, tourniquets, bleeding kits, stuff like that, and additional items that people just don't have in their IFAC which again, we're gonna talk about right now. So this is the squad level bag and again, just remember with all this stuff, it's just an iteration, right? You don't have to do what I'm doing here, you can do your own thing but this is how I've thought through that problem. The first thing I've done is I have mounted it on a three-day pack, right? So this is my three-day pack. I wanted the medic bag, the squad level medic bag to be hikeable with your three-day pack because if we're all gonna go out on a long walk and you need to bring your three-day pack, the medic also has to have a way to carry his medic bag and then hopefully you can get somewhere, you can drop rocks or whatever and then you can just put this pack on. So my first requirement for my bag was that it had to be mountable to the bag somehow or another. So it couldn't be a huge big backpack, right? It had to be a slimmer and smaller profile bag which is how I ended up with this one. So the way I have this attached is I just have this random piece of nylon with a buckle that came with the bag and then I looped the arm straps over the bed roll here, right? So the arm straps of the actual backpack are over the bed roll, comes off like that. So again, the idea being right that you drop your ruck, you can throw this on when you're going on patrol, you're going out to do some stuff and now you just have a much slimmer profile bag that you can wear as a backpack over your gear. This is why we do webbing and everything else. See the previous video in this series when we talked about gear systems. So I think the brand that makes this bag is Elite Spanker. It's something on and off Amazon. It's actually pretty good quality. It came with the tags that say this is official Cordero fabric. It's just not made in America. But this honestly, it seems like a pretty good bag. And it's about the perfect size. I already owned this bag and so I want to try to use something that I had rather than, you know, go out and buy a brand new bag. I looked at like the M9 Medic bags. However, those things are ridiculously expensive. I mean, you're talking $300, $400 for a bag about this size. Maybe slightly bigger. This is like 56 bucks on Amazon. So there was a significant price difference there and I wanted to, again, try to use what I have and not have to buy something new. Right now I do have this big glow in the dark medical tag on it because I also use this as my range safety bag so that when I go to the range where I teach classes, this will be the bag that I have. So I wanted it easy to identifiable. If it's really time to party, that is obviously gonna come off because you don't wanna wear something that glows in the dark. Okay, so first thing, I did add these really rather large two poles here for the zipper so that you can easily unzip this. Don't have to do that. I just did it because, like I said, I thought it made it easier to unzip, which I liked. First off, in the top pouch here. I can here, I just have a ton of gloves because you can never have too many gloves. So I just stuffed a bunch of gloves in that top one so they're easily accessible there. In this bottom pouch right here, I put a Sam Splint because, again, remember, you have to carry some things in here that you can't carry in your iFact. If you were to fall and break a bone or if you were to get shot and that were to break your bone, you're gonna need some way to splint that. So having a Sam Splint is super helpful. This is a general boo boo kit. Just bought this off Amazon. This is the Adventure Medical Kits. This is a one to four person and it's just got typical stuff, like all kinds of band-aids and there's a button compass in here and a rescue whistle. There's a survival blanket, an emergency blanket, little scissors, Tylenol, ibuprofen, a bunch of band-aids. Just, like I said, a little boo boo kit. That's kind of a squad level boo boo kit. Additionally in here, I have two of these emergency survival blankets. Those are helpful for hypothermia after you're able to address the wound. You're gonna wanna wrap someone up. That's what I have in the top pouch. Along the sides, you're gonna see that I have four tourniquets on the whole bag. So I have two on this side and two on that side. Obviously they're all external, so again, you can grab them and go. I also put a roll of athletic tape on here that can be, again, used to just tape up wounds, tape up some gauze, whatever. You can never have too much tape. So that's my roll of athletic tape. Inside the bag, in order to organize this helpfully, I purchased a condor, a little bag organizer thing. So what this does is it pulls out of the bag. I have dummy-corted this to the bag so that you can't lose it or separate it too far. This folds open and this becomes the actual medical contents of the bag. I did carabiner a headlamp on here because so that you can treat wounds and always have a way to see what you're doing. That's gonna be helpful. This one specifically happens to be white, red, and green, but it doesn't matter too much to me. I just wanted to be able to wait to see something. So if you had to treat something at night or under a building or whatever, you would have a better way to be able to see what you're doing. These three pouches here are all detachable so that if you had to, you could have different bleeder kits in here and you could detach them. I really like that feature. I think that's super, super helpful. And if I ever eventually change the bag and the bag has a Velcro interior, I can still use all the pouches on here and just Velcro them directly to the bag. So that's a cool deal. The top one here, this is just a Dark Angel iFAC. It's their full iFAC. Again, it's just an additional one that I carried in here and that thing is really stuffed so much for quick deployment. But this is their Dark Angel iFAC. A big, big fan of Dark Angel iFACs. They're the only iFACs I use anymore. I don't have a promo code for them, but I should. And if I ever get one, I'm totally gonna give it to you. So that is the deal for that. This middle one here is all respiratory oriented stuff. So this is things like a nasal pharyngeal airway, chest seal, chest seal, chest seal. Basically ways to treat and deal with breathing. On this bottom one here, I have, again, bleeding. So this is a Israeli compression bandage and this is some hemostatic gauze. Super important if you're gonna have to pack wounds. Hemostatic gauze does wonders. And then this is just plain old compression gauze that is not hemostatic. I would use this one if I had a choice, right? This is just in here because I own it and it's extra and will do more good in here than anywhere else. Moving on to the second side here. So this is just an empty panel that I just stuffed with a bunch of gauze because I could. Again, these panels themselves are all detachable, right? So I could take this entire panel off and hand that to someone if I had to do that. On this top panel here, this is a little bit more admin tools. So I have some shears. I have some more gloves stuffed in up here. I have a cravat up here so that you can do things like dress wounds and things like that. I have two chest decompression needles, a permanent marker, and then a SWAT-T tourniquet here. Basically a way of having extra tools. Again, this whole panel is detachable. One more note I'd like to make about this bag is that it has very slim profile backpack straps, which I liked. That was another thing. And you could attach this directly to a plate carrier or any kind of Moly really, which gives you options, right? So that if you and your squad were gonna roll up and you were gonna use plates that day or whatever, this could be directly attached to the Medex plate carrier and then it allows them options. And because this is all removable and detachable, this can attach to a plate carrier and still be pretty usable. As I was making this bag, I already know two changes I'm gonna make. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take all these tourniquets and move them to the front and enclose tourniquet pouches to both protect them from the elements and just to make them a little bit easier accessible. And then I'm probably gonna add two pouches on each side of this pack. And I think in those things, I will probably put IV bags and ways to carry IVs. You can actually buy IV bags and catheters and stuff like that online. It feels like you shouldn't be able to, but you definitely shouldn't be able to and you can. So God bless America. And you can carry additional medical resources that way. I'm also going to buy a Velcro pouch to be able to store my shears right here. So those will sit behind this in this little pocket here, this is all Velcro. So the shears will sit in here. And then there is a retractable leash you can get for your shears that I'll attach up here somewhere so that the shears are much more accessible. The other thing that I would like to have in this bag that I currently do not have in this bag and I don't know if there's gonna be a way to figure it out is some kind of litter, some kind of foldable cloth litter so that if you had to move someone, you could do a team effort to do it, right? You could unfold some kind of cloth litter from this pack and then boom, you're able to move someone because moving someone who's not movable when you don't have the proper tools becomes much more difficult. And that would be a nice thing to be able to have in your medic bag. But like I said, I just haven't been able to figure out a way to get it in this bag. And the profile being slim is very important given the other mission requirements of how we're building this gear system. Again, this is here for inspiration and thought for you to think about it on your squad and your level and with your guys and how you're gonna manage that. This is not an item that everybody needs but it is a group item that you should have in your fire team, in your squad that someone should carry to have extra medical gear in case things get really bad. I hope that's helpful. I hope that inspires some ideas. Show me your squad medical bag. We'd love to see it. Do brave deeds and endure.