 Hey everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and it's time to revisit the battle rattle. Welcome back to our series on Minuteman Gear, with time to revisit the battle rattle. About six-ish months ago is when I put together the very first iteration of this battle rattle, and between then and now it has gone through some changes, some fairly significant, and so I wanted to talk about why and what's on the battle rattle, and again, what is the purpose of the battle rattle. So to start, just remember, the whole idea of the battle rattle is that you need to sustain yourself in the field for an extended amount of time. And my general rule for the battle rattle itself, with just this stuff, if I just picked this up and threw it on, is that I'd have enough food, water, ammo, medical, whatever, batteries to be able to live and fight for the next eight to 12 hours. That's kind of my goal with this. So let's go through it and talk about what's on here. First of all, the belt itself is an ATS tactical gear belt, and I also utilize their low profile suspender straps. Now, I utilize their low profile suspender straps so that my back is clean, and I can throw on plates or a pack or whatever over this without any problem. So it allows it to scale up and scale down pretty easily. Starting left to right, so I have a large dump pouch here, I did add a little elastic cord so that I can wrap that around my leg when I want and secure it down to my leg a little bit better. I have a double open top. This is a high speed gear mag pouch right here. And then I have a high speed gear closed top mag pouch right here. So that's double, so that's four on the left side here. My idea right is that I would use these kind of as speed reload slash, I need a magazine right now. And these of course I can either bump forward and or attack reload out of these. The dump pouch here, that's just for other general purpose things I would have to throw in and or if I needed to retain my empties for whatever reason or retain parcels, I tend to not like to run a dump pouch system. I tend to like to reindex my magazines, but it's here just because it's useful for other stuff that I just need to grab. This is a Blackhawk zip top pouch. The only thing that's in here right now I believe is a water bottle. Yep, just a one quart water bottle that rides in this pouch. I think eventually I'd like to replace this out with a buckle top pouch because the zip one's just a little bit harder to access, but it's what I have on there right now. There is plenty of room in here. I mean, I can still get my whole hand in there for other stuff. If I needed to carry additional equipment that I needed somewhere to put it, I could stuff it in there. Moving along here, this is a Dark Angel medical kit. I really, really like Dark Angel medical. I got their tourniquet pouch as well. So I have two tourniquets back here. Then the Dark Angel medical iFAC itself would highly recommend that, buy their kits, don't buy them full price. Before we get, this is my butt pack. Before we get into that, on this side, of course, I just have my radio with my big floppy antenna. And then I run my radio up to my shoulder strap. And on my shoulder strap, I have taped a piece of rubber band or a ranger band or something like that up on this shoulder strap so that I have something to attach my radio to. In the butt pack itself, I have a couple things. First of all, we have lube because that's important. Second thing we have in here is my NVG. So this is my night vision. This is a Rainier tactical pouch. It's padded, it's got some padding on it. And it also mollies so that if I had to mount this outside somewhere else or I was gonna throw plates on, I just wanted this more accessible, I could easily mount this somewhere. So I like that. It does have this nice little cool battery holder up here so I can store two batteries. And then there is my night vision device. I like the idea of carrying my nods on me so that, you know, again, eight to 12 hours, right? And somewhere in there, it could get dark so that I have that capability with me all the time. It's in a padded case, it's in my butt pack between a poncho and a meal and some other stuff. So it's not, it's gonna stay safe. We wanna keep that very safe because that's very expensive. This is a poncho, this is just a GI spec military poncho by Five Star. Nothing really fancy or significant here. I will say what I did do is I did tie loops to the four corners of the grommets on this poncho so that I can more easily set it up for a shelter. I also included a daisy chain, a bunch of paracord lining here so that I can run a line to hang the shelter over or whatever. So this is kind of a ready-made shelter that if I need that in the field, it can act as that or I can just, of course, wear it like a poncho if that's what I need. This is an MRE, slightly stripped down. I just like to keep an emergency ration on me in the kit. So again, remember, eight to 12 hours, right? So you're gonna need some food at some point in there, some snacks or something. So this is some kind of sustenance so that I don't get hungry and cranky. Extra set of gloves, these might come out of here but this is just an extra pair of gloves that I had in here because, again, if your gloves fail in the field, that's kind of a big deal. And then last but not least is this little boo-boo kit. So again, just some band-aids, some hand sanitizer. Took me a while to figure out what that was. A little bit of medical tape, right? Just a couple little boo-boo things that I would need in case you get a cut or whatever because, again, that stuff in the field can be more significant than it would be just around your house. And that's it, that's all I have in my butt pack. So with that, I try to keep everything around the night vision so that obviously that stays as protected as I can. And then I try to cinch that sucker down fairly tight so that it doesn't ride away from me or kind of get out of control. I'm a big fan of having my gear as tight to my body as possible. And with a butt pack that can get a little bit unruly but I do what I can to cinch it down. The butt pack itself, I think my wife found it on Poshmark of all places. So I paid like $20 for it. It was just some random piece of gear. I did end up using, I'm not gonna be sure if you're gonna be able to see it or not, but I do have a bunch of malice clips back here and that's what I use to attach it to the belt itself. I have six malice clips back here. I probably don't need all six but that's a built-in redundancy so that if one of my other pouches were to fail I could harvest up to two of these off of this butt pack and use them on one of my other pouches to secure it to my belt. So that's a built-in redundancy I have. The other thing I really like about it is of course it keeps it very tight to the belt. Again, like I said, not a big fan of having gear hanging off of me or something loose. I like everything to be tight and compacted in. So that's the butt pack. I've moved to the butt pack to kind of store more stuff. I'm really happy with it. I think it's gonna stay for a while. Moving over here, this pouch right here is empty. This is just kind of a general purpose empty pouch that I keep empty on purpose. So if I had to put a smoke in there or some extra mags or whatever, extra food, extra water, if there's just something else that I needed to add to this pouch or this kit I wanna have an empty pouch so that there's a place to add it. The problem with having everything just stuffed to capacity is then you have no flexibility and you have no expansion room. And so I really like the idea of keeping an in general empty pouch on here so that I have flexibility and expansion so that if there was something else I needed to do or have or move or whatever or even if it's just, hey Dylan, we need you to bring like 15 mags over to those guys over there. I have a place that I can start throwing that on me rather than having to grab extra bags or carry something or whatever. So a big, big fan of having flexibility built into your kit. Coming around here on my right side, this is my admin kind of general purpose pouch. So I do have water in here. This is kind of my main drinking water and then I'd swap it out with the other one and this gets empty. I have a right in the rain notebook because you're gonna need that to make notes and stuff along with a pen. That's important. I have a lighter wrapped in a little bit of duct tape and then I also have a ferro rod in here. This is just, again, built in redundancy. This is mostly for like lighting cook stoves and stuff like that. Not necessarily starting a campfire, although of course it's fire. You can use it for whatever you need. That's it, that's all that's in that one. My compass is not in here right now but usually that's in here but I just did some land nav recently and I took my compass out of there to use it for land nav. The other thing I've learned is that I'm a big fan of having Molly on the external of your pouches so that if, again, you needed to put something else on, like I wanted to mount that night vision out here because I needed it more accessible because I know it's gonna be coming on and off soon or to dummy cord things to the Molly is really, really helpful. When I run my compass off here, I dummy cord it through this external Molly. One thing I would like to see and most pouches don't do is have internal dummy cord tie down points. That would be super helpful. There's only a few pouches that I've seen do that and I just haven't gotten any of them yet but that would be something that I would like to probably add to all my pouches at some point. Back here, this is a cold steel SRK knife. This is kind of just for general field task-y stuff. I have been able to, I'm not gonna sure if you're gonna be able to see that but I've slid that between the Molly attachment points and then I've just kind of paracorded it in place so it sits behind my pouch that way I don't have to take up some extra roll of Molly somewhere else but I'm able to kind of stick it in there. And then over here I just have another two AR magazines. They are my right side. I know that's kind of a no-no and you should have them all on your left side, right? Well, this is the only place I could figure out that would fit them if I'm gonna center the butt pack in the back, right? Over your butt. So this is where they ended up having to go. I've dry-fired it with a bit. It's a bit cumbersome of course to kind of move them over to the left side but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do and I'd rather carry two extra mags than not. That brings my total loadout to six mags on this kit plus one is seven in the gun. I know that's the standard kind of Marine military loadout. I didn't do that on purpose. It just kind of happened up that way and rarely do I think that I'll be sad that I'm carrying too many bullets. Maybe, possibly, but probably not. So that's kind of the current loadout that I have and that will shift up and down. Before this it was five then I put in this double pouch up front so now it comes up to six but in general I wanna kind of hang around there for numbers of how many bullets I need on the kit. Last thing here, I just have some green field gloves that I have used at Carabiner that I spray painted dark green and keeps my gloves here because you always need gloves. Okay, so I think that's everything. That is my current battle rattle loadout. I hope that's helpful. I hope that gives you ideas. Remember, this is for sustaining yourself in the field for the next eight to 12-ish hours and you can be doing a lot of walking. This is not for mounted operations out of a vehicle. This is for patrolling type stuff where it's just you and your boys and you're wandering around. This is the kind of stuff that you'll need to keep yourself able to fight because there's all the other stuff you have to do to take care of yourself if you're gonna make it. I hope that's helpful. Do brave deeds and endure.