People have been asking me about building or buying a first aid kit. I don’t think there are many on the market that are that good. The ones you find at Wal-Mart or your local store I call “stub your toe kit.” They have small bandages, antiseptic, and maybe a bee sting kit. It is designed for small cuts and scrapes. Here is an old post called Medic!, about the minimum I always have (normally in my truck or in my man bad with me). ITS Tactical also sells a couple little first aid kits that are top notch and is something I would buy if I didn’t already have the supplies. Here I’m going to show you my “blowout” kit I carried overseas as a private contractor.
Being a contractor was different then being in the military because you were on your own and had to doctor yourself if you got hurt. Your friends would come to help and eventually a medic would get there, but the guys I worked with were professionals and knew that the attack had to be stopped first, and then they could help any wounded. There was no medic running up under fire to help, so my kit was built that way.
I carried right where I could get to it, almost dead center on my gear (it’s the big pouch just off center. Any kit you have needs to someplace easy to get to. If you can’t find it, it can’t help you. I used a Maxpedition Tear Away Panel to hold it in place. This made it possible for me to pull the entire pouch off of my gear if I needed to.
I used a SAW Pouch to carry everything in. A SAW pouch is designed to carry 100 rounds of linked ammunition for the Squad Automatic Rifle. They where in abundance and I already had 3 or 4 of them, but they are a great size, not to big, but big enough to hold everything I needed. I think they are a perfect size to start a blowout kit of your own. You can find them at any surplus store, or if you know any soldiers they probably have extra one lying around. Most pouches for sale I find are huge, and I just start trying to fill them up with extra stuff that I really don’t need (or don’t know how to use).
Here is a list of items in my kit in the order that they would be pulled out.
Saw Pouch
Trauma Shears (stuck in behind the pouch)
SOF Tourniquet
Gloves
Israeli Battle Dressing
Quik Clot Combat Gauze x2
First Aid Dressing x2 (a piece of gauze with a long end on each side to tie it off)
Asherman Chest Seal
Hooked on the sides:
TK4 Tourniquet
Nasopharyngeal Airway
Tension hemothorax/pneumothorax
Super Glue
Sharpie
Gerber Multi Tool
Now don’t just go buy everything on the list and think you are ready to go. If you don’t know how to use it, or what it is for, then most of this won’t help you. You have to have a kit that is built around your skill level (that’s the hard part). It’s no use carrying a full emergency surgery trauma bag (like that one) if you don’t know how to use it (I couldn’t find a bandage in that thing to save my life).
This kit is the extent of my emergency medical training. The only two things I would add, and had at one time, are a role of electric tape and two tampons.
If you want to build a first aid kit, and you should, you can start with buying and building a blowout kit like the one above. I think everyone should have 2 small kits. One blowout kit for huge emergencies and one “stub your toe kit” for everyday use. To start a blowout kit simply buy the items that you know how to use on the list above or start with one of ITS Tactical’s small kits. If you don’t know what a Nasopharyngeal Airway is after looking at the picture (I had to look up the official name of the thing), don’t buy it yet. The important thing is starting a kit. In my post called Medic! I told a story about someone shooting themselves on the range and no one knowing what to do or having an emergency kit to treat the wound. Luckily that one turned out easy, but even if professional help is minutes away, it only takes minutes for someone to bleed to death. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to use some of this stuff.
Stay Safe,
Ben