Preview – Grab and Go

Building a Go Bag on a Budget

Assembled and debated under many guises and many names, the “Go Bag” (GB) represents different things to different people, but generally it’s a pre-staged, man-portable collection of gear to keep an individual safe and healthy for at least three days. Why three days? In addition to what FEMA recommends, it’s the average time a human can live without water. Considering survival exercises can have infinite possibilities and permutations, one has to draw outer limits to size, function, and duration. To that end, the editors at RECOIL laid out the challenge of creating a GB with a roughly $300 budget (exclusive of tax and shipping) from easily sourced vendors to build a viable GB.

Given those limitations, the first question has to be, what’s not in the bag? Let’s start with a few limitations and disclosures.

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