‘I taught 11,000 people how to put up a stretcher.’ In this week’s episode, the creator of the popular Instagram page Tuesday Night Violence Co. joins us to talk through equipment and gear setup. The creator – CPL Mitchell Clark – is currently posted as the Training Sergeant at 2nd/17th Battalion, Royal New South Wales Regiment (2/17 RNSWR) but spends his spare time providing ‘hot chips’ for diggers on fitness, gear and tactical planning activities. CPL Clark has bounced in-and-out of full-time and part-time service and today he takes us through his philosophy for gear selection and setup and what having his gear squared away does for his mindset.

CPL Clark came to Army with a teaching background and finds real fulfilment in teaching and mentoring diggers as a Junior Non-Commissioned Officer. The Instagram page gives him the ability to reach almost 12,000 followers and he started when he returned from a rewarding deployment to Iraq, trying to work out what was next. He now conducts Research and Development for several different companies, designing gear to improve his DP1 and then thrashing prototypes to help diggers in the battalions spend hard earnt money on excellent equipment.

CPL Clark uses the conditions faced by Lark Force in Rabaul to emphasise that we need to make what we have work, and that our issued gear is world-class and envied by fighters in other nations. When looking at either issued or non-issued equipment, versatility and redundance are the two most important things that must be considered. Versatility so that everything we carry is high value and redundancy to ensure that we can still fight even when things go wrong. We go through packs, sleeping gear, shelter and heaps of other equipment to describe what makes fighters more lethal. We sum up the episode with CPL Clark taking us through three high value items that you should consider when posting into your first unit.

—————————————————————————

Subscribe to The Cove Podcast to make sure that you do not miss out on any of the heavy hitting content we have recorded with CPL Clark and many other amazing guests. If you haven’t already done so, go back and listen to Invasion Rabaul and Age in War which CPL Clark recommends in this episode.