The TPG Spec-Ops Assault Pack Gen 2 (Large) in Black
I’ll be honest, when I first received the TPG Spec-Ops Assault Pack Gen 2 (size large) I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. There was nothing wrong with it. It was sturdy, looked awesome and came in all black. The only problem was that it was much larger than the backpacks that I typical use. However, I decided that there must be some way I could make use of it and immediately began thinking about possibilities. Perhaps I could take it on an overnight camping trip and carry “all” of my gear in it, including that 5-gallon bucket water filter that a relative got me for Christmas, you know, “just in case.” Maybe I could use it as a range bag to transport my “entire” arsenal of guns, ammo and targets. Perhaps its tactical black color and large size would allow me to remain undetected by the wife while conducting covert operations, like raiding the refrigerator late at night, gleefully stowing a weeks worth of snacks in the backpack and holing up in my room to wait out the zombie apocalypse while binge watching Netflix. Perhaps I could lend it to Santa and he could use it to carry all of the toys on Christmas? While certainly imaginative, these didn’t seem like ideal uses of the pack and so for the first couple of days it sat in my house scowling at me like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, daring me to make the first move. I quickly looked away whenever the Assault Pack met my gaze.
It turns out my fears were unfounded; the pack had a way of coming in handy. The first time I needed to use it was for a video shoot I did for Dead Air, a suppressor manufacturer. I had a lot of gear I needed to bring to the range: a full-size tripod, camera, sound equipment and a laptop. I was able to fit all of it inside the bag with room left over to bring my pistol in its case, ammo and a giant 100 oz CamelBak(did I mention it has a compartment for a CamelBak?). I was pretty impressed. It also has a Velcro area where you can slap I.D. patches, which I used to place an awesome tacticool looking patch that I got at the event.
I soon realized that I just kept finding occasions that I needed to carry a lot of gear and the Spec-Ops Pack was always up to the task.
I’ve been using it twice a week to go to a class I’ve been taking. The books they’ve given me for the class are massive (each one’s about the size of a phone book) and would not fit in a normal sized backpack. With the TPG Spec-Ops Pack I can carry all three massive books, along with a notebook, my full-size 15.6″ gaming laptop (which I use for video editing) and its charger, dinner, a 100 oz. CamelBak filled to the brim and still have plenty of room left over. I’ll admit I didn’t originally plan on using the backpack for this purpose, however none of the backpacks in my house could even come close to carrying all of these supplies. Plus, even if I could somehow manage to fit it all in one of them there’s no way I’d accomplish the task without bursting a seam or two.
It also comes in OD Green
Unlike regular backpacks made for mere mortals, so far the TPG Spec-Ops Assault Pack has proved to be invincible. For example, just last week, I took it camping and decided to see if it could indeed fit “all” of my camping gear. The backpack just kept eating whatever I fed it. I stuffed a sleeping bag, full-size pillow (I camp in comfort!), towel, swimsuit, clothes, 100 oz. CamelBak, flashlight, all of my food, toiletries, bug spray and… a blowtorch (hey, I may have been a boy scout, but I don’t mess around with matches and you’ll never catch me using flint and steel or heaven forbid, a bow drill; I want my fire now!!!). The pack was stuffed to the gills. I was sure a zipper or seam was going to pop any minute. Here’s where the side compression straps come in. I ratcheted the straps down and all stress on the zippers was instantly relieved. So, despite my pack looking like a contestant on “The Biggest Loser” trying to suck in their waistline at the pre-show weigh in, I was confident my gear wasn’t going to be flying out anytime soon.
…and Coyote Tan.
I was so impressed that I wondered to myself, is there anything that won’t fit in the pack? With this in mind, I then set out to answer one of life’s great questions. Will it pack? I began to think of all of the things that rationally should not be able to fit in a backpack and then attempted to see if they would fit. I first attempted to see if the entire contents of my closet, aka my wardrobe, would pack. The Assault Pack responded with swagger and my entire wardrobe easily fit. This is no small task as I still have clothes in my closet from high-school which was way too long ago.
Due to my sometimes short attention span, I decided I’d had enough of that question and attempted to answer another. Will it break? After some deliberation, I came up with the perfect test. I placed both of my 52.5 Bowflex dumbbells in the pack’s main compartment for a grand total of 105 pounds. I cinched the weights down with the internal load cinch straps. After much maneuvering and several attempts I managed to get to my feet with the pack shouldered. I then tried various ways to get a seam to burst, including jumping up and down while wearing the pack. This turned out to be extremely tiring and sweaty for me, but child’s play for the pack. Time for round two! I then attempted to hang the pack from various hooks in my house to see if it could withstand the weight of the dumbbells for a prolonged period of time. However, I decided that this was a bad idea and would probably end with the hooks being ripped from the wall from the weight. After a stroke of genius I ended up hanging the pack from the pull-up bar in my doorway. I watched it nervously for two hours fully expecting that at any moment the stitching on the reinforced handle it was hanging from would burst and my weights would tumble to the floor. To my surprise, the pack was up to the challenge and returned unscathed.
At this point I began to run out of ideas of ways to test the pack. It had won. Nothing short of my taking a chainsaw to it was going to damage the pack.
The pack and I are now inseparable. It’s become my “go-to” bag; in fact, I’m sipping water out of my CamelBak stowed inside of it while I write this very sentence. From one man to another, if you have a lot of gear to carry, tactical or otherwise, and you want an awesome backpack to carry it in, get the TPG Spec-Ops Assault Pack Gen 2 in large. Hey, and if you feel like you can’t handle all of that backpack, the pack does come in medium and small. But, seriously, be a man about it and get it in large.
