Yea, a real man would pull an X-ray machine out of their hip pocket and...

I wouldn't worry too much about not having everything. It would be nice to have a complete kit but given the way life is the kit won't be anywhere near where you are, or it got lost when the boat tipped over, or your trying to make do treating a dozen people with a small kit so you out of everything.

IMHO how people handle things when they don't have all the supplies says more about them. Quick, given the same injury, and a more desperate situation, but no kit or firemen, think of three ways of using materials on hand to treat the injury.

My solution:
1) Using a magazine from the front seat of the car and socks from me and the guy next to me I form a splint and pressure bandage. Elastic socks make good pressure bandages and magazine make good splints.

Your clothing, and the clothing of anyone around you, can be used as raw materials. A library card might be used to seal a sucking chest wound. A leg from a pair of pants makes a nice selection of bandages. A severed vein can be tied off with a shoelace.

2) Using the ladies pantyhose I create a pressure bandage. Nylon hose makes good pressure bandages. Better at holding bandages on difficult wounds than many normal supplies. Lots of uses for pantyhose.

3) Using the drapes from the church I rip them into strips and use those as a pressure wrap by carefully keeping the cloth tight as I wrap and using several layers. That is how pressure bandages were done before they had ACE bandages.

IMHO the ability to adapt and use available materials is better than being dependent on any kit. It is a skill that gets seldom practiced as people get used to having 'just the right thing'. Ripping up curtains probably wouldn't go over well in anything less than a major casualty situation.

As for the question of the tourniquet? The evidence is that if the person gets to a hospital in less than an half and hour, some say an hour, the odds are a tourniquet will do little harm even if it was not called for.

The old logic was that you never used a tourniquet unless you had tried direct pressure and failed. Then tried direct pressure and elevating the wound and failed. And then tried a pressure point and failed. By then they had likely bled to death.

The old reasoning was that a tourniquet caused a lot of damage, that there was a huge risk the veins wouldn't reopen, and that a limb deprived of blood flow rapidly died. Tourniquets are still serious business but we have found out that limbs can often go far longer than previously thought without blood flow. Medical science has learned how to repair damaged veins. And we now know that one of the greatest predictors of traumatic death is how much blood the person loses. There is simply no substitute for keeping the blood in the body.

Newer protocols, and what experienced medics had been doing all along, go the other way. If it looks like a serious wound that might need a tourniquet you apply one first thing. When you have time, and possibly handled several other patients, you might back off the tourniquet. That can be risky. More typically you simply let it ride to the trauma center as-is.