Pretty much what Rhino1 said. The life raft and survival kit were attached to you and the chute harness by a long lanyard and could either deploy automatically if selected or manually. As you came down in the chute, the raft and survival kit would dangle some distance below you. As Rhino1 said, you did not want that stuff to get tangled in the trees. For a water landing, once in the water, the procedure was to pull yourself to the raft via the lanyard (you had your life preserver on). You would then pull in the survival kit. In the 50's and 60's, SAC (and possibly others) had a survival rifle in the kit, it was a folding .22/.410 over and under single shot, primarily for hunting. I never saw one on active duty, but have seen examples.
In SEA, with PACAF, we were issued S&W Model 10s with a total of 18 rounds. The ones we had were in decent shape. Later, when I went to SAC we had S&W Model 15s that were in great shape (Carried and cleaned a lot and fired very little). For alert, we had 50 rounds per crew member aboard the aircraft (six 50 round boxes). When deploying for Desert Shield/Storm, since I was not in a primary flying position, they tried to issue me a S&W Model 10 that the cylinder was so loose that it wobbled back and forth on the longitudinal axis. Luckily I was working directly for a boss that had the authority to waive the "no personal weapons" policy and allowed me to carry my personal .45 as long as I drew my ammo from the JTF armory (our JTF had AF, Army, and Navy so they had .38, 9mm, and .45 available). Primary aircrew in our JTF were issued M-9s, but others had the hodge podge.
