Hello everyone, first off just wanted to say I fully support this entire forum. The fringe forum is dying on the internet and it's good to see another one come up. I will always support these endeavors.
Who the fuck am I? I wasn't a big name on any of the older fringe forums, I mostly frequented the night ops threads back in the day but have branched out considerably. What are night ops? A lot of risk for a little reward but a whole new world of freedom. Explore areas while going unnoticed much as in urbex but sometimes this can be just for the sake of pushing one's abilities and not just to explore something. Dark clothing or camouflage is taken advantage of along with any identity concealing measures deemed necessary.
Here's an example from last night, linked to the following topic:
http://niggasin.space/forum/reinvent-yourself/40281-project-euryphaessa-stage-one"Well, what a stupid idea. Was I really doing this???"
Hours prior, I had decided to push myself and my new limits to the extreme with a real operation and not some playful night time romp. I wanted to do something where I knew the night vision would come into play and allow me to do something I would have never been comfortable doing before. As it would happen, after all of my moving around in my lifetime I find myself living relatively close to where I once lived - the house I began operating from in the very beginning of my "career". I decided I was going to walk directly to that house from mine, cutting straight through the countryside, ravines, tree lines and stands, and whatever else might appear. No navigational aids except my ability to see - no GPS, maps, or anything else I might normally want to pull me through the darkness so I knew where I was going. No roads. No artificial lighting. Nothing.
The house was about an 8 mile drive by roadway from here so I estimated it would be roughly a 5 mile walk. Temperatures were low as well so I needed to dress appropriately. My loadout ended up like this:
Underarmor beneath,
light polypro undergarments beneath,
HECS stealth screen beneath,
full multicam uniform
Danner Terra Force low top boots
Nomex flight gloves inside Mechanix M-Pact 3s
Camelbak Woodland Bladder Pack w/2L Bladder, 1/2 full
Kershaw Camp 18 machete
Leatherman Wave multitool
Water Purification Tablets
2 Vivarin caffeine tabs
Bic Lighter
Sightmark Ghost Hunter Monocular (Night Vision)
The night vision was mostly unnecessary but I wanted to see how it would perform while under the influence of Ce6 and the result was basically wall hax but we'll get to that later. Everything else was just being geared for a long lonely night walk in the cold.
After dropping up and waiting about an hour and a half for the drops to kick in, I left in full gear, crossed the nearby highway, climbed over the fence, and ascended the brushy hillside. I could tell when even the most silent of cars were on approach because there would be a haze of light on the horizon or around corners well before they appeared. Cool effect, but it would be an issue as I pushed further into the hills and away from civilization. As I approached the top and hit steppe terrain, I looked around and marveled once again at how clear everything was. It was just like a demented day hike only I could enjoy. For laughs, I pulled out the NV monocular to have a look around.
Wow. Imagine daytime with a green tinge through a small monocular and that's pretty much what you see. Everything is visible through the tube without lack of detail which was nice. Normally this is something of a "1 and a half" gen monocular that gets the job done but isn't really high end. Now, the only gripe I had was FOV which was obviously pitiful. Anyway, playtime being over I pocketed the device and moved on.
My next obstacle was a small draw with a field in the center and a ranch house nearby. There were plenty of trees so I moved toward them to keep in the shadows. Vision in the trees was excellent and I was able to see everything just fine, maybe too fine. Paranoia was a constant factor as I kept to the darkest places possible while crossing. I felt extremely exposed and made it a point to move quickly and leave the draw. Climbing the next hill with haste, I finally got beyond the first ranch house.
The next hour was almost disappointingly uneventful. Up. Down. Up. Down. You see, the area is a big mountain valley and I was up above the valley on the steppes, which run down form the proper mountains forming foothills that creep down like huge, wide fingers. And since I was traveling down the direction of the valley, I had to cross every single one of these fucking things.
Looking back, I noticed a plane in the sky and the contrail. That was a trip. Normally you just see a flashing light up there, but because the sky was still a hazy azure between my eyes and the moon, the plane was clearly visible as was the contrail. I also scouted around to make sure I wasn't being stalked by any predators. Nothing. Moving on, the next draw brought me through yet another ranch home nested apart from everyone else. I moved past without any incident and continued climbing and descending again, over and over.
I lost track of how many of these stupid things I crossed, but I could see a treeline growing closer and closer in the distance. This treeline I knew well because I had been to it from the other side when I began operating years ago. It was sort of the beginning of the home stretch once I reached it. The fact I could see it from afar at all was pretty amazing.
Unfortunately this brings me to a weird thing about the night vision. Lights and shadows become deceptive in relation to distance. I guess because I'm not so used to everything being so bright or visible, things look closer. I thought I was getting close to the treeline but unbeknownst to me I still had a couple more hills to cross over first. I also thought there was a house I didn't know about sitting in the treeline itself because I could see outdoor lights passing through the trees from a distance with intensity. This makes it difficult to judge how far away lights are if you're unable to see the object it's attached to.
As I drew closer, I started to have my opening thoughts on this whole matter. This was just fucking crazy. For one, this was a pretty intense walk in general and my legs could feel the strain of the ascents and descents. Second, I had just made it to this point like it was nothing. I wouldn't have even been able to see where I was going hardly before and progress would have been much slower and more cautious being half blind. The moon was out, yes, but I've been in cloud dispersed moonlight before and it's never this generous on vision. If this sounds like a boring story so far, it's because the night vision basically took the danger completely out of the operation.
Anyway, I reached the treeline. Now I was lost. The lights were confusing and something didn't feel right. I knew that standing on the other side, I would often see a white house on a nearby hillside to the left of me but standing here, there was nothing on the right. Did I overshoot my goal? Was I too far downhill? I could see city lights but the intensity was again deceptive. I felt roughly a mile away from them but I also felt too close to the mountains above me. I decided to just push through the heavy trees and see where I was.
This was just as easy. I could see in the trees much better than expected and could even see so well that I could cross over the shallow waters in the shadows by stepping over the stones which I could see just fine. Yet again no animals nearby to my knowledge. On the other side I could finally see the outdoor lights and the building they were attached too. Fuck. I had overshot my goal area by almost exactly a mile. I knew the building I was looking at and also knew I had to walking toward town to do now.
This was a boring exercise of walking and walking some more, crossing the occasional stream and barbed wire fence while trying not to spook any cattle, alerting anyone of my presence. Finally, I reached a familiar dirt road I knew would lead to my old base of operations. It was a road I haven't walked down in many years and I was unsure how to feel. Triumphant for sure, having done something so incredible and yet it felt so mundane. This wasn't the most action packed read, right? That's kind of how I felt for me too, even walking down that road. It almost felt too easy. It was physically demanding as fuck but otherwise relatively effortless. After getting past the "Am I really doing this???" phase it was smooth sailing.
I approached my old home from the road and just looked at it from a distance in the cover of a wooden fence. Man, the memories. This is why I chose this destination. It had been almost a decade since my last break-fall landing after sliding off the metal roof - my deployment of choice back then. In some ways I cursed the night vision. The glory felt spoiled in a way. I couldn't even look up and see the milky way that I used to gaze at out here because the sky was too bright and felt more like twilight to me. In fact, everything felt alien and unfamiliar because I never had so much detail back then. None the less, I knew I had accomplished something that I never would have dreamed of back then, that no matter how this felt, I have greatly surpassed who I used to be. Granted, having less muscle mass on me like I used to back then would have been fantastic for those fucking hills. But I made it. I had walked 6 miles through barren nothingness non-chalante and brought things full circle. Boring, maybe, but I felt like a fucking badass.
I called up my apprentice to pick me up above on the main road and waited behind cover staring into the city lights below, a sight that used to greet me before every operation as I'd walk the dark fields between this house and there. I decided then and there that the next time I used the night vision drops, it would have to be for something incredible.
Mission accomplished.
Love it, hate it, got your own stories feel free to share.
