Medal of Honor

Every service in the Armed Forces operates at night.  Therefore all of the services are equipped with Night Vision Goggles.  We truly own the night.  Whether it’s on midnight patrol in a foreign country, or bringing in your helicopter into a “hot” landing zone for extraction, the use of NVGs is a life saver.  When you secure a set to your helmet and lower them down over your face, an alien world comes alive, and when people should be sleeping you see what truly is going bump in the night. Met with a green landscape, the enemy won’t get far at night.

This technology has evolved over the years giving the soldiers in the field crisper and cleaner imaging while they perform their missions, but how exactly do they work?  One of my collateral duties in the US Coast Guard is to perform maintenance, calibration and inspection to our NVG’s.  Running off of two AA Batteries [depending on which models] provide enough voltage to the Image Intensifier Tube which gathers light from the objective lenses and converts that light through a photocathode to become electrons.  The electrons go through a series of conversions and eventually exits through a phosphorous screen [which causes the green color] and then to an ocular lens that can be adjusted for clarity.  

In Medal of Honor you too will be using Night Vision Goggles.  Use them to your advantage during low light situations to pick out targets that might not be seen by the human eye.  You’ll also be able to see infrared lasers and strobes for marking targets that you can’t see without your NVGs.  Although they may be cumbersome in the field for some soldiers, they will never leave the wire without a set and extra batteries.  It’s nice knowing that you can see the enemy, before they can see you.

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Aaron “USCGBaTs” is an Active Duty US Coast Guard Flight Mechanic and contributor for www.offdutygamers.com.  You can follow him on Twitter @uscgbats or @offdutygamers.