©Kooskia (art)
©  googynoober (commission)
© Naomi Novik (original world setting)

Fourth commission for  googynoober
Another '900 years setting for dragons warfare in Temeraire world.



The end of the Korean War changed little of the Western military thinking about using dragons in warfare:
Long-range automatic weapons, even medium-size machine guns could easily kills a dragon and the sky were now dominated by aircrafts.

However something of surprising happened while the US Military was involved more and more into the Vietnam War: the NLF (Vietcong) groups suddenly started to move with an inexplicable rapidity and the NLF Politburo evaded all the attempt to capture between the South Vietnamese / Cambodian border.

The surprise turned out to be even more terrible when advanced bases and observation posts started to be systematically destroyed.
None will never know if the North Vietnam started to deploy units of a native local fire-breathing dragons breed in South Vietnam as claimed or (as supposed by Western sources) they were fruits of frantic years of crossbreeding with Chinese dragons.

The result was, however, that the NLF gained an incredible firepower and increased its elusive movements: fire-breathing dragons could strike by the cover of the jungle and heavy-weight dragons could carry groups of guerrilla units to evade the South Vietnamese and American offensives.

US Military attempted to use their own fire-breathing dragons but the only tactics that could be used was ignite massive forest fire, in collaboration with defoliants and Orange Agent used by aircrafts.

This had the fundamental effect to increase the inner opposition to war: not only among the humans, even into the American Breeding Grounds, dragons started to show opposition for a warfare that lost the old flavor of challenge and direct clash with an enemy and turned into a immense carnage.

American Green Berets and other special groups attempted to fill the gap, recruiting feral south Vietnamese dragons (and the human counterparts, the "Montagnards" groups) to counterbalance the movements and knowledge of the territory of their enemies.
Such "allied" were of course not properly reliable and could not change the course of the conflict.

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This art describe a common event in Temeraire setting: a Vietnamese captain that tries to hold his dragon to prevent a rush and unplanned attack on the enemy.


Comments and opinions are extremely welcome ^^