Thing is, the Fulton Recovery System was a real-ass thing. It got more arcadey in Peace Walker (they used an airplane instead of a helicopter for recovery, blowing up the balloon took a long time, and you had to sync when the plane was flying overhead), but the system itself is fairly sound.
Snake used a more realistic version of the Fulton system to extract after the Virtuous Mission in MGS3.
I’m pretty sure there are in-game subtitles for the russian interpreter side-op. Because I’ve seen them before. I think you just need to redo the side-op. But why’d you ever do that? Why did I do it? I don’t know.
I like to think Russian interpreter guy just learned english from watching too many Hollywood action movies and he just thinks Americans greet by drawing knives on eachother.
There’s talk of phantoms appearing in Afghanistan, appearing when the area is clouded by an unnatural mist.
The phantom is of course Vapor Snake, tripping over into different timelines.
The Colonel that the two soldiers are talking about is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov while he saved the world from nuclear war he was reprimanded because he didn’t respond to what might have been a first strike by America.