It isn't exactly a mission premise in and of itself, but!

As a start, I'd recommend Chickenhawk by Robert Mason. Mason writes about his experiences as a transport Huey pilot in Vietnam, and it is widely regarded as the best military aviation book out there as well as a splendid Vietnam book.

In addition to having a fascinating book to read, based on what I gather from the synopsis of the Patrol game, there are likely plenty of fascinating anecdotes in there from which you could draw inspiration.

I'd like to add another book recommendation, Matterhorn. This book was written by a Marine who served as a Lieutenant in 1969 and is probably one of the best novels about war I have ever read. Some scenarios it includes are jungle ambushes, weeks-long patrols to establish new firebases, and building up a firebase only to abandon it the enemy and then be ordered to retake it. If you're looking for infantry combat scenarios in Vietnam you'll find plenty there.

So, not that I make a lot of missions, but missions that I have made and we have run are going to end up on the gitlab for me (though, probably not before we run them). Reproduced here is my original concept for the mission:

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co39_LegalTechnicality_v5

Concept

The concept of the mission was conceived shortly after the first run of Operation Overcall by Shifty Eyebrows. That mission involved a small strike team assaulting a mortar position and "The Villa". The goal being to prevent the terrorist failsafe (raining mortars on the hostages' position) and to collect intel from the villa.

Now the first run of that mission didn't go so well as the terrorists mortared the hostages. The breaching and clearing of the objective however, was damned cool.

Also, I had recently read Inside Delta Force so maybe there was some of that in my mind too. Whatever.

The plan was to methodically approach and set up on the Villa. This, being made as a Saturday mission, might have as many as 25 people in it (in reality it broke 30), so I made it multiple objectives. We'll put a Weapons Cache in the nearby building that they'll also have to secure. Now we can (and do) have two full teams of 12 guys each to assault a well defended position with a pretty big technology advantage.

After that, we'll have them secure the hostage, find some intel, destroy the building, destroy the weapon's cache, done. That's probably not a very long mission though, is it. No problem, the intel's going to reveal a problem for them to solve! Now I need a way to get rid of the hostage. Originally I wanted a helicopter to fly in using a script generated by BIS_fnc_UnitCapture and BIS_fnc_UnitPlay, but that ended up not working on a dedicated server for technical reasons. I didn't trust the AI to fly into a possibly hot area, so I put a truck on the map and had it wait for the intel to be grabbed, then it would drive over to the villa, we could place the hostage in it, and it would drive away. Now the rest of the mission.

I'd wanted to include a real recon mission for a while. A "find out what's at X" type thing. So, I gave two possible objectives. One at the military base, one at the Construction Site. The Construction Site is obviously the real objective as it's crawling in ISTS (and the occasional Taki Army), the military base had lots of empty vehicles, but not a lot of men.

With the construction site, I have delivered unto you another large building that needs to be cleared floor by floor and teeming with enemy AI. There's also two intel stations in there to be exploited. Then it's a pretty linear jaunt to the WMD and then to the extract.

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As to what actually happened. Despite my exposition, as it was so rightly called, the memo on what was going on for recon of the base and the construction site didn't get through quite properly. I explained it a bit more to Moldy as it was happening.

For the umteenth time, I don't know where the IEDs came from. They aren't in the mission.

I really wish I could've seen more of the clearing of the house and the construction site. I worked pretty hard to populate those.

At one point, after the construction site, I decided that things were going too well and hopped into Zeus to throw some more ISTS at you. You didn't seem to give shit and just kept slaughtering them wholesale.

The attack on the extraction site was supposed to be a platoon-sized element you'd run into on the way there. They had fucked off on their own though, so as we hit the extraction, I had them attack it. They all died quickly. I'm actually pretty impressed with High Speed Low Drag Clear Backblast!.

You can see/download the mission files and get a better explanation of the technical side of the mission here