Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-86.46.22.35-20130403153709/@comment-1504072-20130413122617

Big Boss rescues Fox after the Vietnam War, so at some point after Peace Walker.

Originally, Naomi says she was rescued "sometime in the 80s" in Rhodesia. Then the MGS4 Database writers must have realized the civil war there (1964-1979) ended in '79, so plugged that year into the timeline. Of course, this is going by the assumption that Naomi was caught up in that particular war, which, while implied, was not clearly established in MGS1, as far as I recall. Rhodesia bordered Mozambique, so Fox may have traveled between the two countries during the Mozambican Civil War (1977-1994). This could thus be seen as a workaround if they chose to retcon Fox's story.

Now, if they went with the original "sometime in the 1980s" account for Naomi's rescue, and have Big Boss actually rescue Fox in Mozambique PRIOR to Ground Zeroes (another event that is not nailed down to a particular year), this raises the interesting possibility that Fox could have been hospitalized around the same time as BB, bandaged face and all, for surgery, following the torture in Mozambique that disfigured his face.

IF they used this setup to make Fox Ishmael, questions about whether his treatment would take a whole nine years (its likely he deliberately stayed longer), or how he ended up in the same hospital as Big Boss after GZ, are still up in the air.

OR, he may not even be Ishmael at all! While his early backstory from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake may be removed from continuity entirely by MGSV (some fans believe Portable Ops already did this), his rescue of Naomi in Rhodesia is fundamental to FOX's character, and is extremely unlikely to also be removed from the timeline.

Anyway, maybe I'm completely off on this one (it literally came to me in the last half hour), so feel free to pick holes in this theory. Maybe the idea's been floated before on other websites, I'm not sure, but it's fun to speculate.