For usable NVGs... honestly you're looking at dropping a LOT of money.
I've been down the gen1 route and they're near useless, even with quite high power IR illumination the range on them is iffy. Because of the illumination things in the foreground end up a LOT brighter than anything behind them.
The fish-eye effect on all of the gen1 sets I've ever used has been really bad too, to solve that problem you need to either go digital, gen2 or better. My advice to anyone that can't afford/justify the cost of gen3 night vision is to buy a really good torch instead, 500lumens of surefire will seriously give you much more of an advantage than a gen1 night vision monocular.