Last week, I answered a knock at my apartment door. It was Mi Van, a lovely Vietnamese-Canadian woman who came to Canada in the 1970s as a boat person. She was one of the first residents we met when we moved in a year ago April. I told her at that time that I had "visited" Vietnam in 1966, as a hospital corpsman with the U.S. Marines, which interested her greatly. She has since read my various web pages about my experiences in Vietnam, and we have had several pleasant conversations. (She became a teacher after her arrival in Canada, and actually went back to Vietnam to teach for several years, so we had teaching in common too.)

Mi Van's visit last week was to deliver a gift, a Coles collection of 50 North Vietnam stamps issued mostly in the 1970s, so they include several war-themed issues, including one commemorating the shooting down of the 3,500th American plane. (I used to think that those stamps were nothing but propaganda. Well, they were. But they were also fairly accurate — if memory serves, the Americans lost more than 5,000 aircraft to North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns and missiles.)



I have most of the stamps, perhaps all — I'll have to check my Indochina/Vietnam stock book. All of the stamps are CTOs, but that's to be expected. Many of them are hard to find in postally used condition, and I don't mind CTOs at all, since I collect them for the topics they represent, not their actual value.

Now I have to decide if I want to remove the stamps from the package. I kinda like the idea of keeping them as I received them.

My experiences with Vietnamese people since the war have been interesting. My first encounter was with a grade 11 student when I was teaching high school. She invited me to a Vietnamese New Year's festival, which turned out not so well for me: I had my first Vietnam War flashback during a style show which featured, among others, a little man in a conical hat and black pyjamas. I froze and couldn't look at the stage. It was one of the early signs that I was suffering from combat-related PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).

A few years ago, in our previous apartment, we decided to replace our windows, and contacted a window company. The company representative who came to give us an estimate turned out to be a Vietnamese man, from North Vietnam; his family owned and operated the company. We ended up giving them a lot of money in exchange for new windows, which was ironic: we never could have afforded the windows if I hadn't had my VA disability pension. I was wounded in an ambush by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army soldiers. I told the company rep that it might have been his grandfather who shot me, which resulted in my VA pension, a large part of which I was now turning over to him! What goes around comes around, I guess.

Bob


www.ephemeraltreasures.net