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John Appler and his shipmates from his Royal Canadian Navy days were looking forward to their big 50th anniversary reunion in Victoria.

Not any more. After Victoria city council’s insulting cheap shot at veterans over Remembrance Day spending the navy buddies are setting sail for a different port.

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“We’ll find another community that respects their veterans,” Appler told me. “We’re boycotting Victoria. And I doubt we’ll be the only veterans group that does.”

Appler, 71, was part of the deployment of Canadian military personnel who shipped out to Vietnam in the 1970s. Their mission: Protect Canadian peacekeepers overseeing the implementation of the Paris Peace Accords at the end of the Vietnam War.

“We were ready to sail into Saigon at a moment’s notice to evacuate our peacekeepers if there was trouble,” said Appler, who was a weapons technician aboard HMCS Terra Nova, a destroyer.

The three-month mission in the South Pacific was one of many adventures for Appler during an eight-year hitch in the navy.