Lt. Col. Frank Campbell took a lot of pictures during the Vietnam War, but there are no bloody battlefields, tanks or trenches in his photos.

Instead, there is a gorgeous landscape of rural Vietnamese countryside with a rice farmer working a water buffalo plow in the foreground. There is a group of Canadian soldiers having a laugh with some locals as they enjoy dinner and a few beers at a restaurant.

There is a tall, beautiful Vietnamese woman, her long hair tossed to the wind, posing with a smile in front of a military Jeep. Her name is Mai and she is 25 years old. She works as an English translator for the army. She is "unmarried."

We know this because Campbell was a meticulous notekeeper, who wrote down the names and details of everyone in all his photographs. He even denotes when names are listed left-to-right, with front and back rows marked when necessary.

We know a lot about the subjects of Campbell's photos thanks to his notes scrawled across the back of each, but what we don't know, is exactly how his vast collection of military history came to end up in a Goodwill donation pile in Port Colborne.

"A lot of the time when stuff like this ends up with us, it's because someone died and they had no children," said Bob Romeo, director of marketing for Goodwill Niagara.

When people die and leave behind estates that need tending to, some things end up going unclaimed during the process. Goodwill often works with estate settlement services to find a home for the items left behind after everything else has been claimed or sold.

Occasionally, valuable items will end up with Goodwill in these situations. When that happens, the organization sends the items to be auctioned off, but once he saw Campbell's collection, Romeo said he knew the auction block wasn't the right route.

"This is important history, and it didn't seem right to sell it," he said. "This could add to our understanding of this part of military history. Some child somewhere might learn something from this stuff one day."

Romeo reached out to the local experts on such things - Niagara Falls Military Museum - and the items were turned over to it on Wednesday.

"Wow! This is a treasure trove," said Jim Doherty, president of the museum, as he opened the box for the first time.

Inside were thousands of photos, alongside a scattering of notes. Some of the photos appeared to be typed first drafts of official communication documents, as they had large sections scratched out with pen and rewritten. Between the photos and the documents, Doherty said he was able to piece together a fair bit of information about who Campbell was and what he did during his time with the military.

According to Doherty's deduction, he was an officer stationed with the International Commission of Control and Supervision Vietnam (known as the ICCS in the military), which was a four-country operation set up to negotiate and enforce a ceasefire between North and South Vietnam. The ICCS was designed to include two communist nations, Hungary and Poland, and two non-communist nations, Canada and Indonesia.

Canada served on the ICCS for only a few months before withdrawing in frustration. During the six months Canada spent on the ICCS working on a peace agreement, there were 18,000 violations of the ceasefire. An ICCS helicopter carrying a Canadian soldier (Captain Charles Laviolette) was shot down in April 1973. A few weeks later, Canada announced it was pulling out.

The short-lived mission has been largely forgotten, according to Doherty, who said there is little documentation from the time.

"This is a part of Canadian military history that very few people know anything about," said Doherty as he went through the box of items. "This is fascinating, and there's enough information here that I think we can piece this all together about who he was."

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How exactly the items ended up at an estate sale in Port Colborne remains a mystery. As does much of Campbell's military background, or what exactly he was doing for the ICCS in Vietnam.

Doherty said he will be contacting some of the museum's researchers and the rest of the board to get more information and determine what to do with the collection.