Some posts ago I considered the lifepaths of two professional West German businessmen - Thomas Niedermeyer and Werner Heubeck - whose careers brought them to the North East corner of Ireland in the Seventies during years of unrelenting violence and unrestrained madness. The fate of the former - along with his wife and children - casting a pall of dark shame over the entire island to this day.
Another small group of people who shared Ulster's soil in the depths of our very very troubled times were the Vietnamese boat people refugees. Between 1979 and 1981 approximately 60 families were resettled in Northern Ireland - many of whom came to Craigavon in Country Armagh.
Recently I have finished reading Max Hastings' lengthy 2018 history of the Vietnam War and also watched the acclaimed Ken Burns PBS documentary series on the conflict that was produced the previous year. A decade ago I visited that country myself and saw many of the associated historical sites not only in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi but also at Hue, My Lai and in the former Demilitarised Zone. Approximately 800,000 fled Vietnam by sea in the two decades following the 1975 fall of Saigon - over 11,000 would come to Britain from Hong Kong camps.
In hindsight the destination of Craigavon for some of the boat people appears extraordinarily strange with regard to the acute town planning and infrastructural difficulties affecting all British New Towns in the period let alone the sole Ulster model. This was analysed in depth in Newton Emerson's superb 2012 BBC documentary Lost City of Craigavon. Even the choice of name for the new modernist conurbation between Portadown and Lurgan - that of Northern Ireland's first Prime Minister and the earlier organisational genius behind the original Ulster Volunteer Force of 1912 - had garnered as much sectarian controversy in the late Sixties as Stormont's decision to site a new university at Coleraine instead of Derry City.
The story of the boat people in Northern Ireland was recalled in a BBC news feature in 2014 on the 35th anniversary of their arrival. It references the culture shock awaiting all by way of the local carb-heavy folk cuisine, inclement weather patterns and heavy British military footfall. Language barriers and the regional unemployment problem were major drawbacks to ease of settlement.
There was also the juxtaposition of a warm civic and community welcome in Craigavon with their being made targets of lowlife hood activity. In fact an article on the AgendaNI website notes original government plans to place the refugees in a part of North Belfast where the author himself grew up. I can readily confirm that it was then an exceptionally volatile district by way of paramilitarism and interface tension. Many of the families placed in Northern Ireland would leave within the next two decades - the extremely talented Dungannon photographer Victor Sloan capturing some wonderful images of the Vietnamese community in Craigavon at the time.
Over the past few months in Ulster the deaths of two leading Republican paramilitary commanders from the Seventies, a veteran Sixties civil rights leader and a victims campaigner has underscored - by way of the digital trail of public commentaries - just how deep the psychological transition in the North is now running on historical legacy issues despite the stagnant political culture. Thus in similarly reinvigorated regard, the arrival of those Vietnamese families in Ulster may be recalled in disparate respects within the complex social history of Northern Ireland and as set against that three-decade battle for contested and shared space.
Firstly the Vietnamese arrival marked a very rare demographic influx within what was still in the Seventies and Eighties an overwhelmingly monocultural society bar the Chinese community in Greater Belfast, a dwindling Jewish population and small numbers of South Asians.
In turn, for all the horrendous murder and carnage that was wrought on the civilian population of Ulster for thirty years - let alone across the county of Armagh - the Vietnamese who came to Ireland's shores were escaping unimaginable levels of sustained industrial horror and were victims of a political betrayal that dwarfed anything the Protestants and Catholics perceived to have been inflicted upon them by the policy dictates of Stormont, Westminster or Dublin. Hence even in the context of Ulster, their suffering was sobering and unfathomable.
Lastly, the refugees experienced both sides of the archetypal Northern Irish life experience in terms of a genuinely friendly and empathetic welcome and alas an unfortunate interface with the anti-social goon behaviour that the country excelled at for so long as European market leaders.
Vanguard politician Bill Craig once reflected in 1975 that fundamentally the conflict was due to an accident of history beyond the complex catalysts and solutions rendered. The same base essential relates to the position of the South Vietnamese within Indochinese geopolitics in the third quarter of the 20th Century.
Just a few hundred of them were to make their way from their beautiful yet troubled country in the tropics to an Atlantic island where bloody historical payback played out across a landscape of extraordinary physical grace. Whether they stayed or passed through Northern Ireland I hope life has been very kind to all of them.