A Korean War veteran is celebrating the mysterious arrival of an envelope he mailed from Japan 63 years ago, but the letter he placed inside is nowhere to be found.

“I couldn’t believe it,” says Bill Awalt. “I heard of slow mail before but that is a little bit slow … 63 years.”

The Halifax resident was fighting in the Korean War in 1953 when he nearly lost one of his legs and ended up in hospital.

“I was an army engineer – combat engineer – and I was doing my work that I was doing and they were guarding me from the Chinese who put in a 10,000-man push.”

The next thing Awalt remembers is waking up in a Japanese hospital bed run by the British Commonwealth. That’s where he penned a letter to his family, but it never arrived – until now.

Canada Post employees found the decades-old envelope in the regular mail stream a short time ago and contacted Veterans Affairs in the hopes of tracking down the rightful owner.

“I just couldn’t believe it, that long ago … I mean, it surprised me,” says Dawn Awalt, the veteran’s former wife. “Then I said, ‘about the letter?’ He said, ‘well, there wasn’t any letter.’”

“It is crazy, you know?” says their daughter, Sherri Awalt. “We couldn’t believe it. I’d like to see what was in the letter myself. That would have been really something.”

Where the letter ended up remains a mystery. The family says that, at the time, many letters coming from overseas were censored by the military, so the letter was likely removed.

“Maybe he put something in it that he shouldn’t have put in it,” speculates Dawn Awalt.

While they can only guess what was in the letter, the family says they had fun deciphering the code letters on the back on the envelope.

“’Sealed with an extra special kiss from me to you,’ and the rest was ‘Miss everyone, love Dad,’ I think it was,” says Sherri.

Meanwhile, the 86-year-old decorated veteran has a lot to reflect on when he looks back on his time with the military. Late in his career, he was a member of the United Nations peacekeeping forces that won a Nobel Peace Prize for their work in Egypt.

“He was no sooner home and he was planning to go somewhere else,” says Dawn. “He always wanted to go somewhere else.”

With files from CTV Atlantic's Suzette Belliveau