Dean Attends Repatriation Service for Brother
Remains Believed to Be of Younger Sibling
By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 27, 2003; Page A01
HONOLULU, Nov. 26 -- Howard Dean stood on the tarmac of
Hickam Air Force Base on Wednesday, hand over his heart, and
for a few solemn moments he was not foremost a presidential
candidate or governor. He was a brother, and he was grieving.
Flanked by his stoical mother and siblings,
Dean watched a military honor guard return to
American soil the flag-draped remains believed
to be his younger brother Charles, who was
captured by communist insurgents while
traveling in Laos in 1974 and then vanished.
The austere military repatriation service was a
striking counterpoint to the tarmac scenes that
greet Dean the Democratic presidential hopeful.
There were no signs, no music. The only sounds
were the snap of flags in the wind, the
persistent rustle of palm fronds and the
rhythmic stomps of the marching honor guards.
"My brother was an extraordinary person," Dean
said in brief prepared remarks before the
service. "He was a person of deep principle who
lived his life the way he believed it ought to be
lived. . . . We're going to miss [him] every day.
But we are deeply comforted by the fact that
this operation has allowed us to repatriate what
we believe are his remains and ultimately take
them back home."
The return of the remains -- along with those
believed to be Charles Dean's Australian
traveling companion -- brings two families closer
to solving a mystery that has haunted them for
nearly 30 years.
The Dean family has provided old dental records that they hope
will allow military forensic experts to determine conclusively over
the next few months whether the remains recovered this month
in a rice paddy in Laos's Bolikhamxai Province belong to the
missing Charles.
"This is difficult," said Dean, who has described the
disappearance and presumed death of his brother as the most
traumatic and pivotal event of his life. Growing up, Dean and
Charlie, just 16 months younger, were so close they shared
bunk beds. Now Dean and his family wait, and hope, to bury a
lost brother finally come home.
"We've been waiting 20 years," he said. "We can wait another few
months."
He praised the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting
Command (JPAC) for finding the remains, which he strongly
believes are his brother's. "I think it's a miracle they were
recovered," he said. "In a lot of ways, it was like looking for a
needle in a haystack."
Charles Dean was a gregarious, adventurous and idealistic
recent graduate of the University of North Carolina when he set
out to see the world. He was 24, and had been traveling for more
than a year, when he and a young Australian journalist named
Neil Sharman began a raft trip on the Mekong River in the fall of
1974. Charles Dean was planning to go to Thailand and then to
Tibet to visit a friend in the Peace Corps. He never arrived.
Laos, the site of a once-secret U.S. war to cut North Vietnamese
supply lines that snaked through its jungles, was a dangerous
and unlikely tourist destination at the time. In his last letter
home to Dean, Charles wrote that at night he could "hear the
thump of distant artillery and the muffled explosions as the
shells hit the ground," Dean wrote in a soon-to-be-published
book, "Winning Back America."
The worried Dean family spent months without any further word
from him. Eventually, the family learned that Dean and
Sharman were detained by the Pathet Lao communist forces at a
checkpoint south of the Laotian capital, Vientiane. His family's
best guess was that the communists believed that two white men
with cameras to be spies.
"There was speculation that Charlie was in Laos because he was
working for the CIA, and I think my parents believed that to be
the case," Dean wrote in his book. "Personally, I don't think he
was employed by the U.S. government in any capacity, but we'll
probably never know the answer to that question."
Intelligence reports indicated over the years that the communists
detained Dean and Sharman for three months and then
executed the men in December. Witnesses saw the two being
loaded onto a truck. "The next day the vehicle came back empty,"
Dean wrote.
His brother was classified as a POW-MIA, "although we don't
know why," Dean wrote.
Lt. Col. Gerald O'Hara, spokesman for JPAC,
said the command searches for any Americans
missing as a result of past conflicts, not just
military personnel. JPAC investigators have also
searched for missionaries and journalists
missing as a result of conflict in Southeast Asia,
he said.
More than 380 Americans are still missing in
Laos from the Vietnam era. The vast majority
are military personnel. On Wednesday, the
remains of two more missing servicemen came
home on the same Air Force C-17 that flew the
remains believed to be Dean's and Sharman's.
JPAC has investigated Dean's disappearance
seven times since 1994, O'Hara said.
Eventually, a Laotian witness led investigators
near the Vietnamese border where he reported
seeing two white men dumped in a bomb crater
and hidden beneath a covering in late 1974.
The site had since become a rice paddy.
Investigators, unsure where to dig, worked with
the witness to try to pinpoint the possible grave.
Howard Dean visited the site in 2002. Moved by
the beauty of the place, he finally understood
what could have propelled his brother to
embark on such a dangerous adventure, he
said. He left resigned that his brother's remains
might never be recovered.
In August, a military recovery team dug at the site through
weeks of heavy rains. They found no grave. In late October, a new
team returned, found the terrain drier and began painstakingly
excavating. On their 15th day of digging they found human
remains. They also found personal items that the Dean family
believes belonged to Charles, Dean said
Among them was a bracelet like one Charles had donned during
the Vietnam War. He wore it to commemorate his fellow
Americans who were prisoners of war or missing in action.
Researcher Lucy Shackleford contributed to this report.
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