Dean Pauses to Reflect on a Brother's Long Trip Home
The New York Times
November 27, 2003
By JODI WILGOREN
HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii, Nov. 26 - Howard Dean's eyes
followed the flag-draped container on Wednesday as four servicemen slowly
marched it from a mammoth cargo plane past a military color guard onto
the back of a school bus. Dr. Dean did not cry, nor reach for his
mother's hand, but simply swallowed hard, once, during the 15-minute ceremony.
Inside the aluminum container - military officials were careful not to call
it a coffin - were remains believed to be those of Dr. Dean's brother
Charlie, who disappeared while traveling the Mekong River in 1974
as part of a yearlong adventure tour around the world. And so Dr. Dean had
interrupted his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to come here.
"This is Charlie coming home - that's better than not having anything,"
said Dr. Dean, a former governor of Vermont, who has called his brother's
disappearance and death "the most traumatic events of my life."
"Of course we've known he's been dead for 29 years," Dr. Dean said
in an interview on Tuesday on arriving in Honolulu with his mother, Andree,
and two surviving brothers, Jim and Bill. "But it's still hard. All the
memories come flooding back."
In all there were four coffinlike containers removed from the C-130
cargo jet that had arrived from Laos, via Guam, on Tuesday. One other set of
remains was believed to be those of Neil Sharman, an Australian with
whom Charlie Dean had been traveling. The others were believed to be those
of airmen.
Though Charlie Dean and his friend were civilians, they were given
military honors, officials said, on the chance that the remains include those of
service members missing in the Vietnam War.
"We don't know who we have until the lab says who we have," said
Lt. Col. Gerald O'Hara, a spokesman for the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting
Command, which runs the international recovery missions and the forensic
laboratory here. "Ninety-eight percent of the missing from this war
were service members. We're treating everyone as if they could be a service member."
The ceremony was a reminder of the mystery surrounding Charlie Dean's
death at age 24 toward the end of the Vietnam War.
It remains unclear whether he was executed or felled by disease.
Over the years some family members and military investigators have even
wondered whether he was working as a spy. Colonel O'Hara said DNA
testing to confirm the identity could take up to eight months, although family
members are confident of the identity because of the personal items
found with the bones. Eventually, the Dean family plans a burial in a
cemetery at Sag Harbor, N.Y. There is already a marker there for him
in the family plot, placed in 2001, according to the wishes expressed in his
father's will.
In a brief statement before the ceremony, Dr. Dean described Charlie,
who was 16 months younger, as "an extraordinary person who we're going to
miss every day."
"He was a man of deep principle," Dr. Dean added, "who lived his life the
way he believed it ought to be lived."
In his recently published book, "Winning Back America," Dr. Dean
wrote of the disappearance of his brother, who set off for a trip around the world
after graduating from the University of North Carolina, working on the
George McGovern presidential campaign in 1972 and protesting the Vietnam
War.
Charlie Dean and Mr. Sharman were taking a raft on the Mekong River
from Laos to Thailand on Sept. 5, 1974, Dr. Dean wrote, when they were
captured by the Pathet Lao, a communist faction. Around Dec. 14,
he said, witnesses saw the two men loaded onto a truck, which returned the
next day empty, but for the handcuffs that had bound the two.
Military investigators tried six times to find Charlie Dean and Mr. Sharman.
Then a former police guard in the central Laotian province of
Bolikhamxai, who said he had witnessed the burial of two Caucasian
men in 1974, helped pinpoint the site of the crude grave, and the discoveries
began on Nov. 8.
"You have these hours of hard work, you spend hours at the screen
elbow to elbow," said Elizabeth Martinson, an anthropologist who helped
oversee the 14 soldiers and 100 villagers who participated in the dig.
"And then you have the moment where we found what we came for."
Searching for the brother of a presidential candidate, "gives the team
a little more personal connection to the site," said Capt. Grover Harms, its
leader. "It makes it unique."
But the ceremony was familiar, if not for Dr. Dean and his family,
then for the scores of soldiers who stood in salute behind them. There are as
many as a dozen such ceremonies each year here on a runway
surrounded by buildings still pockmarked by bullets from the attack on Pearl Harbor
in 1941.
"It's almost like a family thing for me," said Nick Nishimoto, 74, a
retired Army staff sergeant who spent 33 months in Korea as a prisoner of war,
and since 1985 has come to every ceremony here for the return of
service members' remains. "It's like my brothers coming home. I want to meet
all my brothers."
Dr. Dean, who flew 11 hours to get here after a presidential debate in
Des Moines, and left about noon on Wednesday to fly to New York for
Thanksgiving, praised the men and women who did the digging.
He stood with one hand in his pocket, and the jacket of his suit fell open to show
the black leather belt he wears nearly every day. It was Charlie's.
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