Dean sees the return
of brother’s remainsThree Americans and
an Australian had been missing
since the Vietnam war
Howard Dean took an emotional break from his Democratic presidential campaign this morning at Hickam Air Force Base to join his mother and two brothers at the return of the remains of three Americans and an Australian missing since the Vietnam war.
Dean believes one of the Americans was his brother.
Remains tentatively identified as those of Charles M. Dean and his friend, Australian Neil Sharman, both civilians traveling in Southeast Asia when they were killed in 1974, were discovered earlier this month buried in a rice field in central Laos. The other two sets of remains were unearthed from other sites in Laos.
“While we are saddened that he is not still with us, we are comforted by the fact that he is finally coming home,” Dean said just before four caskets were unloaded from an Air Force C-130 cargo plane and carried to a bus for transit to the military’s nearby forensic laboratory. The brief ritual is one that has been repeated scores of times as missing soldiers and others continue to be recovered from the Vietnam War era.
One casket was tightly wrapped in an Australian flag and the other three in U.S. flags.
Dean, his mother, Andree, and brothers Bill and Jim, stood with their hands over their hearts as the remains arrived on U.S. soil.
Dean’s brother Charles, who had worked in the anti-war campaign of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, and Sharman both were believed to have been imprisoned and killed by communist insurgents.
About 100 people attended the 10-minute ceremony — mostly active military personnel and some veterans.
“This has been a long and emotional journey for my mother, Jim, Bill and me,” Dean said. “We greet this news with mixed emotions but are gratified that we have closure for this painful episode in our lives.”
Thanking the military for the efforts, Dean said his younger bother “touched the lives of everyone who knew him. I miss him every single day, and I’ll never stop being inspired by his passion and idealism.”
Sharman’s brother, Ian, also attended the ceremony and thanked the U.S. military for recovering his brother’s remains.
None of the remains has been positively identified, but Dean has said he is confident they include his younger brother because of personal items found at the site, including a pair of shoes and a bracelet.
“We don’t really know who it is until the lab does the work. However, we have an encouraging amount of evidence that leads us to believe that it is Dean and Sharman.” said Lt. Col. Gerald O’Hara, spokesman for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
The lab work is expected to take several months, he said.
The Dean family has been trying to piece together the details surrounding Charles’ death for three decades. They held a memorial service him in May 1975.
As governor of Vermont, Dean had visited a site in Laos last year to push for excavation. The late Howard Dean Sr. traveled to Laos in December of 1974. Mrs. Dean visited there in February of 1975.
A U.S. investigation into the disappearance began in 1991, and the first of two joint U.S.-Laotian excavation teams began digging in August.
A Laotian villager led the investigators to a boulder in a rice paddy near Lakxao, about 25 miles west of the Vietnamese border in Bolikhamxai province.
He and Sharman took off for Southeast Asia and were arrested by the communist Pathet Lao on Sept. 5, 1974, during a trip down the Mekong River in Laos. They apparently were suspected of being spies, although the U.S. and Australian governments said they were merely tourists and strongly protested their detention.
