News-Info-Alerts

Re: Ceremony Marks Loss

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: November 27, 2003

"Ceremony marks loss

Thursday, November 27, 2003 - New York Times

HICKAM AIR FORCE BASE, Hawaii - Howard Dean's eyes followed the flag-draped container as four soldiers slowly marched it yesterday from a mammoth cargo plane past a military color guard onto the back of a school bus. Dean did not cry, or 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 Dean's brother, Charlie, who disappeared while traveling the Mekong River in 1974 as part of a yearlong adventure tour around the world.

Howard Dean had interrupted his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination for a pilgrimage here.

"This is Charlie coming home - that's better than not having anything," said Dean, the former governor of Vermont, who has called his brother's disappearance the most traumatic event of his life.

"Of course, we've known he's been dead for 29 years," Dean said Tuesday evening after 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, four coffinlike containers were 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 who had been traveling with Charlie Dean. 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 members of the military still missing.

"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 POW/MIA 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, not backpacking around the world. O'Hara said DNA testing to confirm the identity could take up to eight months, although family members were confident because of the personal items found with the bones. Eventually, the Dean family plans a burial under the Sag Harbor cemetery marker laid for Charlie two years ago, according to the wishes expressed in the will of his late father, who never spoke of his son's death after 1975.

In a brief statement before the ceremony, Dean described Charlie, who was 16 months younger, as an extraordinary person who would be missed every day.

"He was a man of deep principle," Dean said, "who lived his life the way he believed it ought to be lived."

In his recently published book, "Winning Back America," Dean provides an account 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 1972 George McGovern campaign and protesting the Vietnam War.

Charlie Dean and Sharman were taking a raft down the Mekong River to Thailand on Sept. 5, 1974, Howard Dean wrote, when they were captured by the Pathet Lao, a communist faction. Around Dec. 14, he said, witnesses saw the two young men loaded onto a truck, which returned the next day empty but for the handcuffs that had bound them.

Military investigators made six prior attempts to find Charlie Dean and Sharman, including an excavation marred by heavy rains this summer, before the mission that began Oct. 25. A former police guard in the central Laotian province Bolikhamxai, who said he had witnessed the burial of two Caucasian men in 1974, helped pinpoint the location of the crude grave, and the critical discoveries began Nov. 8.

"You have these hours of hard work, you spend hours at the screen elbow to elbow," explained Elizabeth Martinson, an anthropologist who helped oversee 14 soldiers and 100 villagers who participated in the dig. "And then you have the moment where we found what we came for.""