Body of Dean's kin uncovered in Laos

HOUSTON -- For nearly 30 years, Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean has wrestled with the fate of his younger brother, who disappeared in Laos while being held by radical Communists during the Vietnam conflict.

Yesterday, Dean announced that he received confirmation that the remains of Charles Dean had been discovered in a rice paddy in Laos near the Vietnamese border, bringing finality to a harrowing family nightmare begun in 1974 when Charles was plucked from the Mekong River and executed at the age of 24.

The remains, found by the Defense Department's Joint Task Force Full Accounting, a unit created to seek the whereabouts of POW/MIAs, were not confirmed by DNA, but were identified with circumstantial evidence, including a POW bracelet Charles had been known to wear, and the remains of a second individual. Charles Dean was traveling with Australian Neil Sharman when they were detained in Laos by the Pathet Lao.

Dean, who shared a bunkbed with Charles as a child and regularly wears a thick black belt that once belonged to his brother, kept a full campaign schedule yesterday, campaigning in New Hampshire and Texas, but appeared somber and subdued as he shuttled cross-country.

"This experience is very hard for us," Dean said aboard a flight to Houston. "But it will be a good because it does bring closure."

Dean learned of the discovery days earlier. He had known for some time that an excavation of the suspected gravesite was underway. Dean said he waited to announce the discovery because he and his brothers, Jim and Bill, wanted to tell their mother in person, which they did Monday in Washington, as the family gathered to celebrate Dean's 55th birthday.

The remains are to be transported to Hawaii, the home base of the task force, where a repatriation ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 26. Dean is expected to travel there. Charles Dean will be buried in a cemetery in Sag Harbor, N.Y., the seaside Long Island town where the family's roots date back hundreds of years.

Charles Dean, the second eldest of the four Dean boys, 16 months Dean's junior, was the one believed destined for politics.

Outspoken and brashly confident, Charles was active in student government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and while there, signed on to the 1972 presidential campaign of George McGovern, the anti-Vietnam war crusader who won the Democratic nomination but lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon.

With McGovern's defeat, Charles Dean decided to sign up for a Peace Corps stint in Nepal, according to friends at the time, but first traveling through Australia and Asia. He and Sharman were detained in Laos by the Pathet Lao. The left-wing nationalist group apparently considered the men spies, though the Dean family has denied the suggestion, as have the US and Australian governments. Sharman's brother, Ian, told the Australian Herald Sun yesterday that the two men had been handcuffed and executed.

The Dean family received word that Charles was missing in October 1974, and confirmation of his death in the spring of 1975, prior to which his father and mother successively traveled to Laos seeking answers. Dean made the trip in 2002, shortly after his father's death, traveling to a remote site on the Laos-Vietnam border, where the two men were believed buried based on a witness account. The individual claimed to have seen the bodies dumped in a bomb crater after the execution.

Dean has said he sought counseling in the early 1980s to work through the emotional turmoil of his brother's death.

Yesterday, Dean reflected on his brother, saying roles would have been reversed had he made it back from Laos. "He'd be running for president if he were alive, not me," Dean said. "He had a natural knack for it."