Pentagon Has Uncovered Remains From Suspected Burial Site of Howard Dean's Brother

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Nov 18, 2003

Pentagon Has Uncovered Remains From Suspected Burial Site of Howard
Dean's Brother
By Nedra Pickler
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon said Tuesday it has uncovered remains
from the site in Laos where Democratic presidential candidate Howard
Dean's younger brother was believed to have been killed nearly 30
years ago.
The remains have not been positively identified, but they were found
along with some of Charles Dean's personal items, Howard Dean said.

"The personal effects found at the site make us confident that we
finally have located Charlie's remains," Dean told reporters after
appearing at a candidate forum in Bedford, N.H.

A joint U.S.-Laotian team discovered the remains earlier this month in
Bolikhamxai Province in central Laos, said Larry Greer, spokesman for
the Pentagon office in charge of POW and MIA issues. Dean had visited
the site last year while serving as Vermont governor to encourage
excavation.

Charles Dean was a 24-year-old graduate of the University of North
Carolina traveling the world when he and a companion, Neil Sharman of
Australia, were arrested in Laos by the communist Pathet Lao.

The two were detained Sept. 4, 1974, during a trip down the Mekong
River, and held in a small, remote prison camp for a few months before
being killed. They apparently were suspected of being spies, although
the U.S. and Australian governments said they were merely tourists and
strongly protested their detention.

The Dean family has been trying to piece together the details
surrounding Charles Dean's death for three decades. Dean said the
discovery would be painful not only for his family, but relatives of
every POW and MIA.

"We greet this news with mixed emotions, but we are gratified we are
now approaching closure," Dean told reporters in a brief statement. He
did not take questions.

Sharman's brother, Ian Sharman, told the Australian Herald Sun on
Tuesday that the men were handcuffed, executed, and their bodies
thrown into a bomb crater. He told the newspaper that U.S. Army
officials had told him one body had been found on top of the other,
and two skulls, bones and shoes had been recovered.

Charles Dean, although a civilian, is considered by the U.S.
government to have been a prisoner of war. The effort to recover the
bodies of Dean and Sharman was coordinated by the Defense Department's
Joint Task Force Full Accounting.

Greer said the remains are still in Laos and will be picked up by a
U.S. Air Force plane in the next few weeks to be taken to the
military's identification laboratory in Hawaii. Dean said he will fly
to Hawaii on Nov. 26.

Identification could take months or years, depending on their
condition, Greer said.

Charles Dean had graduated from the University of North Carolina when
he decided to travel around the world in the spring of 1973. He left
New York for Seattle by car with a friend and then traveled by
freighter from Seattle to Japan. He later went on to Australia, where
he lived on a ranch for nine months and met Sharman.

There are currently 1,875 Americans missing from the Vietnam conflict,
including some civilians such as Dean, Greer said. He did not have a
precise number of missing civilians but said they include government
contractors, missionaries and those like Dean who had no connection to
military operations.

The military tracks those missing Americans for two reasons:
Government contractors deserve the same effort as military members and
civilians need to be tracked so their remains aren't mistaken for
those of soldiers, Greer said.

"We track everybody who's an American," he added.

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Associated Press writers Matt Kelley in Washington and Holly Ramer in
Bedford, N.H., contributed to this report.

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AP-ES-11-18-03 1400EST

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