Posted on 11/18/2003 9:44:55 AM PST by Lance Romance
Pentagon Has Uncovered Remains From Suspected Burial Site of Howard Dean's Brother
Published: Nov 18, 2003
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The remains have not been officially identified, but were uncovered in a grave along with some of Charles Dean's personal items, said Howard Dean's campaign spokeswoman, Tricia Enright.
The candidate was notified of the discovery a few days ago, Enright said.
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.
"Either he tried to escape or they just executed him," Dean said last year as he prepared to visit the site where his brother was believed to have been buried.
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.
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. He 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.
Identification could take months or years, depending on their condition, he said.
Greer said the remains were discovered at the site where officials believe Dean and Sharman were buried after they were killed in 1974. Their case had been investigated seven times before, Greer said.
He said it's far too early to tell whether the remains are those of Dean and Sharman. There were many fragments of remains found in the excavation and the experts can't be sure how many people they are from, Greer said.
"In many cases we find remains we believe are one person but we find out it's a different person" through laboratory analysis, Greer said.
The search team will continue its work in the area until Nov. 25 on other cases, Greer said.
Charles Dean had graduated from the university 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.
Didn't these two ever hear of Hawaii?
I wonder if Dean knows that his very good friend [the French Senator from Massachussetts] personally ordered the destruction of the original and only set of POW/MIA sightings/intelligence files then in the custody of the agency at the US Embassy in Bangkok. And not more than ten years after the brother allegedly went missing. Aaah, mistakes were made, nothing to see here, everyone just keep moving.
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