HOUSTON — Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean confirmed Tuesday that a joint U.S.-Laotian task force has likely discovered the remains of his younger brother Charles, who was kidnapped and slain while traveling through Laos 29 years ago.
Dean, who journeyed to Southeast Asia last year to visit the site where it was believed his brother was killed, received the news several days ago. He and his two other brothers told their mother Monday night.
The discovery resurrects a painful chapter in the life of the former Vermont governor, who was 25 when his brother and an Australian friend, Neil Sharman, were captured during a trip through Laos in September 1974. After months of uncertainty, the Dean family learned from Asian contacts in mid-1975 that Charles Dean was probably dead, but they knew little about the circumstances until recently.
On Tuesday, Dean was uncharacteristically introspective about how the loss of his brother affected him.
"I never really had time to grieve; it's very hard to grieve when you don't have a body," a somber Dean told reporters traveling with him on a plane from Bedford, N.H., to Houston.
But the loss of a brother made him "much more careful to tell people that I loved them when I did," he said. "It made me more demonstrative about my emotions."
Dean also said that his brother's death was so traumatic that he had anxiety attacks in the early 1980s, which motivated him to seek therapy for about a year.
"When you go through something like this, you have a tremendous sense of survivor's guilt and anger -- anger at the person who disappeared and then guilt over the anger," he said.
Dean still wears a belt that belonged to Charles, and said his brother's disappearance still haunted him.
"You always think about it," he said. "That never goes away."
Dean said that the items found at the site in Laos, a rice paddy a few miles from Vietnam, gave him confidence that his brother's grave had been located.
"This experience is very hard for us, but it's a good experience in the end ... because it does bring closure," he said.
Pentagon officials said that they could not confirm that the remains were those of Dean's brother until they could complete a forensic analysis of the bones and other items found at the site in Bolikhamxai Province in central Laos. The identification process could take months or years, depending on the condition of the remains, said Pentagon spokesman Larry Greer.
