Dean Attends Repatriation Service for Brother

From the Washington Post

Charles Dean was a gregarious, adventurous and idealistic recent graduate of the University of North Carolina when he set out to see the world. He was 24, and had been traveling for more than a year, when he and a young Australian journalist named Neil Sharman began a raft trip on the Mekong River in the fall of 1974. Charles Dean was planning to go to Thailand and then to Tibet to visit a friend in the Peace Corps. He never arrived.

Laos, the site of a once-secret U.S. war to cut North Vietnamese supply lines that snaked through its jungles, was a dangerous and unlikely tourist destination at the time. In his last letter to Dean, Charles wrote that at night he could "hear the thump of distant artillery and the muffled explosions as the shells hit the ground," Dean wrote in a soon-to-be-published book, "Winning Back America."

The worried Dean family spent months without any further word from him. Eventually, the family learned that Dean and Sharman were detained by the Pathet Lao communist forces at a checkpoint south of the Laotian capital, Vientiane. His family's best guess was that the communists believed the two white men with cameras to be spies.

"There was speculation that Charlie was in Laos because he was working for the CIA, and I think my parents believed that to be the case," Dean wrote in his book. "Personally, I don't think he was employed by the U.S. government in any capacity, but we'll probably never know the answer to that question."

Intelligence reports indicated over the years that the communists detained Dean and Sharman for three months and then executed the men in December. Witnesses saw the two being loaded onto a truck. "The next day the vehicle came back empty," Dean wrote.