For Dean's brother, Laos was beguiling, deadly

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/dean/articles/2003/11/21/for_deans_brother_laos_was_beguiling_deadly/

SOMETIMES in my dreams I go back to that haunted land by the Mekong where Democratic front runner Howard Dean's brother Charlie was found in a shallow grave, and I see again a place like no other on earth, as Howard Dean described it. I can see clearly the red-brown river that flows down out of Tibet on its way to the South China Sea and the wooded limestone hills like ancient Chinese paintings and the villages at dusk with the oil lamps and the wood fires and the temples to the Buddha set back in among the trees.

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During the Indochina war there were many young foreigners in Vientiane, the half-asleep, French provincial river port that served as the capital of the Kingdom of Laos, the "land of a million elephants," as the Lao liked to say. Some came for drugs, while others were travelers in romance, seeking adventure, as it seems did Charlie Dean. But nobody has ever explained why he and his Australian friend took off from the safety of the capital to venture out on the river in September 1974. All that is known is that he was picked off his boat up river by the communist Pathet Lao forces, spent a couple of months in a prison camp, and was then murdered and buried in a bomb crater. When Howard Dean visited Laos last year, however, he said, "I understood it immediately" -- the strange, "beguiling" pull of Laos that must have infected his brother.

Howard Dean visited Laos in 2002, flew in a helicopter to the place where the authorities thought his brother's bones might have lain since he disappeared 29 years ago, and helped sift through the dirt with the recovery crews for missing Americans that our government pays $103 million a year to maintain in Indochina. "Teeth would show up once in a while," he said last year before his brother's remains were found.

Teeth in the dirt would not have been uncommon. Those regions would have been contested by Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese to protect the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and as a result it became one of the most heavily bombed places on earth. Time and nature would have softened the bomb craters by the time Howard Dean got there, but in 1974 there were parts of the country that resembled the surface of the moon.

Is that a village in Laos?

cutting and pasting. Didn't catch that one.

So kind of you to comment on it. :evilgrin:

:evilgrin:

...."But what haunts me still are the accounts of ashamed Americans who in the last days of the Indochina war heard the radio cries for help from behind enemy lines of tribesmen who had helped them fight their war whom they were about to leave behind to their fate. Thousands of Laotians who had backed the United States died in the communist reeducation camps. Today there is little in Laos to remind one of the American times save the memories of those who were there and the unmarked graves....."