HONOLULU ? Howard Dean stood Wednesday on the tarmac of Hickam Air Force Base, hand over his heart, and for a few solemn moments he was not foremost a presidential candidate or governor. He was a brother, and he was grieving.

Flanked by his stoic mother and siblings Dean watched a military honor guard return to American soil the flag-draped remains believed to be his younger brother, Charles, who was captured by communist insurgents while traveling in Laos in 1974 — then vanished.

“My brother was an extraordinary person,” Howard Dean said during brief prepared remarks before the service. “He was a person of deep principle who lived his life the way he believed it ought to be lived … We’re going to miss (him) every day. But we are deeply comforted by the fact that this operation has allowed us to repatriate what we believe are his remains, and ultimately take them back home.”

The return of the remains — along with those believed to be Charles Dean’s Australian traveling companion and two other Americans– brings two families closer to solving a nearly 30-year mystery.

The Dean family has provided old dental records they hope will allow military forensic experts to determine conclusively over the next few months whether the remains recovered earlier this month in a rice paddy in Bolikhamxay Province of Laos belong to the missing Charles.

“This is difficult,” said Howard Dean, who has described the disappearance and presumed death of his brother as the most traumatic and pivotal event of his own life, said. Growing up, Dean and his brother Charlie, just 16 months younger, shared bunk beds. Now Dean and his family wait, and hope, to bury a lost brother finally come home.

He praised the U.S. military’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) for finding the remains that he strongly believes are his brothers’. “I think it’s a miracle they were recovered,” he said.

Charles Dean was recent graduate of University of North Carolina when he set out to see the world. He 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 fall 1974. Dean was planning to go to Thailand and then on to Tibet to visit a friend in the Peace Corps. He never arrived.

Laos, the site of a once-secret U.S. effort to cut North Vietnamese supply lines that snaked through its jungles, was a dangerous and unlikely tourist destination at the time.

Intelligence reports indicated over the years that communists detained Dean and Sharman for three months, then executed the men in December.

More than 380 Americans are still missing in Laos from the Vietnam era.

A joint military honor guard carries the casket containing the remains believed to be of Charles Dean, the brother of Democratic presidential hopeful and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Dean took an emotional break from his campaign Wednesday to join family at the return of the remains of three Americans and an Australian missing since the Vietnam War.