COURT HOUSE – Nearly 50 years after the U.S. military signaled a withdrawal from the drawn-out and costly Vietnam War, Dona Re’ Shute, of Court House, was finally given closure. Her brother, Paul Charvet, was shot down in his plane on the last day of his last assignment, and the remains of his body were finally returned to America 54 years after his death.
Shute said that her family received a recent, unexpected communication from the U.S. Navy.
“They were going to send him home to us,” she said. “It is just shocking and stunning. Fifty-four years later, we never expected to have this happen.”
Five decades of decay are not kind to the human body, and Charvet was no exception. As recently as 2020, the Vietnamese government has cooperated with the U.S. military to return the dead to surviving families. However, what is left is often little more than pieces of cloth or miscellaneous pieces of bone. Shute said that bone fragments, teeth, and a scrap of fabric with Charvet’s name on it, were sent from Vietnam to a forensic lab in Hawaii, where a positive match was made.
“We didn’t even know that any of this was going on,” Shute said.
She and her family were overjoyed at the chance to say one final goodbye to Charvet. Shute’s sister and 101-year-old mother live in Anchorage, Alaska, where the body was delivered, but Shute and her siblings were raised in Washington state. Charvet’s remains were ultimately sent to Anchorage, and news of his recovery has reverberated across the nation.
Charvet was remembered in Spokane, Washington, by his former classmates at Gonzaga University, in Anchorage, where a greeting party of loved ones waited at the airport to receive what was left of the body, and finally, in Court House, where the specter of Charvet’s memory sits heavy on Shute’s heart.
Shute said she did not know her brother as an adult. They were close as children, she said, but his early death meant that she missed out on the chance to know him fully.
“We never got to know each other as adults, to share our lives. When you’re young, you think you’ll have each other forever,” she said.
Shute remembers Charvet as joyful, vibrant, and hard-working.
“He was vivacious, he loved life and tried to live it to the fullest,” Shute said. “The chaplain of those Navy ships said that Paul was always an altar server at the ship’s altar services. That made me feel really good.”
Shute and her two siblings, Charvet included, were all sent to different boarding schools in high school. Soon after, Charvet joined the war effort. Soon after that, he was shot down from the skies above the island of Hon Me just a day before he was scheduled to return home.
However, the pain of death has been overshadowed by the joy of reunification.
“We finally got closure,” Shute said, and she is thankful that her mother was able to say a final goodbye to her son before she passes.
Shute and her sister showed old photos of Charvet to their mother, who now lives in an assisted living home, to jog her memory.
“We reminded mother with a picture of Paul. We said, ‘Mother, remember you have a son, that he was in the Navy.’”
Fifty-four years after losing her son to the cruelty of war, she looked up at Shute and said, “That is wonderful news.”
To contact Collin Hall, email chall@cmcherald.com.
