On July 19, 1967, a helicopter took off from the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier operating off the coast of North Vietnam. The chopper, with its crew of four, never returned. On Thursday, at the Arlington National Cemetery, the sailors’ remains were laid to rest.

The funeral was three decades in the making, if you start with the dispatch by the Vietnamese government of a box of remains to American authorities in 1982.

In 1993, joint forensic teams from the former belligerents began to excavate the area in which the helicopter, a SH-3A Sea King, was believed to have crashed.

In 2009, scientists identified three of the deceased. They were Ens. Donald P. Frye, 23, and Aviation Antisubmarine Warfare Technicians William B. Jackson, 32, and Donald P. McGrane, 24. Just last year, the pilot was accounted for. He was Lt. Dennis W. Peterson, 28.

Peterson and his men were searching for two downed American pilots in Ha Nam Province, North Vietnam, when they were hit by fire from a concealed enemy 37 mm anti-aircraft gun. Down went the Sea King in a ball of fire. All aboard perished.

In her book “The Republic of Suffering,” the historian Drew Faust tells how the American government took no evident responsibility for Union deaths in the Civil War. The next of kin did not receive so much as a telegram. Now we have the indefatigable work of the Joint POW/MIA Command Central Identification Laboratory. If the decades-long search for the DNA of the Navy men does not suggest that American society has become more humane, it at least attests to the fact that it has become richer.

You wouldn’t have known that a federal sequester was a topic of political conversation by the caliber of the proceedings at Arlington on Thursday. Scores of sailors in gleaming whites stood by. Some were part of the honor guard. Others played in the ceremonial band. Still others, members of a search-and-rescue outfit based in Norfolk, Va., were driven up in busses to pay tribute to men who had plied their dangerous trade a half century earlier. The Army supplied a caisson for the single coffin and six white horses to pull it. Four fighter jets executed a booming flyover.

There were mourners, too, perhaps two dozen: children, sisters, brothers and grandchildren of the crewmen. Also, former comrades-in-arms, notably some graying former naval aviators.

The collective mood seemed to match the dazzling sunshine. If the deceased had not died but were themselves present, they would be well into their Social Security years. They, too might have been laughing and reminiscing. A pilot who had flown off the deck of the USS Oriskany joked at the sore temptation he felt to drop a bomb on the stockpiles of surface-to-air missiles that the Soviets, unmolested, were able to deliver by sea to Haiphong. “It wasn’t me!” he said, pulling his arms back as if to rehearse his insincere protest of innocence for doing what a fighter pilot might well have regarded as the Lord’s work.

“Hurry up and wait” is the ancient way of naval life, but Thursday’s proceedings went off like clockwork. We formed up at the Welcome Center at 12.30 p.m. and pushed off for Section 60 of the cemetery at 1 p.m. We watched the honor guard remove the coffin (there was only one) and gently place it on the caisson. To judge by the sailors’ movements, it was the lightest of burdens.

Then came the interment. The band played the Navy Hymn and a chaplain spoke the homily. It wasn’t easy to hear the priest over whoosh of cars and the roar of the jets coming and going from Reagan National Airport.

“Dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” came through loud and clear. Then something about service members giving up their vacations and holidays to do their duty and how much these men had loved their country. I heard “life, liberty and happiness” quite distinctly. Also unmistakably, “Greater love hath no man than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

A bugler played “Taps,” and the honor guard fired three fast volleys, the signal that the dead have been removed from the field. The band played “America the Beautiful,” and the honor guard meticulously folded the flag had been draped over the coffin.

For the most part at this point, eyes were dry. The band marched away, the honor guard dispersed and we spectators were directed to return to our cars. As I left the cemetery, I saw a mass of school-age children ready to begin a tour. They seemed as cheerful as if they had come from a long-delayed funeral.

Mr. Grant served aboard United States Ship Hornet from 1965 to 1967.