Senior Master Sgt. Phillip Stickney has received the honors due to his memory for decades.
In May 1966 _ 38 years ago _ when a C-130 with Stickney aboard went down in Vietnam.
But not until February were his remains _ found in 1998 _ finally identified, through mitochondrial DNA testing.
Stickney, originally from Manchester, N.H., was honored during Arkansas' annual Memorial Day service Monday. Stickney is to be buried in the Arkansas State Veterans Cemetery in North Little Rock. The funeral home in charge of the burial said Tuesday the family will hold the service at a later time in a private ceremony.
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee addressed a crowd of about 500 people at the Little Rock National Cemetery. Huckabee paid special tribute to Stickney and his widow, Patricia, who now lives at Jacksonville. She raised their four children by herself when her husband didn't return from Vietnam.
"On Memorial Day, we come here as debtors _ and all of us together, collectively as Americans, we owe something," Huckabee said. "But in this case we can never pay it."
Stickney's oldest son, Phillip Edwin Stickney, shared memories he's kept alive since he was 12 years old, when the C-130 carrier plane was shot down with his 28-year-old father aboard.
His father had a "crazy sense of humor" and one time removed the backseat of his car to load a Shetland pony _ with its head sticking out one window and its rear out the other.
The younger Stickney said his father became his first hero when he saved him from drowning at a Florida beach. But his mother, who at 28 took responsibility for the family, was another hero.
"She was left in the world alone to take care of us, and she did just that," he said after a roaring applause died down.
Patricia Stickney wiped away tears throughout the ceremony and kissed a red rose before she laid it beside a framed picture of her husband. Her children and other family members followed, laying down a pile of roses.
A 21-gun salute was followed by a trumpeter playing Taps, and at the end a C-130 from Little Rock Air Force Base, the training center for those aircraft, zoomed over the crowd.
During the ceremony, Patricia Stickney received a missing-in-action bracelet with her husband's name on it from an airman who had worn it every day for the last seven years.
Master Sgt. Jim Holley of Cabot, who did not know Stickney or his family, bought the bracelet in California and heard about Stickney's burial. Holley said he wore it for all veterans, living and dead.
"There's a special place in my heart for Vietnam POWs and MIAs, and those who are even still alive got treated so wrong," Holley said.
Across the state, people gathered to remember those who had fallen out of respect and duty.
Ben Maness of North Little Rock, a World War II veteran, and his daughter, Donna Rountree of Scott, brought his 7-year-old great-grandson, James Norman, to a memorial for those who died at sea. James watched three wreaths, thrown off the Broadway Bridge to honor fallen sailors, drift away in the Arkansas River.
"We just feel this is a part of the American way of life that we need to teach everybody," Maness said. "The younger you start the better it is."