Almost four decades after his plane caught fire and tumbled into the Gulf of Siam, Lt. j.g. Frank Hand III will be going home.

The remains of the pilot, a member of the Brunswick-based Patrol Squadron 26, were discovered earlier this year and identified using DNA tests.

He will be buried on Monday at Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery, not far from where he grew up and took his oath as a naval officer.

“It will be a homecoming,” Hand’s brother, Bruce, said Friday in a phone interview from his home near Dallas. “We always thought we’d get together and make great memories as adults. All that was scrapped.”

Frank Hand III was serving as a young pilot with the U.S. Navy when he was sent to Brunswick. He hadn’t been here long when his squadron, nicknamed “The Tridents,” deployed to the South China Sea in early 1968.

On April 1, he was part of a 12-man crew aboard a P-3 Orion searching for enemy gunboats.

“A Cambodian gunboat threw up a shell,” Bruce Hand said. The damage was catastrophic.

The .50-caliber shell knocked out an engine and started a fire, according to reports filed with the Pentagon.

Too low to bail out, the pilot tried to reach an airfield 20 miles away.

Within sight of the runway, the starboard wing tore off between two engines and the plane fell into the water. No one survived.

Almost immediately, the Navy recovered some remains, which they brought home. The discovered portion of Hand’s remains were buried at Barrancas National Cemetery near Pensacola at his widow’s request.

Hand’s parents and his brother attended the funeral.

“That kind of closed that chapter,” Bruce Hand said.

Thirty-nine years passed. Then, the Navy called one of Hand’s aunts.

An initiative to recover the bodies of missing servicemen in the Vietnam era included the wreck of the Brunswick plane.

Navy scientists compared some newly recovered remains with Bruce Hand’s DNA and found a match.

The surviving brother chose to bring the remains home.

He planned a small ceremony until Edward Hill, an airline pilot and Navy Reserve captain, heard about it.

“I just stepped in,” Hill said. “I wanted to see a good ceremony.”

A formation of Navy F-18 Hornets is scheduled to do a flyover. The Brunswick squadron’s executive officer, Cmdr. Andrew Westerkom, plans to attend. And Hill hopes to be able to give the fallen pilot a posthumous promotion to full lieutenant.

On Friday, Bruce Hand recalled his brother’s high school years. He was an Eagle Scout who worked as a lifeguard.

“He had a hot car,” Bruce Hand said with only a slight bit of sadness in his voice. “He was pretty popular, outgoing.”

Monday will be a celebration.

“It’s an honor of my brother,” he said. “It’s a reunion, remembering the things he cared about.”