At Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s funeral, one of his grandsons, an Army captain also named Augusto Pinochet, gave a eulogy so defiant and aggressive that he was cashiered the next day. Earlier, as the general lay in state in his dress uniform and Chileans filed by his casket to pay their last respects, the grandson of another general, assassinated by Pinochet’s secret police, spat on the former dictator’s cadaver full in the face.

That was barely three years ago, and it suggested that the ghost of General Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and continued as army commander until 1998, would be hard to exorcise. But the scenes of Chileans’ embracing soldiers who aided in rescue and reconstruction efforts after the huge earthquake last month make all that divisiveness seem an eternity ago.

“This disaster was so immense that what people are seeking above all now is stability,” said Gregory B. Weeks, author of “The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile” and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “This is the first real troop presence since the end of the dictatorship, and obviously raises a certain amount of nervousness. But it marks a return to a normal civil-military relationship.”

The euphoria is such that Chileans seem willing to overlook serious lapses in the performance of the other military services. Instead, public dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response has been transferred to Michelle Bachelet, who began her term as president four years ago as a symbol of reconciliation. Still, Ms. Bachelet, the daughter of a general and herself a former defense minister who was jailed, tortured and exiled, stepped down Thursday with an 84 percent approval rating.