Elaine Harmon and her comrades flew Army planes across the country. They helped train pilots on how to operate aircraft and instruments. They towed targets behind them while soldiers below fired live ammunition during training. Harmon was aware that her service could cost her life: For 38 other women, it did.But few people in 1944 wanted Harmon or women like her to be part of the military. Not Harmon’s mother, who believed that Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) “were all just awful, just probably loose women” and was ashamed that her daughter would be one of them. Not civilian male pilots, who felt threatened by the female recruits. And not Congress, which voted down a bill that would have granted the female pilots military status for fiscal and political reasons. As World War II drew to a close, the program was disbanded and largely forgotten. It wasn’t until the Air Force began accepting women for pilot training in 1970 that anyone remembered women had flown for the military previously, and it was not until 1977 that the female pilots were finally granted veteran status.Harmon, who helped campaign for WASPs to get that status, was at the first full veteran’s funeral for a WASP in 2002. It was a world apart from the brief affairs she had attended before, when urns containing a woman’s ashes were unceremoniously placed inside an outdoor structure at Arlington National Cemetery. It made Harmon proud to know that she also would be afforded full military honors when her time came — in April of last year.Which is why Terry Harmon, Elaine’s 69-year-old daughter, was angered when Secretary of the Army John McHugh reversed the old rule and said that ashes of WASPs can no longer be inurned at Arlington Cemetery.