My young husband had already signed up to serve in the Navy when he finished his medical training at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center. His uncle had been an admiral in WWI. I had a job at NBC Radio writing copy for The Woman of Tomorrow, a half-hour daily program on fashion, food, books, and "how to keep your husband happy." More and more, I was using news bulletins about stories of courage and escape in Europe, even movements of the German war machine. We urged women to save sugar, tinfoil, gasoline-anything for the European war effort.

Our show featured a guest interview, often on current events. Once I was filling in on the air and interviewed Clarence Taylor of Taylor-craft Aviation. Growing excited as we talked, I strayed from the written page (all scripts had to be approved by the "continuity department"). I got a throat-cutting gesture from the production booth.

But flying was in my blood.  I was raised in Iowa, a prairie child: All we had was the sky. After my mother was killed in an auto crash when I was 3, I was told I could see her again in heaven. The only way I knew to get there was to fly. The childhood myth followed me and, when the Civilian Pilot Training program course began at the University of Iowa, I applied-one woman in a class of 10. I got my private pilot's license.

It was 1943 before I knew how I could use it to help the war effort. It may surprise some people today, but many of us went into the service for reasons both patriotic and humane. Human beings were being destroyed purposely and methodically. Maybe it was naive to think we could make a difference. But somebody had to stop Hitler's march across Europe. It was up to Americans to try. My college students today have no concept of the uncertainty we lived with in the 1940s. Bulletins from the South Pacific registered loss after loss. We could not take it for granted that we would win World War II.

In 1943, my husband outfitted a destroyer and went to the South Pacific as ship's doc. I was on my way to Sweetwater, Texas, on a train filled with troops, to begin my pilot training with the Women's Air Force Service Pilots, the WASPs.

Again and again I have met people who lived through WWlI and didn't know we existed. "Female pilots in WWII? I thought all the women were Riveter Rosies." Or I hear, "So the Army taught you to fly?" No: Ail the women who went into the flying service had to know how to fly. The training was for precision flying in Air Force planes.

Army Air Forces Gen. H. H. "Hap" Arnold encouraged Jaequeline Cochran to go to England to see how the British were using female pilots. Cochran headed the Army Air Forces flying-training program for women pilots with a private license but who had fewer than 500 hours. Sweet-water's Avenger Field was our base. Over the gate was the figure of Fifinella, the flying gremlin, in her red dress, gold helmet, and blue wings, that Walt Disney drew for us-our mascot to ward off gremlins and sabotage. She was the shoulder patch on our flight suits. Avenger, the only all-female base in U.S. history, was fondly called Cochran's Convent.

Twenty-five thousand women applied for the training; 1,830 were accepted after rigorous testing; 1,074 of us won our wings. We flew more than 60 million miles in every type of plane, from P-51 fighters (called pursuits back then) to the B-29 Superfortress. The first women checked out in that huge ship had a specific mission: Male pilots at one base balked at flying because of B-29 "bugs." When a crew of women stepped down from that B-29, the commandant had no more trouble with male pilots. "Even women" could fly it.

My next assignment was towing targets at the gunnery school at Las Vegas, flying B-26s while B-17s flew beside us, firing live ammunition at the sleeve we towed. After a target run, we dropped the sleeve on the desert. The ammo had been dipped in colored wax, and the rim of the holes showed which gunner had hit the target. We used those holey red, blue, green, yellow targets for bedspreads, curtains, whatever.

We understood when we were recruited that Civil Service would provide our pay until the bill in Congress militarizing us was passed. Hap Arnold was on our side and had all the clout needed to get the bill through. Little did we know.

I will never forget the camaraderie. Friends of my forever. ?o share the anxieties, aching bones, the effort to do it right. Living close-in, with all the ups and downs.

And I will never forget when a plane crashed in Las Vegas, he male pilot's body was sent home to be buried with honors. The female co-pilot.., the Army said it was not responsible. The Civil Service said it was not responsible. We took up a collection to send her body home.

More than 30 years later, when another bill came up in Congress to give us the title of "veteran" retroactively, we ended our silence. WASPs came from all over the country to make our case. Even though the committee chairman said publicly to Bernice Falk Haydu, a former WASP pilot, "I promise you this, young lady, the bill will never leave my committee." When the final vote was taken, we had our place in history. We now had recognition and a burial plot. No GI Bill, no insurance, but we had the name we'd fought for: veteran.

She knew, better than we did, I think, what it would mean, how it would feel on this Veterans Day to be remembered-finally. The memorial was dedicated last month in Arlington, Va. Many of us went to the ceremony because we thought we should. What we experienced was a need we didn't know we had. To gather as a bonded group with every body (and soul) there. Flying buddies we hadn't seen for decades. Sons and daughters of mothers who had not lived long enough came to pay their respect, their admiration. More than 30,000 women-and their friends.