Last weekend, Marine Captain Jennifer Harris, 28, of Swampscott, MA, was honored in a funeral procession in her home town after her helicopter crashed in Iraq. As her horse-drawn hearse made its solemn way to the cemetery, the chilly streets were packed with neighbors, police and firefighters. But what was extraordinary was that none of them seemed to be there to mourn, as the Boston papers obligingly put it, the death of the first Massachusetts female to be killed in the war. They were there to mourn the loss of a soldier.

As we soon move into the fifth year of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, what was once a hot debate—women in combat roles—has been overtaken by the sheer magnitude of loss we’ve suffered in those countries.

The last real debate over women in combat occurred in May of 2005 when the House Armed Services Committee, responding to the increase in female casualties, wanted to ban service women from combat support. “We want women to serve everywhere, except in ground combat,” said Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y. McHugh, then chairman of the personnel subcommittee. But the Army, having a hard enough time keeping troops in the field, gave McHugh a stiff elbow to the ribs and tossed a little bureaucratic-ease at the press…they said that female soldiers weren’t “assigned” but rather “attached” to combat units, which made the it all sound much safer and more legitimate.

Still, there are some, like Elaine Donnelly of the Center for American Readiness, who keep trying to resuscitate the moral dilemma of women in combat. In fact, the number of women now serving in “combat” roles (air force) and “combat support” roles (army) has made the debate all but moot. But Ms. Donnelly sticks to her guns, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, all the same. Using the argument that embedding of female troops with infantry is prohibited by DoD regulations (which it is), she seems more interested in the letter of the law than in the reality of life inside the Green Zone. Can you imagine, for example, American men attempting to search local Muslim women at checkpoints inside Baghdad?

There was a point some years ago when people inside and outside the military hesitated over the possibility of women serving in combat roles. We’re past that now. No one can ignore the dead and wounded returning from overseas. Female service members like Captain Harris are earning the respect they deserve, though at a terrible price. Last Sunday, Harris was buried with full military honors, while her fiancé watched from the graveside.