At the age of 79, Charles Rector may be one of the youngest World War II veterans still alive.

“You have a story here,” he said as he opened the door to his northeast Austin home last week. “I enlisted when I was 15.”

Rector is one of at least 17 Mower County World War II veterans scheduled to fly to Washington D.C. Oct. 10 to see the World War II Memorial. The trip is part of the National Honor Flight program that enables veterans of “The Greatest Generation” to fly to the nation’s capitol for free.

“I think it’s great,” said Rector, about being chosen for the program.

The Southeastern Minnesota Honor Flight was organized in the fall of 2007 and took its first flight in April 2008. Since then, it has averaged two flights a year and has taken hundreds of passengers.

“A lot of them have told me it was the best day of their lives,” said Peter Mathias, treasurer for the Southeastern Minnesota Honor Flight. “I tend to argue with them and say ‘you probably got married and had kids’ and then they say it’s probably the third best day of their lives.”

The national program is based in Ohio, with hubs across the country.

The southeastern Minnesota hub is a subcommittee of the Soldiers Field Veterans Memorial in Rochester and is strictly funded by donations.

“We do not have a major corporate sponsor of any sort unfortunately,” Mathias said.

The October flight, like all Honor Flights, will go up and back in one day.

The chartered U.S. Airways plane will leave Rochester at about 6:30 a.m. and will come back at around 9:30 p.m. In addition to the World War II Memorial, the day’s itinerary includes stops at the Vietnam, Lincoln and Korean War memorials as well.

“It’s a very full day,” Mathias said.

The Honor Flight program is open to any World War II veteran and their guardians, although guardians have to pay their own way.

Mathias said funding has been a struggle in the weakened economy, but added that the October flight, which will also include three paramedics and two doctors, has already been paid for.

“We’re trying to get funding so we can go next year,” Mathias said.

Mathias stressed the importance of having as many flights as possible as many of the nation’s World War II veterans are dying or are too frail to fly.

“If a veteran is terminally ill, we’ll move them to the front of the line assuming they are well enough to make a flight,” Mathias said.

The initial passengers for the October flight signed up two years ago when the Southeastern Minnesota Honor Flight started.

Mathias said that when calls to 100 of those veterans went out in July, 25 had already died or are now too frail to go.

“A lot happens to people that age in that time,” he said.

Rector is looking forward to the flight.

He said he enlisted in the Navy after his parents both died before his 14th birthday.

He was born and raised in the Minnesota town of Garden City and after working at a Mankato cement plant, he took a chance on the Navy.

“I was a small-town boy … who went in the Navy,” Rector said. “It was like an adventure I guess.”

Rector wasn’t comfortable publishing the part of how exactly he enlisted at 15, a good two years younger than the legal age, but said he was able to sign up for only a two-year enlistment.

“I went in in ‘45 and got out in ‘47,” he said.

Rector served time in the South Pacific toward the end of the war, including a stint in Guam where he said he was involved in some combat with Japanese soldiers who came out of the hills.

“I did some shooting, and I got shot at,” he said. “But at night it’s bad news because you don’t know if you were shooting or being shot at by your own guys.”

Rector is a religious man who keeps a Bible in his living room.

When asked if he prayed much by himself or with fellow soldiers during the war, he said he did.

“It was pretty fast,” he said. “You didn’t sit down and sing songs. It wasn’t very smart to bunch up.”

After the war, Rector got married and moved to Austin in 1950.

As far as any regrets about joining the military, he said he has none.

“In my situation, the Navy was pretty good for me,” he said.

For more information on the Southeastern Minnesota Honor Flight, Peter Mathias can be reached at (507) 251-4557.