BAY MINETTE — Iona Quinley has always been a strong-willed, determined woman, which made service in the military a perfect fit for her.

Quinley, an Army veteran of World War II, is the most recent Bay Minette veteran to take a ride on the Honor Flight. The Honor Flight is a one-day trip to Washington, D.C., for World War II veterans in order to give them a chance to visit the World War II memorial and other sights of interest in the nation's capitol.

Quinley could not contain her excitement as she talked last week about the flight.

"I'm so excited … I can't stay in my hide," she said. "I know we're going to have a good time. I know a man in Stockton who went last time and he's still talking about it."

Quinley did not set out to serve in the military, planning instead on being a wife and mother. She and her first husband married secretly when Quinley was still in high school.

"I was dating a guy who was already out of school. He had joined the service, so in the fall of 1941 we married secretly. Back then you didn't go to school if you were married, so we didn't tell anyone," she said. However, living in a small town, word quickly got out.

"He was going to be home on leave Christmas and I told my parents when he went back I was going with him. My parents said, 'Oh no you’re not.'"

Christmas, 1941, weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Quinley left her hometown of Bay Minette and returned to base with her new husband.

"I was there Christmas through February, but of course you know what happened Dec. 7, so the first week of February he was gone," she said. Quinley said she was devastated, convinced she would be a widow before the war was over.

"I was so miserable. I came back home and went back to school. I attended business school, but that was not satisfying so I went to welding school and worked at the shipyard. I still wasn't satisfied," she said.

Our family always used dinnertime as a time to talk about our days or issues. So one night at dinner I said, 'I have something to say.' Dad said go ahead and I told them I was joining the service," she said. "There was another big row over that, but I won out on that."

She said she and her best friend went to Mobile and talked with recruiters at all the branches of the military before settling on the army.

"We signed up on the buddy system, but as soon as basic training was over she went somewhere else," Quinley said. "I stayed at the training center and she went off on some medical assignment. We didn't see each other again until after the war."

Military service was good for Quinley, she said, because it kept her busy.

"I wasn't so miserable because they kept me so busy I didn't have time to be miserable," she said. Quinley was made a drill sergeant and spent then next few years training new recruits.

"There were 20,000 women. The base was all women with the exception of one troop of male MPs," she said. "We trained one company after another after another. But I felt like I was doing something useful."

Quinley reminisced about the years she spent in the service - the good and the bad.

"I peeled hundreds of thousands of potatoes. I scrubbed trash cans - and these cans were bigger than me. I had to get inside them to clean them. I cleaned latrines too."

She said inspection time was always a tense time because expectations and requirements were so high.

"You had to leave your footlocker open and you could only have certain items in there. You had to have your stockings rolled a certain way and everything put in there a certain way.

Your uniforms had to be hung in a certain line, and every button had to be buttoned," she said. "We had a nervous fit every time inspection time came around."

Despite the nerve-wracking experiences, Quinley said she would do it all again.

"It was good discipline. Despite scrubbing the toilets and peeling the potatoes and scrubbing the trash cans, I loved it," she said.

As the war came to a close, the post Quinley had served at for several years was closed and she was reassigned to a rehab station for soldiers coming home from overseas following a one- to three-year tour of duty.

"Their records were a mess and it was my job to straighten them out," she said. She said she also served as a typist during that time.

Shortly before Quinley served out her required four years, her mother got sick, so the young woman applied for a hardship discharge and was granted it.

She said her mother had become dangerously depressed following a move from Bay Minette to Robertsdale.

"My dad bought a drug store in Robertsdale and moved the family there to a house out in the country," Quinley said. "My mother never drove but she had always been in a place where she could walk everywhere and got to know everyone."

She said the move limited her mother's access to other people. The brothers were not happy either, being required to work at the drug store, taking them away from football. "My sister was too young to really care," Quinley said.

She said not too long after her return from the service, her father moved the family back to Bay Minette and her mother's health and well-being returned.

Quinley's husband soon returned from the war, and a year later the couple had a son. But Quinley said the husband who returned from the war was not the husband she had married.

"He served in the South Pacific three consecutive years," she said. The war ruined him, it destroyed him. He saw so much blood and guts. He began drinking and carousing. Finally, we separated and I went back home."

Quinley said she feels not that had her husband gotten help for post-traumatic syndrome, things might have turned out differently.

"He never got help and a lot of the veterans are still not getting it and some never will," she said.

Despite the end of her first marriage, Quinley said she does not regret it and said she got a "wonderful son" out of it.

Quinley applied for a state job, passing the preliminary test and interview with flying colors. "Then the lady said 'I can't hire you, you don't have a high school diploma,'" she said. "I was determined no one was ever going to say that to me again."

Quinley returned to Baldwin County High School and talked to her former principal. "He said I was older, married and had a baby and suggested I get my GED," she said. "I told him if I wanted a GED I would have already gotten one. I wanted a diploma from my high school."

Again Quinley's stubborn streak won out and eight years after she should have graduated, she earned the half-credit she had been lacking and graduated with her two brothers.

"I finally remarried and had two girls, wonderful children," she said. "The Lord has been good to me."

At 85, Quinley still works part-time for Paul Rider's construction center, where she has worked for 38 years.

Quinley takes life a little easier now, enjoying the time she spends with her two grandchildren.

"I am blessed and thankful," she said.