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Was Dad alive, or was he dead?

Monday, September 18, 2000

BY ROY WENZL, The Wichita Eagle

For 41 years, Terry Asla lived with that question.

If anyone could have survived that shootdown, it would have been Dad. His fellow-Sabre-pilots held him in awe, not only for heroics but for resourcefulness. There were many hints, in letters Dad's fellow pilots wrote to Terry's mother after the shootdown, that allowed Terry and his mother and sister to hope that he had survived. the 1952 shoot-down.

Fellow pilots had said it was possible he had bailed out. Dad had told Mom that Americans were fighting Soviets in the skies of Korea; and Mom believed the Soviets had captured Felix.

Terry didn't know for sure.

But in 1993 Terry's uncle, Ralph Asla, learned something about his missing younger brother that sent a thrill through the entire Asla family.

U.S. military investigators had compiled a list of American pilots missing in the Korean War. They'd given it to their counterparts in the Russian military.

The American investigators were demanding answers.

Like the Aslas, they thought there was a chance - based on hints being dropped by old Soviet veterans of Korea - that the American pilots had been taken to Russia.

The investigators wanted to know, Were these men still alive?

Felix Asla's name was on the list.

The Russians were denying they had ever held any Americans.

But they were now admitting what U.S. pilots had suspected all along: The Soviet Union had secretly run the entire Communist air war in Korea, and hundreds of the best Soviet pilots had flown thousands of fighter pilot missions in MiG Alley.

Ralph did not relent. He knew his brother.

When Ralph and his other brother Mitchell had taught Felix to box, they had brought other boys home to fight Felix, boys always bigger and stronger than their little squirt of a brother. The fights all ended quickly. A blur of fists, and the big boys staggered back.

Felix was not only smart, resourceful and courageous, Ralph said.

Felix was invincible.

Ralph wrote letters to the Air Force, to Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, and others. Meanwhile, the U.S. military investigations in Russia were advancing; Cold War adversaries were talking.

The investigators worked. And the years passed.

1992...

1993...

1994...

By June 1994 it was too late for Terry's mother, Besse. She died at 71 in a nursing home in Oregon. A dark-haired beauty at age 29 when Felix Asla disappeared, she'd never looked at another man. She told Terry's sister Merrilee that no other man could ever match him.

"She had waited her life away," Merrilee said.

Even after her death, the search for Felix continued.

So did Terry's daydream, the image of Dad coming home off a plane flickering into his head at odd moments. He'd raised his family in Kansas since 1979 and had become estranged and distant from his mother and sister. But Merrilee would call him to tell of the search and, like them, Terry held on to hope.

Odd, he said later, how we hang on to hope.

Sometime in 1995, Terry got a call from Merrilee.

Uncle Ralph had finally done it, she said. He'd found out what happened to Daddy. Daddy was dead.

He'd been dead from the moment his fighter plane had hit the North Korean ground 43 years before.

Terry was devastated.

"It was as though Dad had died all over again," he said.

Felix Asla's fate was discovered not by the military but by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The BBC had sent a team to Russia to do a story about Russia's secret war 42 years before in Korea. The BBC had found photos of Felix's wreckage in Russian trophy books.

All fighter pilots take trophies. The Russians were no different.

When possible, they'd taken pictures at the crash sites of planes they'd shot down. And that's what the BBC found - photos, in a Soviet air force trophy book, of an F-86 crash site in North Korea. They found a photo of a damaged tail section. The Soviets had even taken a photo of Felix Asla's own trophies - nine red Russian stars stenciled on the fuselage, one for each Russian-built MiG he had shot down or damaged.

There was also a photo of a broken body. Air Force officials said they couldn't confirm the body's identity from the photo.

But the photo persuaded Ralph.

It was Felix, he said.

And the U.S. Air Force would later confirm _ the number on the tail section in the Soviet air force photo matched the last five digits of Asla's tail number: 12767.

Ralph was relieved.

For more than 40 years, he'd pursued leads, kept Merrilee and Besse informed, prodded Air Force officials and senators to find his brother.

But now he felt resigned.

"He said dying in the crash was better for Daddy than spending the rest of his life in a Russian prison," Merrilee said.

It was harder for Terry.

He felt wrecked. Grief returned, the daydream faded. For good this time, he thought.

Love remained, fused with bits of anger.

Had Dad died of ego?

The anger had started in Terry's teens, when his mother began dropping bits of information, things she'd picked up from Dad's fellow pilots.

Dad, she told Terry, could have come home long before that last mission. He'd under-reported his missions; he'd even fibbed to Besse, failed to tell her that he was flying combat missions until he'd recorded more than 40.

"There are only two kinds of men in the world," Besse Asla would say to Merrilee, long after Felix disappeared.

"There are the men who love their wives more than anything, and there are those who love their careers."

Felix was the latter, Besse said.

Floyd Clark had kept Felix Alsa's secret for 48 years.

"Don't you tell anybody, Chief," the commander had said teasingly. "This is our little secret." " Yeah, major," Clark said.

The commander had fibbed to his superiors, underreporting the number of combat missions he'd flown. He was supposed to come home after 100 missions, but he'd flown 125.

The only person he hadn't fibbed to was Clark.

Clark and Maj. Asla were friends, which touched Clark deeply. Here was this brilliant guy, a squadron commander popular with 200 guys, and the man he'd made his closest friend was Sgt. Floyd K. Clark.

The commander used to talk to him for hours, the two of them alone together , Asla's legs dangling off the wing of his plane.

The commander said it often, Clark said. He wanted that fifth MiG. Nobody remembers the guys who get only four, as he had. They only remember the aces.

So Asla had stuck around.

But Clark also knew that becoming an ace wasn't Asla's only obsession. Mostly he talked about his wife. How beautiful she was. How he loved her so.

"Marriage is the best thing, Chief," he would say. "You need to get married after the war."

"Yeah, major."

In the years that passed since he learned his father was dead, Terry threw himself into work and school and buried the grief.

Merrilee said her brother often became lost in books after Daddy disappeared. "Lost in academics," she said.

Terry himself put it more concisely.

"Lost," he said.

He would stay lost in his work until April of this year.

Terry had a phone message.

It was from Moscow.

Terry was now 55 years old, the director of resource development for the Larksfield Place retirement facility in northeast Wichita.

The phone message was from Alan Cullison, a reporter in Moscow working for the Wall Street Journal.

Cullison's message said he wanted to talk about Dad.

Terry listened but did no more.

Cullison called again and again.And still Terry did not call back.

Terry was now a grandfather, a scholar and oral historian. At Larksfield Place, he had tackled a project that fascinated him - he and a team were interviewing residents, posting the resulting personal histories on a Web site called I,witnesstohistory.org.

Terry noticed: Telling these tales seemed to reconcile the tellers to their pasts.

He began to realize: Perhaps there was a lesson for him in this.

Days passed. Phone messages stacked up.

Then one day, out of curiosity, Terry called Cullison back.

Cullison told him the story he was working on would show how the Soviets had secretly run the Korean air war against the Americans and their United Nations allies. No one had ever found any of the American prisoners supposedly taken to Russia in secret. If they'd gone to Russia, they were probably all dead.

None of this was news to Terry.

But Cullison told Terry more.

And as he listened, Terry found his heart thumping faster again.

Cullison had seen the Soviet air force trophy book. He'd seen the Soviet photos of Maj. Asla's wrecked tail section and of Maj. Asla's body.

And he'd seen something else in the book: A name.

Nikolai Ivanov.

It was the name of the Russian MiG-15 pilot who had shot Felix Asla down.

He was still alive. Cullison had spoken with him.Terry listened, stunned.

He had a wild thought: He wanted to talk to the Russian, too.

The daydream was back.

He couldn't bring Dad home. But he still wanted to find the father he loved but had barely known.

His mother and uncle had devoted their lives to looking for Dad.

Now it was Terry's turn.

He'd search for his father - for the remains and the story that went with them.

He'd start with the man who killed Dad.

Roy Wenzl can be reached at 268-6219, or rwenzl@wichitaeagle.com.

In Tuesday's Eagle: Terry Asla confronts the man who killed his father 48 years ago.

< The story so far

Terry Asla grew up wondering if Dad survived being shot down over Korea in 1952. The end of the Cold War brought new hope.

To read the first installment of "The Hero's Son" please visit the Eagle's website at www.wichitaeagle.com

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