[NEXT PAGE]

Tuesday, September 19, 2000
BY ROY WENZL, The Wichita Eagle

Terry Alsa stared at the screen and let rage take him for a ride. "I want to kill him." He wanted to go to Russia and kill the old pilot. Nikolai Ivanov. He stared at the photos on a Russian air force historian's web site. Photos of his father being killed.

In the first frame: the silhouette of his father's fighter plane, dead center in Ivanov's MiG-15 gun sight. In the second: the smoke plume, the explosion.

In the still photos shot from a gun camera, Terry saw his father's death. He felt rage almost uncontrollable.

He'd never felt angry like this before. Not about Dad. It's impossible, after all, to become outraged over a death when you're not sure a death has occurred.

For more than 40 years, Terry hadn't known whether Dad was alive. The Air Force had declared Dad missing in action after he was shot down over North Korea in 1952. But fighter pilots who saw it said he might have bailed out. Dad had told Mom they were fighting Soviets in the skies of Korea. Mom had said the Russians had him, she'd said it when Dad went missing, when Terry was 7. She'd said it for 40 years. Terry had lived for 48 years now in a constant state of denial.

And now here it was in the first week of September: Photos, shot and captioned by the Russians themselves. Neat Russian handwriting, calculating the range at 150 to 200 meters when the MiG-15's cannon shells struck.

His father's explosive death, mounted on the Web as a trophy, for all the world to see.

"Dad being killed," Terry said later. "Or, more accurately, him killing my father."

Nikolai Ivanov.

Terry didn't like being angry. But he knew it was necessary.

He was tired of hiding from Dad's death. He didn't know if he was strong enough to stop hiding.

Perhaps, he thought. Perhaps he could try.

Terry had spent a lifetime estranged - from his sister, from his mother now dead, even from memories of his father.

He thought Dad had died chasing trophies. His father had deliberately under-reported the number of combat missions he had flown so he could stay in Korea long enough to shoot down a fifth MiG and become an ace. Instead, he stayed long enough to die.

Terry pushed the emotion down deep. He moved to Kansas in the 1970s for a reason - to put, 2,500 miles between himself and his memories of loss. He avoided family and the risk of love: It had become habit, even with his wife and two children, he said.

He'd tried to be good to them, but there were doors to his soul he'd never opened to them.

"Perhaps I could change."

So he had forced himself, against the lesser angels of his nature, to call the Wall Street Journal reporter back.

Alan Cullison had called several times in April. Terry had talked to him, about Dad and himself, and the goodbye at the train station when Terry cried as his father left for Korea.

And then he'd endured the shocks that came, and there were many: One revelation after another about Dad, about his ambition but also selflessness.

But as the shocks came, so did resolution; weak and uncertain at first.

"It's time I faced this," he said.

When Cullision published his story on June 13, Terry read Ivanov's descript ion of Dad's last dogfight:

That day, he recalls, there were dozens of planes in a confused dogfight, and he had lost control of his own aircraft while trying to get a U.S. fighter off his tail.

"When my plane stopped spinning, I all of a sudden saw this other plane in front of me, and I fired," he says. "Then the plane was in flames."

Mr. Ivanov, now 77, thinks Mr. Asla was killed instantly, because he opened fire with all three of his MiG's cannons "when he was very close."

Terry read the story with a mix of shock, grief - and fascination.

"Almost from the first," Terry said, "I wanted to talk to Ivanov myself."

He regarded Ivanov with almost an academic detachment. He imagined himself taking down Ivanov's oral history as he had the elderly residents of Larksfield Place in Wichita, where he works.

Ivanov for him was not the killer of his father but rather a witness to history.

"These were two men doing their jobs who happened to end up in the same part of the sky," Terry would tell Slava Osipov, a Russian interpreter enlisted to help him talk with Ivanov.

But there was something else.

He sensed a kindness in Ivanov and a clue in the elderly Russian to whom his father was. He read this in Ivanov's words, printed in the Wall Street Journal:

"It was always our hope that American planes would just turn the other way when they saw us coming. Anyone who tells you they were never afraid in battle is lying. I was very much afraid of dying, and I was never proud of hurting anyone."

Terry has not yet spoken to Ivanov. The Russian agreed to a conversation but several tries to reach him before he left for a month of travel were unsuccessful.

But Ivanov did speak with the interpreter. And he said to tell Terry that the U.S. and Soviet pilots who fought each other in Korea had much in common. They fought as allies in World War II, when Ivanov shot down six German planes and was shot down twice himself. In Korea, they served their governments and their countrymen. They did their duty.

Both sides suffered, Ivanov said. In the same dogfight where he shot down Maj. Asla, another American pilot shot down and killed Ivanov's wingman and friend.

Terry listened to Slava describe his conversation with Ivanov. At first, he said nothing; not even when Slava reported that Ivanov had interrupted the phone conversation several times to say "good health and good luck to Terry Asla."

Terry appreciated the gesture, but he felt cold.

By that time he knew something else about Ivanov. Alan Cullison had passed it along: Inside Ivanov's apartment was a photograph - one of the Soviet photos of the wreckage of Dad's plane.

Warriors, Terry thought. Taking trophies, counting kills, keeping score. He'd lost his father because his father had chased trophies.

Dad was Ivanov's trophy.

Terry felt himself beginning to change - almost against his will.

"It's time I faced this," he'd said.

He didn't try hard; not at first. But he began to try.

Within days after the Wall Street Journal story ran, other reporters came calling. ABC News called, and interviewed him on its nightly news program on June 23. The Eagle called.

Inside, he was thinking: Use the media, keep the story alive, and so keep the pressure on U.S. investigators to find Dad's remains.

He told reporters that he wanted to find the remains, in North Korea or wherever they might be.

"It would be like a fulfillment of my boyhood daydream," he said. "I could no longer meet his plane, but I could bring him home." Perhaps that might please the family, he thought.

He wanted to become a better person, reconcile with Merrilee. And the only way he could do that was to first face up to loss. He'd allowed loss to diminish him.

In Battleground, Wash., Merrilee Lee said she was dubious about Terry's interviews, but hoped for the best.

She admitted she didn't entirely understand her brother and hadn't for many years.

She would not talk about what Terry described as their estrangement.

"I love my brother, and that's all I need to say." Then she offered to help. She offered to go up in her attic and pull down the boxes.

"Daddy's scrapbooks," she said.

"And Daddy's letters."

Letters?

"Yes," she said.

Hundreds of pages, she said.

She laughed softly into the telephone line, a laughter tinged with sadness.

"Terry didn't tell you about Daddy's letters, did he?"

Terry sounded embarrassed.

Yes, he knew about the letters. No, he'd never read them.

The man who said he wanted to learn more about his father, who said he would even reach out to the Russian pilot who had killed him, had never read the box full of letters Dad had written home from Kimpo Air Base in Korea.

"Frankly, I've been avoiding all of this for a very long time," Terry said.

"It hurts."

Dad had written Mom nearly every third day, from the night after he departed Eugene, Ore., on the train in September 1951 until July 28, 1952, three days before he was shot down.

There were hundreds of pages, filled with revealing references to Terry and Merrilee, written in an artist's flowing script.

He'd written about the beauty of the tiled and thatched Korean rooftops; about how he'd make the men drop two bits into a box for Korean orphans every time they cursed; about his love for Besse, and Merrilee, and his son.

But Terry had read none of this.

Not yet.

"I'll have to save that for a day when I can afford to break down," he said.

In grief, a person usually travels from shock to acceptance by passing first through way stations: denial, depression, bargaining, anxiety, anger.

Depression, anxiety, denial? He'd wallowed in those.

But anger, and acceptance?

"No."

You can't get angry or accept a death that has not occurred, he said. You just have to live, as he and Merrilee had lived, in limbo.

"We never truly grieved," Terry said. "We never let ourselves grieve. . . . Or at least I didn't."

But with the gun camera photos, encountered in the first week of September, Terry found himself grieving, almost against his will.

He was crying now, tears welling up at odd moments. After 48 years, he had opened the door to grief, and grief had come. It hurt so much that he worried that he was coming apart, disintegrating like Dad's plane in the gun camera film.

But part of him knew: In passing through grief, he was completing a task he'd put off since the age of 7.

He was growing up.

He was terrified. But he knew it was time - to grow up, to reconcile with Merrilee, to become a better man.

And there was only one way to do that.

One night, in the last week of August, he opened Dad's letters, and began to read them. In the weekends that followed, he picked up his telephone and called old warriors his father had served with, saved and loved.

In the letters, and in the voices of strangers on the phone, he found what he was looking for - and what he had dreaded most.

Terry had set out saying that he wanted to find Dad's remains.

Instead, he would confront the fierce and joyous soul of Maj. Felix Asla himself.

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

Coming Wednesday: "He saved me."

Soviet archives held the secret of what happened to Terry Asla's dad, a pilot who disappeared in 1952 over Korea. Soviet files revealed Asla was killed by a Soviet pilot, Nikolai Ivanov.

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

© 2000 The Wichita Eagle. Reprinted with permissionAll rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the express written consent of The Wichita Eagle is expressly prohibited.