[PICTURES]

SON FINDS THE FATHER HE'D LOST

BY ROY WENZL

Tues nite.

Dearest darling, I spent a very miserable nite on the train. It has never been so hard to leave before. ... I was sure proud of my family when we walked to town. I'll never forget all the admiring glances you and the kids received. Poor Terry. He seemed to feel pretty bad. . . .

-Felix Asla, in his first letter to his wife after leaving for the Korean war in September 1951.

Terry Asla opened his father's letters from Korea and began to read. He'd put this off for 48 years. But he knew now: If ever he'd make peace with the living, he'd first have to make peace with the dead. He thought reading the letters might wreck him, as the Russian cannon shells had wrecked his father's plane.

He was right. In the last week of August, as he began to read, he began to get mad.

Here's Dad, all right - confident and cocky - and ticked off that upon his arrival in Korea he'd been assigned not to combat duty but as "flying safety officer" at Kimpo Air Base.

Deep down, I am angry and more than a little disgruntled. Always considered myself a top-notch fighter pilot. And here I am flying a desk while a bunch of snot-nosed kids are doing the job I believe I should be doing. . . Damn it, tho, if I don't get some combat time now I probably never will. And my career will suffer more than somewhat.

Months passed.

Then everything quickly changed: Promotions came, first to the rank of major, then to commander of 200 men in the 336th Fighter Interceptor Squadron.

Almost immediately, as Terry read the letters, he could read the lies between the lines.

Dad was concealing from Mom that he was flying combat, that he had started shooting down MiGs almost immediately.

And then when he did admit it, there was boasting, a swagger.

Terry will be interested to know that I shot down my third MiG today. . . .

Tell Terry I'm a regular cowboy now, gun on my hip and everything.

He could almost see Dad grinning, writing by flashlight at night in the pilots' quarters, line after line flowing out in a stylish hand, strutting joy over his promotion to squadron commander.

This is all I've ever wanted.

There seemed to be only one note of insecurity in this 28-year-old bantam rooster: Dad seemed to worry about what his 7-year-old son thought of him. It came up several times.

"Maybe he misses his Dad. Of course, I would be hurt if I thought he didn't.

Toward the end of July, Dad wrote Besse, who had miscarried their near-term baby girl in May 1952, that he was trying to get home, but could not get home until late July at the earliest. He said he needed to get 100 missions.

In his last letter home, dated July 28, he wrote:

Darling - don't know when I'll be leaving depends entirely on the weather.

Terry knew it was a lie. He knew now, from airmen who had known Dad, that Dad had under-reported his combat missions to his superiors. They would have sent him home after 100 combat missions, but he stopped counting after number 94.

He had shot down four enemy MiGs. One more, and he would have been an ace. He'd stuck around to bag another MiG, and a MiG had bagged him.

Terry read. And he got mad.

"He was a great pilot," he said. "But he was not a great father."

"In our family, after he disappeared he became like a god. How can a child model himself after a god?"

But the god-like Felix Asla was not the man Terry and his sister Merrilee remembered.

"Most of what I remember is that he was never home; and when he was home, he was too damned busy to spend any time with me. The one time he took me fishing, he did so only after Mom virtually blackmailed him into it."

Poor little Terry, his father had written. I didn't want him to cry but do want him to be proud of his Dad.

The son read the father's letters, and vented.

He denounced his father's glory-chasing, derided his father's ambition, cursed the silly macho warrior mystique that fighter pilots love but survivors live to pay for.

In his anger, he chided even himself - for spending more passion on his career than on his own family.

"With career, we all need to ask ourselves: When is enough enough?"

But anger was giving way to resolve.

He'd forced himself to start reading the letters because he was forcing himself to grieve, for the first time in his life.

Forty eight years of avoidance was coming to an end.

And the day after he started reading, Terry picked up the telephone.

He called Jack Dews.

March 31, 1952

Lt. Jack Dews looked up to see the brand-new squadron commander coming to see him. He perked up. He liked this guy, and he was about to like him even more.

"Jack," Maj. Asla said. "You're never going to get out of this war if we don't get your mission count up."

Jack Dews felt a thrill. He'd come to fight, but he was the new guy; the bosses hadn't been letting him fly. Now he had a new boss.

"You need to fly some missions or you'll never get home," Asla said. "I'll see what I can do."

The next morning, Dews was startled by what he read on the assignment list.

Maj. Asla had assigned him to four combat missions, all today. It was April 1, 1952. For the fourth mission, Asla had assigned him to fly as his wingman.

"John Red Leader! Break left!"

Dews was yelling into the radio.

"Break left!"

Asla had heard him, thank God, and was yanking his plane into a hard left turn. Dews yanked left on his control stick and followed.

Too late. The MiGs were behind them, cannons blasting.

Wham!

Pieces of Dews' wing flew off.

Suddenly Jack Dews saw the horizon spin and the ground coming up from 33,000 feet below.

30,000. He yanked on the stick. Nothing but spin.

25,000.

20,000.

Going down like a spinning rock.

15,000.

12,000.

Jack watched Korea come up to get him. Bail out, he thought. He yanked the eject lanyard.

Nothing.

He yanked the lanyard again, and again. Nothing. He was trapped and falling.

"This is it," he thought. "The bad guys are gonna get old Jack."

9,000 feet.

Go down fighting, he thought.

He yanked on the control stick again.

The controls grabbed. The spin stopped. Dews regained control.

He looked at his left wing: pieces of sheet metal were tearing off the wing. His plane was coming apart. Wobbling in air, at the far north end of North Korea. Not dead yet, but there's no way he'd get home.

He radioed Asla. "I've regained control."

"Get to the coast," the voice replied. "Get to Cho Do." Dews knew: Cho Do was an island off the left coast surrounded by the U.S. Navy.

"The MiGs won't follow you over water," Asla told him. "Ditch near the island."

Dews flew for the coast, pieces of metal coming off his plane.

He reached Cho Do. He told Asla his ejection lanyard wouldn't work.

"Crawl out and jump," the voice replied.

"Take off your helmet before you jump. You don't want to snag it on the canopy on the way out."

Dews obeyed. He jumped.

He broke his leg in the fall.

But he survived.

He could not see what had happened above him, as his plane had spun toward the ground. But he heard about it later.

When he'd gone into the spin, the MiGs had dived at him to finish him off.

Maj. Asla had taken on all of them.

"There is no doubt about it," Dews would say 48 years later, his voice soft-spoken. "He saved my life."

There were at least eight MiGs, Dews said. Perhaps as many as 11. And the major?

Asla had taken them all on, heading them off, blasting at them with his 50 calibers. He'd shot up two. The rest ran away.

Asla had fought them until he was down to almost nothing in his fuel tanks. And he was still at the northern end of North Korea, 200 miles from home.

With what he had left, Asla gunned his jet upward to 38,000 feet. He pointed the nose south and shut off the engine. There was a bit of jet stream; Asla needed it now. He glided, powerless, through 200 miles of enemy territory.

When he reached Kimpo, he restarted his engine just in time to land. He landed with only a few seconds of fuel left in his tanks.

The question seemed to puzzle Jack Dews.

"No," Dews said. "I don't think Asla obsessed over getting that fifth MiG. And you can tell his son that."

He seemed a trifle concerned. So he continued.

"Oh, sure, he talked about it," Dews said. "I heard him; everybody heard him. He said it in the officer's quarters, and he said it in the operations room. He said it out on the flight line. He really wanted that fifth MiG.

"But you have to understand," Dews said. "The guy was a fighter pilot - and not just any pilot, but a truly good one.

"We were in a war. And it was our job to hunt MiGs.

"We were having a hell of a time keeping enough planes in the air to help in the war. And Asla was just a terrific commander. And he knew that; he knew he was helping to fight the war. And in war, you need guys like that. They save lives. He saved mine."

After the Korean war, Dews fell in love, married, and had a family. He earned a Ph.D. in psychology. He used it to try to help people in the worst possible places, including in prisons.

He tried to be useful to the world, he said, because after April 1, 1952, every day that he lived in the world was "pure gravy."

He had five children and five grandchildren; a useful career.

He'd had love, and children, and a life. It was a gift.

He owed it to Terry and Merrilee's father.

When Terry Asla called Dews, they talked for more than an hour.

Afterward, Terry did what he had long feared. He began to unravel - or so it seemed. His voice about to break, he said his emotions were running wild, out of control.

Dews had helped him understand: The same macho warrior mythology that had cost Terry a father had given life to the family of Jack Dews.

It took days for what Dews said to sink in. Then a few more days to get past the anger at Nikolai Ivanov, the Russian pilot who had shot down his father.

But Terry knew it was time.

He knew that there was a purpose here that went beyond the search for Dad's remains.

What it was, he could not immediately put into words. It took a while to figure out.

But when he did, he felt something that for Matthew Walker was a discovery.

It was the beginnings of a reconciliation, not necessarily with all the people he'd shut out of his life - not yet. What Terry realized was that he was on the verge of making peace with himself.

"I need to change," he said. "I need to become a better man."

He was moved by the kindnesses of strangers: Jack Dews, who said he owed his life to Dad. Floyd Clark, Dad's crew chief, whoalmost broke down on the phone talking to Terry. Nikolai Ivanov, the kindly Russian warrior who wished him "good health and good luck."

His sister, too, had reached across their estrangement now, several times over the last two months, to hint to him again and again that she loved him. And that Dad and Mom had loved him too.

She told Terry that she had felt Dad's presence just before Terry began his search; she could feel Dad's gaze, she said, like a ray of sunlight; grinning at her, insistent, even impish.

Terry knew it was time.

On Sept. 10, Terry called Merrilee.

He told her that he was sorry. He said he knew they had not been close since he'd gone to college, that it was his fault, that he'd cut people off.

He said that when Mom had declined in health, he'd shunned them, forced Merrilee to bear that burden alone.

He had not taken care of Mom, as he had promised at the train station the day Dad left for Korea.

He had never meant to hurt them. But he knew now: In avoiding grief, he'd avoided life and all those who loved him.

He told Merrilee that he wanted to know if they could go on from here.

Dad was gone, Mom was gone. But it was time to love the living.

He asked his sister to come back into his life.

She said yes.

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

The story so far

Terry Asla was a boy when his father disappeared in the skies over Korea in 952. Terry grew up hoping Dad had survived but didn't know until this year that a Soviet pilot had killed him. With 48 years of uncertainty coming to end, Terry finally begins to grieve.

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

Learn more

On the Web

To learn more about the Korean air war and the roles played by U.S. pilot Maj. Felix Asla and the Soviet pilot who shot him down, Nikolai Ivanov, check these Web sites:

www.aiipowmia.com/reports/trnsfr.html

"The Transfer of U.S. Korean War POWs to the Soviet Union." This is the official August 1993 report by Air Force officials investigating the status of pilots missing after the Korean War. It includes details of the disappearance of Asla, as well as the U.S. Marine who was captured by Soviets and mistaken for Asla.

www.aeronautics.ru/nws002 /migs-in-local-conflicts-part-i.htm

"MiGs in Local Conflicts."

This Russian air force site, translated into English, describes the Soviet role in the Korean air war. It offers photos of Asla's plane, including shots taken by the gun camera of Soviet pilot Nikolai Ivanov.

www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/online /migalleysfbld.htm

"MiG Alley: The Fight for Air Superiority."

This site offers a general history of the American role in the Korean air war, a list of Korean aces and a description of Kimpo Air Base. Written by William T. Y'Blood, it is drawn from interviews with U.S. Air Force personnel, including Brig. Gen. Robinson Risner, who served with Asla in Korea.

http://wio.newmail.ru/korea/korea-a.htm

This is a Russian site with information on the Soviet role in the Korean air war. It lists shoot-downs claimed by Soviet pilots, including Nikolai Ivanov, the pilot who shot down Asla.

Books

And for general information about the Korean air war, check these books:

"Crimson Sky: The Air Battle for Korea," by John R. Bruning (Brasseys Inc., September 1999). Accounts of major air battles in Korea by the men who fought them.

"Air War Korea 1950-1953," by Robert Jackson (Motorbooks International, April 1998). Comprehensive military history of Korean air war, including many color photographs.

"F-86 Sabre Fighter-Bomber Units Over Korea," by Warren Thompson (Osprey Publishing Co., March 2000). Features 130 color photographs of the F-86, including quotes from Korean pilots who flew them, and appendices on the units that served in Korea.

© 2000 The Wichita Eagle. Reprinted with permission. All 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.