Anchorage Daily News

Kevin Karella, an Army veteran who fought in Desert Storm and now builds houses in Fairbanks, sat at his computer Thursday morning looking up airline tickets.

The challenge: Find a flight in mid-November -- late enough to be in Alaska for the birth of a grandchild, but early enough to get to a Marine base in California to welcome his 20-year-old son back from a dangerous tour in Afghanistan.

Moments later, two Marines knocked at his door. They stood at attention. One had tears in his eyes. He knew why they were there.

His son, Cpl. Jason A. Karella, was dead.

"My heart's hamburger. Because I believe in what he was doing. ... He believed in what he was doing, but it sure doesn't fill that hole in my heart any more."

"I know he was proud," the father said.

Karella was killed in a vehicle accident Thursday in the Farah province, according to Marine officials.

More than 100 soldiers from Alaska, or stationed in Alaska, have died at war over the past five years. Karella's 21st birthday would have been Oct. 25.

Jason once said if anything happened to him he wanted his family to toast him with glasses of Jameson Irish whiskey, said his father.

Marines spokesman Lt. Curtis Williamson offered few details about the accident Monday, except to say it wasn't caused by an IED (improvised explosive device).

Jason was part of an infantry battalion of about 1,000 Marines in Afghanistan. Their mission is to train Afghani security forces.

"They were definitely in the fight. They were in there hooking and jabbing," Williamson said in a phone interview Monday.

Kevin Karella said the Marines told him his son was manning a turret on a Humvee at about 4:30 a.m. It wasn't his job that day -- the gunner was feeling ill, Karella said.

No one else was killed, according to the Marines.

His son had already seen his share of scrapes in Afghanistan, Kevin Karella said. Two or three weeks before his death, a man shot him twice with an AK-47 from the driver's side of a car.

Jason's body armor protected him, his father said. "It took about two weeks before he said he could really breathe well."

Karella comes from a family of soldiers. Six cousins went overseas and Kevin was an Army helicopter pilot.

Jason's older brother, Josh, is a Special Forces medic who was medically discharged after a rocket-propelled grenade struck his humvee in Iraq in 2005.

Josh's baby is due next month. He'll be named Jason.

Karella spent summers in Fairbanks and winters in Anchorage after his parents' divorce. He attended Bartlett High School as a junior -- the yearbook shows a big kid with braces and short, spiky hair -- before enrolling at the Alaska Military Youth Academy.

The academy puts students through 22-weeks of intense schooling, based on military values. Jason joined to ready himself for the Marines, his father said.

His team leader and mentor at the academy -- a Vietnam vet and former Marine named Cliff Parker -- still has cadet Karella's name tag tucked in a drawer at home.

Jason earned the highest leadership rank a cadet can achieve at the school, Parker said. "He was pretty much a go-getter from jump street."

When he came home, Jason planned to become a cop in Anchorage. Maybe a state trooper. He would marry his fiance. Have lots of kids, his father said.

Jason's MySpace page is set to "private." That means all strangers can see when they visit is that Karella last went online on Oct. 5, and read what he wrote in all capital letters:

"I can't wait to go home!"

Find Kyle Hopkins' political blog online at adn.com/alaskapolitics or call him at 257-4334.

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