Detail of the Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. Photo by Kamira / Shutterstock.com.
That is how Le My Hanh, a high school student in Queens, New York, reportedly appealed to the man who had followed her into her Queens apartment building, tied her up in a vacant apartment, and accused her of being a Vietcong. That man was Louis Kahan, a 30-year-old ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran who later claimed that the New York heat and construction rubble had triggered memories of his time on the frontlines.
Le’s brutal rape and murder at the hands of Kahan in 1977 collapsed the neat spatial segregation between violence “abroad” and “at home.” Le had been marked by the US for the good life, having been resettled during the fall of Saigon and the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1975. The Saigon-born daughter of a Vietnamese professor and an honor roll student at New York’s Jamaica High School, the apparent success story of Le’s resettlement served as a symbolic vindicat