What kind of place?

What kind of place does this to people? Answer me that, patriots. Are we struggling Liberia? Myanmar? Angola? No, it's all quite civilized and formalized; there are the appropriate forms that need filling out. Sorry your son is dead. There is a process. There are guardian-cowards at the borders. There are the real Americans and there are those who are other than genuine. We must protect these boundaries. We must forget, conveniently for our it's-a-small-world household economies, that national boundaries are an entirely artificial historical creation that mean absolutely nothing other than the mythologies that tie them into our tiny little selfish hearts. Yeah, those boundaries where being a decent human being somehow stops as if a Berlinesque wall shuts you off from obligation, even to those who've died for much lesser obligations for your own pasty benefit. Make-believe place. Full of sick people. And the deepest tragedies in the midst of sickening wealth and comfort. The real Americans, it often seems, don't have citizenship and don't even live here. Better for them, perhaps, but what a trail of tragedy.

A weeping Kim-Hoan Thi Nguyen kissed her 7-year-old son goodbye at the Ho Chi Minh airport and told him it would be a long time before they would be together again. Little Binh Le boarded the plane and flew off to the States, where his mother hoped he would flourish. It was 1991.

She next saw Le when he visited Vietnam at 12. He cooked her french fries.

He visited again when he was 18 and a recent graduate of Edison High School in Fairfax County. They had a party.

Their next reunion came in December 2004. At his funeral, at Arlington National Cemetery.

Le, a Marine corporal and a Vietnamese citizen, was killed at age 20 while defending his desert base in Iraq. The month after his death, he was awarded U.S. citizenship in a ceremony at which speakers lauded his valor.

Nguyen, who has lived with a friend in Springfield since the funeral, wants to stay. Wracked with guilt that she sent her only child off to a life that was cut short, she wants only to lay flowers on his grave each Sunday. Yet, although parents of immigrants killed in combat are eligible for permanent residency, Nguyen's applications have been denied.