Vogt-Roberts spent ten days in that bed, climbing out of a morphine haze and trying to find out who assaulted him. He texted people familiar with Saigon's crime and nightlife scenes, many of whom had the same response: It's better if you don't look into who did this. When Vogt-Roberts would ask why, his terrified friends hinted that his assailants were protected and that their reach was global.

As he was driven away from the hospital after being discharged, Vogt-Roberts looked out the untinted windows of the van and had a full-on panic attack. Surrounded by an ocean of motorbikes and possibly wanted by mobsters, he was an easy target in a glass box. When he reached the Park Hyatt, he took the back service elevator up to the presidential suite and finally calmed himself down enough to sleep.

A couple of hours later, he woke up to a beep and a thump. Recognizing the sound of an opening door, he leapt out of bed and grabbed the steak knife from his room-service tray, crept up to the bedroom door, and pressed his ear against the wood, channeling Metal Gear tactics while his mind swirled with adrenaline. He headed knife-first into the living room. Empty. Then he edged over to the bathroom, where he discovered that the noises were a greeting from the mouth of his Japanese toilet.

The next day, Vogt-Roberts visited the office of the Vietnamese Crime Investigation Division and watched XOXO security footage of the attack. Even though a handful of people who were in the club that night had told him that his assault was seemingly random, he worried that he was about to watch himself provoke his own beating. “I remember I wasn't being an asshole,” he says. “I remember I wasn't instigating. I remember getting punched in the fucking side of the face. But you never fucking know. You're out at a fucking nightclub.”

But from the vantage of the surveillance camera, Vogt-Roberts saw that he was only handing his phone to a Vietnamese woman who wanted to know his Instagram handle. It was the same woman who had rejected the gangsters a few hours before. Off to the side, a bearded man and a buff dude with a B on his hat—the men who'd been declined—pointed at him and dispatched a lackey to go up to him and disrupt his conversation with the woman. When a man grabbed his shoulder from behind, Vogt-Roberts responded, “What the fuck?”

Two weeks afterward, barely out of a ten-day hospital stay and facing what he was told could be permanent brain damage, Vogt-Roberts watched himself get beaten nearly to death. After he saw the liquor bottle fracture his skull and knock him onto the floor, he tried to stare through the video screen and pretend it wasn't real. But he couldn't look away from the brutal facts: He was sitting, broken, in a Vietnamese police station, and the men who'd broken him were out there, anonymous and free.

On September 20, Vogt-Roberts flew home. Beverly Hills specialists determined that he had a concussion and that his skull fracture was more serious than he was told in Vietnam. “Today was just a series of doctors looking me very deeply in the eyes and saying, without bullshit, that I was very VERY close to being dead,” he texted me. Weeks after the attack, he still felt aftershocks— dizziness, pain, vertigo. His plan to buy a house in Saigon was replaced by a decision to heal in America.

Sitting on his couch in East L.A., though, Vogt-Roberts longed for Vietnam. “The main thing that was helping me feel creative and feel refreshed,” he said, “the thing that was helping me bounce back to normal life—not only did that get taken away from me, it got taken away from me through an assault and trauma.” To make things even worse for Vogt-Roberts, he could only guess about the prospects of the investigation: The Vietnamese police hadn't told him who their suspects were or whether they were close to catching them. He called his mother, whom he hadn't spoken to in weeks. “You're exceptionally good at powering through,” she told him. He thought to himself, What if this is the time that it all breaks? What if this is the one thing I can't push through? Vogt-Roberts realized there was one thing that would help him move on: bringing his mystery gangster assailants to justice. He wanted to send what he called “an Obi-Wan-type message: Strike me down and I'll come back more powerful than you ever imagined.”