Sherwood O’Neal and Art Johnson—back from an unpopular war and unable to fit into the lives they left to serve their country—are building a new life in a remote cabin in South Dakota’s Black Hills. That life is disrupted by the death of Sherwood’s sister, which leaves him the only living relative of her four-year-old son, Jamie. Reluctantly, Sherwood accepts his responsibility to do ‘something’ for his nephew, which takes the two recovering soldiers back to California where they are forced to confront both the fall-out from their service and the lives they had sought to escape. Slowly they realize that the Army didn’t create all their problems, as surely as getting out didn’t fix all of them.

Through the confusion and uncertainty of a society trying to reconcile itself with the fact that The United States of America is losing a war, Sherwood and Art come face to face with the collateral damage of that war on the home front.