After a harrowing 15-month combat experience in Iraq, Adam Schumann (Miles Teller) returns to a loving wife, Saskia (Haley Bennett), living in the vicinity of Fort Riley, Kansas. Saskia and Adam have two young children, a daughter and infant son born while Schumann was still overseas. Adam suffers from PTSD as manifest by nightmares and frequent flashbacks for which his wife convinces him to seek help from an overburdened Department of Veterans Affairs. He also receives solace from two of his Iraq buddies, an American Samoan, Solo Aeiti (Beulah Koale), and Billy Waller (Joe Cole), who later commits suicide after coming home to learn that his fiancée and daughter have left him.
Adam's unresolved issues revolve around his failure to properly rescue a fellow soldier, Michael Emory (Scott Haze), who was shot in the head and rendered hemiplegic, and guilt about letting Sergeant First Class James Doster (Brad Beyer) take Adam's place on patrol. When the Humvee with Doster filling in for Adam makes a wrong turn and hits an improvised explosive device and starts burning, Solo arranges for the men to escape, but fails to go back for the forgotten Doster, who dies in the conflagration. Doster's widow, Amanda (Amy Schumer) and Saskia Schumann's closest friend, does not learn the circumstances of her husband's death until near the end of the movie.
Meanwhile, Solo suffers from such severe PTSD and memory loss that he is unable to fulfill his fervent desire to reenlist for another tour in Iraq. He falls in with a group of drug dealers led by a Gulf War veteran, Dante (Omar Dorsey). Adam rescues his friend and puts him on a Greyhound bus to California, where Solo will take Adam's place at a California rehabilitation center specializing in the treatment of PTSD.
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