Major Charles Rane (William Devane), an Air Force flier, returns home to San Antoine, Texas, after eight years imprisoned and tortured in a Vietcong POW camp, and is given a hero's welcome by the flag-waving locals. He soon learns his wife (Lisa Richards) met another man, policeman Cliff (Lawrason Driscoll), and is asking for a divorce, and his nine-year-old son (Jordan Gerler) doesn't remember him. When the town gives him a new car and a supermarket gives him a couple thousand dollars in silver coin (one for each day of his imprisonment), Charlie is like a dead man and accepts the good and bad news in the same emotionless way. The publicity attracts the attention of some vicious redneck thugs who break into the major's house and torture him, after he refuses to tell them where he keeps the coins. When his wife and kid enter, the kid tells them where the coins are hid and then the gang kills the kid and his mother. They leave Charlie for dead without a hand, as he now must wear a hook.