In the 1971, at an Army training camp in Louisiana, Roland Bozz, a rebellious yet promising young recruit just released from the base stockade, seeks to avoid a trip to Vietnam and attempts to convince all the other draftees in his company to follow his lead in getting themselves ejected from the Army. But nothing Bozz does can save himself or the others, including Paxton, a writer in the making, or the ambitious Miter and pugilistic Wilson, from Tigerland, a tractless wilderness designated by the army for jungle combat simulation and their last stop before the war zone.