In 1965, medical corpsman Brian Thomas, a white paratrooper in the Vietnam bound101st Airborne Division, confronts both the coming war and reverse racial discrimination, when he becomes involved in an interracial romance with ebony beauty, Gladys Thompson, and despotic, racist NCO's persecute him for violating the South's most sacred, entrenched taboo. Once he arrives in the war zone, Brian's view of combat as a rite of passage "adventure" is shattered as a naïve illusion. He experiences firsthand the horrors of war and its traumatizing effects. Despite having been ordered to leave a critically wounded man behind during a forced withdrawal, Brian regards himself as a coward, and his guilt and shame haunt him relentlessly. Most veterans called Vietnam, The 'Nam. But to Brian it would always be known as, The Land of a Thousand Dances.
